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impromptu opening
Wednesday, January 12 2000
For lunch, I went out with my buddies Jason and Dave to a sub place across the street called "Grab and Go." The joint offers pre-made 12 inch subs for $2.50. You grab them and go. It's that easy, thus the name. They even have a website, so we jokingly started referring to Grab and Go as "that Dot-com place." Seriously, you wouldn't believe all the whisper-whisper, talk-talk going on in the skyscraper of our new office. It goes something like this: "Oh, you're the people on the 6th, 8th, 14th and 17th floors, right? Are you one of those Dot-coms?"
The merit-based ranking system which was unveiled on Monday is now officially scrapped. It was so inaccurate and unjust that it was having a generally negative effect on company morale. Indeed, the poster of our rankings has mysteriously disappeared from the hallowed wallspace by the door, though I suspect its removal predated any official company policy. After all, some of the people dissed by its numerology are known for their late hours.
You have to figure that after one meeting where the Grand Pooh Bah suggested 20% merit-based staff reductions and another where our supposed merits were inaccurately displayed for all the world to see there'd be morale issues to contend with. But I'm not the one trying to run this company; I'm the one trying to leave at 6pm each and every day.
In a moment of unusual relaxation, I was discussing these matters with the crew over in the community resource (including my fellow Obecian Al) when we were joined by the most New York of our company's numberless VPs of marketing, Adam. Somehow he launched into a comic tale of the first computer game he played, a Star Wars-themed diversion played out on dot-matrix paper printouts and programmed using rolls of punched paper. That must have been back in the 70s. Adam says he's seen pictures of Bill Gates standing next to an identical copy of the same game machine. He wanted to know why Gates is a multi-multi-billionaire while he's just a VP of marketing at an early 00's Dot com. What is so different about their respective experiences?
But Adam remains confident that, riding this Dot-com tulip-investment wave, we'll all be rich some day, with young blond chicks hanging on us, Lear jets and everything. "Some day," he said to those around me, "we'll all say 'I remember when Gus was a bohemian.'" At that point Adam turned and left. Everything about Adam has this choreographed Jewish-comic quality. When he's said the comic line of the conversation, he vanishes. Deal sealed. By the way, in two weeks, Adam will be, like me, 20% vested.
Tonight I finally got around to unpacking my paintings as Kim looked on. They were even better than I'd remembered, especially after I'd smoked a little pot.
The original plan for the evening called for Kim to cook me dinner, but she claimed to be tired and wanted to eat out. We ended up having our favourite delivery restaurant, Little Sicily, deliver some food while I went out and picked up a big "quantity-not-quality" bottle of cheap Merlot.
The evening turned into something of an art opening when we invited the neighbor girl Lisa over. Later still, her beau Joel materialized. During a conversation about Jenna the German Girl, the subject of "dry-humping" cropped up, and I felt the need to bring it up repeatedly throughout the rest of the evening.
As Joel and Lisa were leaving, they invited Kim and me to come along, but we declined. I explained that we had to "do some dry-humping first." Joel asked if we'd "come after that." I said that yes, we'd "come after that." It was, as Kim pointed out, a total sitcom moment.
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