I'm ditching paint class!
My office periodically has representatives from various product lines -- window companies, building hardware manufacturers, lighting suppliers, and so on -- come in and give a lunchtime talk about their products. It's kind of a glorified sales pitch; if they get us to include their stuff in one of our 4-story hotels they've just made thousands of dollars in sales, so it's worth it to them to buy us sandwiches and cookies. I usually make an effort to procure a nice eggplant sandwich or pasta salad and munch on it while product specifications go flying over my head and through my ears.
Today it's a paint company, and don't ask how much there is to say about paint. They can talk about their color-matching programs with fixture manufacturers, their custom color mixing, their topcoats and bottomcoats and weather-resisting qualities, their outgassing ratings, and their special pigment technology all in more detail than you ever dreamed existed. I've decided that, between my general ambivalence toward paint (it's nice, but I don't feel any passion for it) and the absence of a vegan lunch option, I just won't attend today. I'll take the taller project manager up on his sympathetic suggestion that I don't have to listen to all of that technical (read: boring) information if I don't want to.
But ohmigod ohmigod ohmigod I'm ditching! The front of the office is dead quiet and empty, like the hallways in high school in the middle of a class period. I'm trying to minimize the crunching noises from my apple and the clicky noises of my keys because ohmigod what if someone catches me? I'll totally get detention and the attendance office will call my parents to tell them I ditched. Noooo!
Posted by dianna at January 26, 2005 12:40 PMDon't you remember anything from high school? (I mean other than that stuff that we rehashed on my journal.) Just look like you're supposed to be doing whatever it is that you're doing, and no one will question you.
Posted by: Chris at January 26, 2005 03:46 PMUh... don't you remember anything from high school (other than the aforementioned stuff)? I never learned the art of ditching class because I never practiced!
Posted by: Dianna at January 26, 2005 03:54 PMRight on, Chris! Alec brought an empty cardboard box in his backpack one day. He left class during a period, opened up the box, and carried it around campus as though he was on some errand. That guy's my hero.
Posted by: Erik at January 26, 2005 05:32 PMDude, that's even better than the kids in my high school who'd get stoned before their Honors Trigonometry tests. And get A+'s.
Posted by: poot at January 28, 2005 08:03 AMI'm sorry, poot. NH kids have you outdone there (although undoubtedly my sister will come on here and tell me all about how Cleveland kids have us outdone), with the getting stoned before an AP test and coming back to report that the correct answers glowed.
Posted by: Dianna at January 28, 2005 09:29 AMTrouble is, on a test where a D-minus can get you a 5, there's really no way to verify. Verification by unstoned sources is key. Thus, mathematics is a great "acid test" (r^3d!) for such experiments. English tests, on the other hand, are useless. I'll leave you to contemplate whether that's because there are no objectively right answers, or because there's no unstoned verification process.
BTW, using a Northeastern state's postal code to abbreviate your school causes much confusion in my pre-noon brain. Please cease and desist. And when your sister starts frontin' for the OH crew, you just tell her the VT posse has everyone beat. Cows + weed: That's Smooooooth.
Posted by: poot at January 29, 2005 06:45 AMsince my high school was in fact named for a caretaker president rather than a city in ohio, i can do no fronting for the OH crew. but oh, cleveland, that was good times. our version, as i recall, was people taking the SAT on acid and doing really, obscenely well. of course, as i also recall, halfway through the test the paper and pencil disappeared and you were just, like, doing it with your MIND.
and then there was mr whatshisface who would help students climb out his classroom window to freedom halfway through the day, and mrs something-with-a-k who chainsmoked all the way through 10th grade philosophy class, right there in the room. that school did so much to prepare me for college.