I Was Off the Grid

Sort of.

Last week I was in Nags Head, NC with friends for our fourth annual Friends Beach Trip.

These guys came:

And so did these guys:

And these guys came to teach everyone how to expertly boogie board:

I was there, too!

We started July 4th with a salute to the Star Spangled Banner at 10 a.m. and continued it with American beer:

In between days with too-cold water and jelly fish-infested water, we played in the ocean:

And Benjamin enjoyed his half-day before having to head home to go back to work. Adulthood sucks.

Jessie was not a fan of Benjamin’s early departure:

But we managed to get a group photo before he left (unfortunately we were missing D for this one):

After showering up from the beach, our America celebration continued with matching (blurry) girls:

And unruly boys:

And slightly less unruly (blurry) boys:

Despite many, many attempts, Jessie and I got a blurry picture:

We feasted like champions the next morning on gourmet breakfasts of mac-and-cheese-with-cut-up-hot-dogs, pasta salad and eggs.

On the last night before all the friends left, we had an accidental/mandatory uniform night:

And on Wednesday we had a fancy group lunch at Sonic before everyone left Hugh and me to fend for ourselves the rest of the week.

It was quite the pig-out session and it was Jessie’s very first Sonic experience:

I think she liked it.

Then we said goodbye, everyone left, and Hugh and I went back to the big, empty beach house and settled into our friendless depression.

Just kidding, it wasn’t that bad.

But I will save that update for tomorrow.

Office Space

We all know what happens when something changes in the way we’re supposed to do things at work.

We used to take a PDF of a paper, add the images, call it a PiP, save it on a drive.

Close out an entry in a database which relied on software that was last updated in 1994.

Move the folder with all the files to be eventually published to a drive where copy editors would start working on it.

Create a mail merge file.

Edit it.

Print two copies.

Send an email to the database_specialist.

Hand deliver a title page and a coversheet to the database_specialist.

Click a button.

And, voila, a manuscript was sent to production.

Last week we ushered in an era in which the verification of a few bits of information, a quick check of the files and the click of a button would replace the long, wasteful practice we’re used to.

So, ignoring the possible implications this could have on the usefulness of our jobs, we celebrated.

Yes, those are hand-crafted paper chain streamers.

(I had nothing to do with this).

And they are made of all those coversheets we’d been printing two copies of and hand-delivering.

If you squint you can see the remnants of this paper’s author list.

Last week — the whole operation and every bit of chaos it caused — was truly our own wonderful little piece of Office Space.

 

PS – this post was supposed to publish Friday and it made me ever so sad to log in today and notice it hadn’t published when it was a timely subject. Sigh.