pseudostoops

This morning, I had a job interview.  This is good news.

The interview was scheduled for 9am.  I left the house at 7:15, in plenty of time to get to my office, do some last minute reading up on the company, have a good luck orange juice, put on the suit-appropriate pumps I leave in my desk drawer, and make my way to the interview location.

And then the red line exploded.  I waited 15 minutes for the red line to come, and when it did, there was absolutely NO ROOM.  So I waited 5 minutes for another one.  No room.  Finally, determined to wedge myself on the next train no matter what, I squooshed onto an incredibly crowded train.  It was now 7:45.  It takes at least 20 minutes to get downtown.  A little rushed, but still enough time for me to buy my good luck oj, swoop by the office to pick up my shoes and cram a little, and make my way over there.

My phone started ringing with an unknown number as I was climbing the stairs up from the train at 8:05.

“Hello?”  I said.

“Hi, pseudo?  This is hiring attorney from place you’re interviewing, I -”

and then the line went dead.

THANKS FOR NOTHING, AT&T.

A few seconds later, as I was in Walgreens for the all-important oj purchase, the phone rang again.

“Hi, pseudo?  This is hiring attorney again.”

“Ah, this is a much better connection.  Sorry about before, I was just coming up from the el.”

“Oh, good, so are you on your way here?”

“Well, no, I was thinking I’d swing by my office first and then head over there.”

*long, ominous pause*

“Did you not get the email?”

“I’m sorry?”

“We sent you an email yesterday saying the interview had been rescheduled to 8.”

“Oh! No! I did not get an email!”

“Well, please get here as soon as you can.”

So I SPRINTED to my office to get interview appropriate shoes, jumped in a taxi, ran into the building as I pulled on my suit jacket, and spent the next three hours of interviews trying to tamp down the residual adrenaline coursing through my veins and answer questions in a semi-coherent fashion.  I’m not sure I succeeded.

On the way over, though?  I checked my email- no message telling me we were rescheduled.  I mentioned that to the hiring attorney and she sort of sighed and said “oh, yeah, we’ve had some trouble with our email.”

!!?!

Don’t you think that if you’d been having trouble with your email, and you were making a last-minute change that required someone to be at an interview an hour earlier than planned, you’d, I don’t know, PICK UP THE PHONE?

Needless to say, I ate cookies for lunch.  I felt I’d earned them.

I had occasion today to lend my Kindle to a 60-something year old U.S. Marshall.  This went about as well as you’d imagine.

When juries are deliberating, the jury room is “guarded” by a U.S. Marshall.  This is not so much to protect the jury from any nefarious characters as it is to guard their cell phones (which they’re not allowed to take into the jury room with them) and to say “all rise!” when the jury comes back into court.

Anyway, there was a jury out in a courtroom nearby where I was working today, and as I walked into the building, I heard one U.S. Marshall say to another that he’d been suddenly assigned to guard the jury room and hadn’t brought a newspaper.  Thinking I could do my good deed for the day, I pulled my kindle out of my bag (I use it for commuting) and said “here, you can borrow this.  I’ve got a bunch of mysteries loaded on there.”

“Thanks!” he said.  “What is it?”

“It’s a Kindle,” I said.  “It’s like an electronic book reader.  The books are already all loaded on there.”

“Do you have ‘When Bad Things Happen to Good People?’” he asked?

“Ah….no.  Sorry.  But I have ‘The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo’  That’s a pretty good one.”

“Okay, I’ll try the one you like.  How does it work?”

“Well, I’ll call up the book…here it is.  Now you just start reading, and press ‘next page’ to turn the page.”

“I’m going to have to get my glasses,” he said, a little uncertainly.

“It’s really easy, I promise,” I said, and I continued upstairs to the office, leaving my precious kindle in the hands of the grandfatherly-looking Marshall.  I mentally patted myself on the back for introducing someone new to this fabulous new technology, and for selflessly lending out my fancy device.  What a kind and lovely person I am!

Twenty minutes later, there was a knock on the office door.

“Hi, pseudo,” the Marshall said.  “I’m going to give this back to you.  I…I think I’ll just do a crossword or something.”

“Were you having trouble with it?” I said.  “I can answer any questions you have.”

“No,” he said. “It’s…it’s just not my kind of thing.”

Oh. Okay.  I took the kindle back, the thanked me, and went on his way.  I felt a little bad, foisting technology upon him like that, when it clearly made him uncomfortable.  Fancy gadgets aren’t for everyone, I told myself, and maybe some old dogs don’t want to learn new tricks.

Curious to see how far he’d gotten, I turned it on and looked at the page where he left off.  There, clear as day, was a description of Lisbeth Sander’s investigation of a man who paid for sex with adolescents in Estonia.

Ah.  Right.  Perhaps it was the incredible amounts of casual sex and violence and not the “next page” button that did it.  Duly noted.

Thank you for all of you who weighed in on the suit quandary.   I am relieved that the majority of people (save for my best friend; thanks for throwing me under the bus, TRIBECCA,) thought that it was no big deal to wear the suit twice, because that is what I did.

What happened was this: my colleague only had one suit that wasn’t at the dry cleaners, and when the trial was pushed back she was worried about wearing the same suit two days in a row.  So I told her I’d do the same thing out of solidarity, and also to minimize dry cleaning bills.  We both wore different blouses, and I don’t think anyone noticed.  But I did worry about it a little bit, because Americans seem sort of uniquely obsessed with clothing cleanliness (which, as Jess pointed out, is viewed as wasteful by the rest of the world).

I suspect that the answers to “is it okay to wear it twice in a row” would have been different if the item of clothing in question had been, say, a sweater.  And I think that’s so interesting, because I definitely don’t wash a sweater every time I wear it (that’s why you wear a tshirt under the sweater, amiright?) but I would still feel self-conscious wearing the same sweater two days in a row.  I would worry that people would THINK I was unhygienic.  Perhaps the lesson here is that I should stop worrying so much what other people think.

When I studied abroad, I lived with the most lovely, friendly family in the history of time.  I loved them to pieces, and am still in touch with them more than 10 years later.

A big part of the study abroad experience is noticing cultural differences, and for me some of the most interesting observations were of the smallest differences, like the way the French grocery shop, or the way “smokers” only refers to those people who smoke a pack a day, not the generally-accepted practice of having one or two cigarettes a day, with or after a meal.

One of the things I noticed was that the French are way less bothered by the idea of wearing the same outfit two days in a row than Americans are.  One week, my host mother wore the same (impossibly chic) blouse to work three different times.  She bathed in between, and changed out of the blouse when she got home at the end of the day, but she showed no compunction about wearing the same highly distinctive blouse several days in a row. Where Americans, in my experience, go to great lengths to change clothes regularly and are afraid of people thinking they’re dirty or gross, the French seemed totally unconcerned.  (And just to head off any jokes: my host mother never smelled bad, and in general I found that whole stereotype about French folks to be overblown, though I’m sure reasonable people might disagree with me.)

I bring this up for a very specific reason.  I don’t have to wear a suit to work every day, but I do have to wear a suit on the days that trials start.  Yesterday was one of those days, so I wore my favorite dowdy skirt suit, comfortable and fresh from the cleaners, to work in the morning.

When I got to work, I found out that, unbeknownst to me, the trial had been pushed to today.  So I was wearing a suit for no reason. Also: heels.  Swell! Inter-office communication fail!

So my question is this: how would you feel about wearing the same suit (with a different blouse) two days in a row?  I’m not going to tell you what I did- I want to hear your opinions first.  So that you can have full information: it’s a classic black skirt suit, nothing too distinctive or memorable, and I’d have changed the blouse I wore underneath.  Thoughts?

There’s still snow on the ground here, which is disappointing, if not surprising.

I’m back from my trip to New Orleans for the half marathon, which was followed immediately by a business trip to California.  You know what New Orleans and California have in common? No snow.  Also: delicious foods that I can’t get in Chicago.  (Though those foods are not similar to each other: I’m left craving hush puppies and beignets from New Orleans and from L.A., those fabulous huge salads full of produce that one can only dream about during a Chicago winter.  And pinkberry.)

I’ll definitely want to tell you more about the half marathon (with pictures! of me making goofy faces!) but for now it appears that I am late for work.  Which I have to walk through the snow to get to.  Not that I’m bitter.

The normal secretary in our office has been on vacation all week, and we’ve had a substitute secretary, a very nice lady named Marge, who is ENTIRELY THE OPPOSITE of our normal secretary who owns a tricked out Harley and wears both a leather vest and leather pants to work on semi-regular basis (not joking).

On Wednesday, Marge started crying, rather noisily, at her desk.  My coworker and I went out to investigate (we are not made of stone) and found her mopping at her eyes with paper towels (we are not made of stone, but we are not made of money, either, and we were out of Kleenex.  At Marge’s suggestion, I went down to procurement and got some raggedy one-ply tissues, which were a minor improvement over the paper towels, plus now I know they have tissues in procurement.  Never have to buy office tissues again, bitches!)

It turns out that Marge’s father is very sick.  He’s probably dying.  Poor Marge and her sister are trying to set up hospice care so he can get out of the hospital and come home.  We heard about this in some detail on Wednesday when the crying jag happened.  Then again on Wednesday afternoon as we came back from lunch.  Then again on Wednesday evening as Marge was leaving for the day.

Thursday he was worse.  Marge is a mess.  She cried several times at work.  She left early to go home and help her sister finalize plans for bringing their dad home.  As she was leaving, she said they weren’t sure he was going to make it through the night.

I feel terrible for Marge.  This is a very difficult thing she’s going through.  But I also…how do I put this delicately…. I don’t really KNOW Marge.  I cannot think of much I can say that would be comforting.  You know who I do know?  My boss.  You know what I know about him?  He is not the sort to really take a shine to his employees spending an hour over the course of the work day nodding sympathetically and listening to the woes of a substitute secretary.  Yesterday, I heard Marge talking to him for at least fifteen minutes about her dad.  You don’t know my boss, but trust me when I say that a fifteen minute conversation about ANYTHING would make him twitchy- he’s a fast-moving guy- and I could hear him getting more and more impatient as the conversation ran on and on.

Today is Marge’s last day with us, probably.  Our regular secretary is scheduled to come back on Monday.  But I wonder: how best to handle it when a near-stranger tells you a LOT about a very difficult family situation? At work? Where your boss would like you to be, you know, working?  I do not want to abandon Marge- she seems like a lovely lady and she’s clearly struggling- but I’m just not sure what to say.  What is the proper way to give support (and potentially condolences) to a near-stranger who has a demonstrated ability to talk at some length and in tremendous detail about a very difficult family situation?  Can I continue to nod sympathetically and say “mmm,” and “oh, that’s hard,” or is there something more specific, perhaps, that I should offer?  Potentially something that will get me back to my desk in under 30 minutes?  Or should I just say eff it to my work and give her as much time as she needs to talk it out?  Truly, give me a script here, people.  I’m at a loss.

Not to sound ungrateful or anything, but:

Our holiday work lunch is today.  It’s at one of those silly downtown clubs that’s like an urban country club but without the golf and tennis.  You know, the kind with a “reading room” and a squash court and like forty-seven bars?  The kind that only let women in starting like 15 years ago and which still requires jackets and forbids denim?  They’re odd places.

So today, which is CASUAL FRIDAY, on which I could USUALLY BE ALLOWED TO WEAR JEANS, I have to dress in a suit so that I can go to a silly downtown club to be served a dry club sandwich and a warm diet coke.  Ho ho ho indeed.

Grumble.

So: work.  I can’t, won’t, will not, must not talk about it.  Except I have to say this:  I leave home earlier every day, get home later, eat lunch at my desk, and pretty routinely feel like an idiot.  It’s taken over my life, my free time, my cooking time, my writing time.  It has, as of this afternoon, officially taken over Thanksgiving with a project that will take me all weekend that absolutely must be done by next Monday.  By all measures, I should be frustrated and miserable.

But I had lunch today with a supervisor from my old job and it was almost impossible to hear what she was saying over the deafening chorus of “thank god this is not my life anymore” running through my head.  New job is hard, it’s a little bit greuling right now, and I love it.

That’s pretty cool.

Outfit: selected (after several false starts)

Fancy work bag: packed

Shoes: laid out

Hair: blown out

Makeup: actually applied, for a change

Train schedule: memorized

Stomach: flip-flopping

I start my new gig today.  Wish me luck!

So, as I’ve mentioned a few times, I have some time off between the end of my last job (which wrapped up right before we went to Egypt) and the start of my new job (in 2 weeks.)  The first two weeks of this time off I spent glued to the couch, battling the great non-swine-flu of 09.  But I am finally feeling better, and the weather is gorgeous, and now I’m…well, I’m a little bored, truth be told.

I don’t do well with unstructured time, you see.  I begin to feel guilty for not being “productive”.  I worry that I’m not doing it “right”.  For example: I love to go to movies by myself, I love to sew and have plenty of projects pending, and I love to cook elaborate meals without time pressure.  There, that’s all my time filled up right there, right?  Well yes, except it’s shaping up to be a gorgeous week in Chicago, and it feels like such a WASTE to be sitting inside watching movies, sewing, or cooking.

So I think I’ve got today covered: I’m going to go for a super long bike ride, followed by reading a book on the beach, followed by some very necessary grocery shopping.  But I’m looking for more inspiration.  Having a few weeks off is such a luxury and a rarity, I really want to take advantage, but I’m a little short on ideas of things to do solo, in the middle of a weekday, without spending too much money.  Help me! If you had a day or a week or a month off, what would you do?