One Door Closes, Another One Opens Presents

And…it’s done.

Our office shut down permanently last night. I’m talking cubicle breakdown, lock replacement, moving companies, and saw the infrastructure in half kinds of permanent.

9 years worth of data flowed through the twisted pairing in those wires…

Hard to say if I’ll ever have my own office again.

 

The final shutdown…

And now… Now it feels like I have a phantom limb where constant emails, worries about viruses/hackers, client meetings, and my nightly, pre-bed network monitoring ritual should be.

Everything went silent. And I suddenly feel very cut off.

I had no idea how pervasive that stress had become in my life until it disappeared, and left me here staring at an alertless cell phone, wondering what in the hell I’m supposed to be doing with my working hours if I’m not taking care of an office infrastructure.

Between you and me, Internet…I’m still not sure.

So today I wandered around the house and tried to make myself useful. Cooked breakfast. Did some dishes. Some laundry. Got my tire fixed. (Oh yeah…I had a flat tire on Monday. Bleh.) That kind of thing.

And now I’m writing for you guys in a desperate reach for some semblance of normalcy. But you know, even this feels strange…writing on my laptop in bed at night instead of on my lunch break. Hmm.

This being said, I cannot say that I will mourn working for the people that purchased our company last year. They are a miserable group, the lot of them, and the company is rotten from the head down. I am happy that my daily efforts are no longer making them a dime.
In fact, I’ve had at least 5 different people express jealousy over the fact that I was getting out of there, each of whom voiced some variant of, “You know, I think I’d rather be in your shoes than be stuck here…”
A couple of them were executives in the company.

My shoes.
The ones that are walking out of here jobless 5 days before Christmas.
Sure.

Speaking of Christmas, our tree is up, the stockings are hung on the mantel, and while we’re still wearing shorts and t-shirts, we’re hopeful that Santa might bring a Christmas cool front with him.

I even got one of my Christmas gifts early this year.


Which in turn prompted the requisite bout of baking.I found what looked like a decent gingerbread cookie recipe online, and set about making some ninjabread men of my very own.

Alas, it would seem my oven is less Wushu and more Wal-Mart, as the ninjas went into the 350° dojo looking like svelte, ass-kicking AOL icons…

Martial Stewart

And they came out 12 minutes later having gorged themselves into flabby, cinnamon-scented bloblets.

The sorting kasa must have switched their house from Ninjitsu to Sumo.

Delicious frosting nipples.

And who am I to argue with a sorting hat?

Besides, a mawashi (that sumo diaper thing) is way easier to draw using frosting than those ninja outfits. Now I just need to get working on some gumdrop mobility scooters…

Merry Christmas everyone.

j.s.

2 Comments on “One Door Closes, Another One Opens Presents

  1. Pingback: Christmas Limbo – Bumbledad

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