Snoqualmie

Cakes and Ale? Or just the cakes?

Meetings suck. Mandatory meetings suck more. Mandatory meetings that are only tangentially related to your work function and do not, as a practical matter, contain anything of use to you bring suck to a level that causes black holes to look nervous and try to quietly sidle away before anyone notices what poseurs they are.

Your day deserved to be fired. And, frankly, I think you should withhold any positive references when it seeks future employment. But I can be harsh like that.

Only the cakes, on this particular occasion. While I firmly believe that a nice dark porter and a sufficiently rich black forest cake could go together beautifully, what I had on hand last night was a moderately light and refreshing ale and an outrageously sweet cookies 'n cream cake. I don't feel it would have been a winning combination.

Maybe the meeting was just a ruse to keep you inside the building. Last night I heard the following tale of a friend's recent lunch break: he came back to find that his card key to the building, which had worked all morning, had ceased to do so. When he followed someone in through the main doors and asked security about it, it turned out that unbeknownst to him, while he was sitting in his car reading, between noon and 1 PM, the mortgage company he works for had been evicted for non-payment of rent. Better yet, he said this was the second location this had happened at since he started working for them a year ago. So now everyone's working out of the boss's house, but she's about to foreclose on herself and he's not sure how that's going to work.

Far be it from me to make any negative implications about the solvency of a state university system, so instead maybe there was something outside that they didn't want you to see. Like gnomes giggling and running about with cookies because they're planning a surprise for you. What variety of Uncle Eddie's did you get, BTW?

Oatmeal chocolate chip. A woman in line behind me looked covetously at them and told me she'd had to stop buying them when they got to be $4 a bag. I tossed back my head and gave a devil-may-care, money-is-nothing, I-shall-spend-myself-broke-on-cookies-and-live-every-day-with-joy kind of laugh. The fact that it may have looked and sounded like a sort of startled chuckle and stammering something about how they're worth it is totally irrelevant.

How does one foreclose on oneself, exactly? And did your friend ever figure out which alternate universe he was working in at the time? I'm torn between wishing I ever had anything that bizarre and hilarious happen to me, and being glad that in fact I work for a reasonably well-established university with fairly regular financial habits.

Oh good, I was hoping you'd say oatmeal chocolate chip, because they're my hands-down favorite. Except that all the cookies in the last bag I purchased were mysteriously dry and brittle, and the only way to salvage them was to use them for ice cream sandwiches. With Creme Caramel soy frozen yogurt. That's right.

I think my friend's decided that as long as a few more paychecks clear before the end of the summer, he doesn't want to know anything about what the hell is going on with this company or how any of this works. As I understand it, that was what got him through his previous job working for shyster personal injury lawyers, one of whom squired me around Tennessee last year and drunk-drove us away from the scene of a hit-and-run during the process.

Wow. Did I ever hear that particular story? I have to think that I would remember it if I had.

Oh my god! Speaking of the combination of inappropriate drunken actions and sickening desserts, I just realized you are coming to visit me in like 3 days! I had better get baking. I shudder to think what will happen if you arrive in town and I don't greet you with a half-dozen perfect green tea cupcakes with tiny marzipan flowers. Also: can I drag you out after dinner on Friday night to my roommate's show at the ridiculous tea bar in the Pearl? I suspect it will be a good time.

Oh, and were you ever around on 63rd St to hear Andrew talking about his ex-girlfriend who once had to pretend to be hard at work, in front of what turned out to be an unplugged television and not a computer monitor, in order to conceal from outside-the-window investigatory types the fact that her company was packing up and moving on the sly? She was my previous winner of the Hilariously Shady Job award. Your friend may have just escaped out the bathroom window with her trophy.

Also: Monday night pub spelling bee at Mississippi Pizza. If we are feeling too broken-up about not getting to go to trivia night at a crappy punk dive bar, we might consider this as The Official Dorkiest Possible Substitute.

My responses to your above statements, suggestions, and queries are, in order: probably not, probably yes, something bad, yes!, no!, and N-A-T-U-R-A-L-L-Y, naturally.

My responses to those responses are, in order: I didn't think so, I agree, how bad?, oh good!, that's a shame, and you totally just got disqualified, d-i-s-q-u-a-l-i-f-i-e-d, disqualified.