John's Blog

Not much time to surf or blog the last few days, so accept my apologies for today's lameness. Been a busy few days at work and then add in a major sleep deficit and you get a tired and cranky blogger. It all started Thursday night when I went to take the dog out for her final walk of the night. When we went outside the rain was coming down at a torrential rate, so she didn't fool around and did her business quickly so we could return to the safe, dry indoors. But while we were out one little detail changed. Our sunroom which had been dry as a bone was now a big ol' pool, and the water was still flowing in. The wet-dry vac that I had bought earlier that day got quite a workout. The fun continued till early morning, resulting in about three hours sleep, if that.

Needless to say, the next day at work was bound to be fun. But sometimes being that tired isn't such a bad thing, since you get this "going on empty" buzz that results in the "safety off" position when it comes to things that come out of your mouth. And it was going to be one of those days.

Anybody that knows me is aware that I'm no fan of meetings, except as a venue for catching a cat nap. So that afternoon we had an impromptu meeting to discuss the results of a visit from our corporate security auditors. I work for a large retail concern that will remain nameless if I plan to stay employed, although I've left breadcrumbs here in the past. They look at our performance against many standards and procedures in a very thorough fashion. The head dude is the kind of guy who when ask for a percentage, has to give it to you to three decimal places, so you can surmise he's a no-nonsense kind of guy. Many times I've checked the dictionary to see if they have put his picture next to the term "anal-retentive" yet. So far, no luck.

So we are sitting in the meeting, reviewing our results point by tedious point. We did very badly so the meeting was tense as well as boring. One of the performance points that was looked at is to see if the cracks behind the fitting room mirrors are sealed with caulking to prevent people from shoving tickets from stolen clothing in the cracks to conceal them. There were many of them that weren't sealed, so this was another area where we got a failing score. I couldn't contain myself anymore, so I blurted out "I guess that this could be characterized as us getting caught with our caulk out?" Not everyone was amused, but I felt better.