Paper Chase
5:32 p.m. - 2003-05-13


Some days you are not meant to get out of bed. Today I came in to work and there was a light flashing on my phone, always a bad bad sign. It means that Darla left a message for me, and something is wrong that I have to fix pronto. This message was the worst - Darla never got the namerun the night before!!!! so how could she possibly get it back to me in time for the 7:55 deadline? I am afraid I forgot where I was and said "Holy Shit!!" and took off running for the recording desk. I found Brian's copy under his phone and faxed it over to Darla. Then I needed to make a copy for myself so I could research all the numbers while I waited for the Run to come back, but my boss had forgotten to turn on the xerox machine! She never forgot before...I could see clouds of bad karma hovering over my head. I turned on the machine then hurried to the center of the plant and turned on the other two machines too. It takes maybe 10 minutes for them to warm up, some faster than others.

I hurried back to my desk and got my computer up and running, checked the xerox, hurray! it was working!, made a copy of the namerun, back to my desk, and researched the numbers in 7 minutes flat. Lucky the run was pretty short today. Right after I finished, Darla faxed over the completed run. I must say, I was impressed with their hussle. It was now 7:35. I whipped through the run, eliminating docs with lightning speed, and called the all clear in eight minutes. 12 minutes to spare! But I felt like taking a restorative nap under my desk.

Strangely enough, the rest of the day was slow and a little boring.