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2001-09-03 | 12:19 p.m.

Friday night we went with friends to see Rat Race, a silly caper comedy. I went in with low expectations, watched the first five minutes and thought "Oh noooo" and came out with sore abdominal muscles from laughing so hard.

Yesterday, Sunday, Duff and I drove into the city and let ourselves into the lab so I could do some hands-on evaluations. I holed up with the two Macs for the longest time, making lavish notes in my tiniest hand. I don't plan to get caught out like last time, stuck at home without enough information to scrape together for a cap, and the machines themselves sitting in the warehouse all boxed up, ready to ship back to the vendors. Unh uh. (A bit of a nightmare, that was.) It would be nice if I had some specs to refer to, but the lab hasn't done any testing yet, so I evalute the cases, the keyboards, the interiors, and the documentation. (Glamorous work, isn't it?) This is a crisis-like situation, the testing not being done, but I refuse to get nervous about it yet. It isn't the lab's fault; the OS just shipped last Friday and they need to test the systems with it. I just want to write the damn story and somehow get it in early so I get a bonus. I need to mentally set back my deadline a few days. Let's say Monday, September 17, instead of my real deadline, which is the 20th. I wonder if that's early enough to get me the bonus? I don't really feel that I can ask, since it's a discretionary bonus. But it will be damn hard to get it in even that early, considering that none of the real testing has been done.

Usually Duff hates going in on the weekend with me when I'm doing work, but this time he did work of his own in preparation for a trip he is taking next week to the Midwest. He's going to some conference or something; I'm not even sure what. He's taking extra days, too, to visit a couple of old buddies. I think that's swell but I wish it weren't happening right in the middle of my article. He says he will give me his security card and code so I can get into the building by myself next weekend. But I wonder if I can even bring myself to do it. Yesterday, I was nervous just going to the bathroom by myself. A deserted office building is creepy. Could I really hang out at the lab alone for hours on end? Every creak of a rack, every whir of a fan starting up would give me the willies. And if somebody else actually came into the lab, which does happen, I'd probably shit my pants.

Plus I also have a thing on home finance due to Stephen on the 11th. And Leo's niece just wrote to ask if I could edit her book. Leo also wrote to ask me to do it. I don't feel like editing anybody's book. Can I say no? I feel like I'm not supposed to say no.

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