On Saturday, a mere two days ago, I left the house at 7am and got home at 7pm. Where was I? In Virginia Beach at a SharePoint Saturday conference. Please do not be too jealous. Really, just settle down.
This morning, my new supervisor and our boss stopped by my cube and asked about the conference. The first question out of my new supervisor’s mouth was, “How long did you work on Saturday?” and then I told her. The two of them looked at each other and smiled. Or maybe those were grimaces. I had already put 8 hours down for this coming Friday to make up for the conference, but now I suddenly had 4 more hours to dispense with this week. They both said figure it out and block off your calendar. This is why I like working for the both of them. They get the whole work/life thing and live it. It’s refreshing.
It will be nice on the one hand to have truncated days this week, but on the other hand it means that I’m basically in meetings all week. When my supervisor and I were looking for time for me to work on a project, I opened my calendar and she said something to the effect of well, crap. Yeah. I won’t be producing anything this week. Unless it can get done in the 30 minutes I have wafting around over the next three days.
Now, on with the very interesting part of SharePoint Saturday. Someone I don’t know well, by sight only, asked me if I could give her a ride home from the conference. She was going down the day before with another co-worker, but had no way to get home. I told her that was no problem…she lives .5 miles away, if even that. I was a little concerned because stranger in my car for two hours and I’m not good at small talk. As it turns out, we went to the same high school. She graduated a year after I did. I threatened to find my yearbook and bring it in…if I actually knew where it was, I’d do it.
We cracked each other up with stories. She has a much better memory of high school than I do, probably because her experience didn’t suck. I did tell her about a memory I have of our campus-style school and that was of the cat fights in courtyards between classes. It had to have happened more than once because why else would that be such a strong memory? She went silent for a moment and then told me that as I was telling her that memory one face came to mind. When she said the girl’s name, we both just burst out laughing because I am sure that girl could throw a punch.