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no twirling on forks
Thursday, August 24 2017
location: Bunk 2, Cabin 12, Camp Hollywoodland, Griffith Park, Los Angeles, California
Last night my sleep was considerably better because I had a nice quilted blanket leftover from someone else's unused provisions. Nevertheless, I woke up early, just as the first light was developing in the east. It was a good time to take care of some business in my favorite bathroom stall and then a long relaxing shower.
I showed up in the main hall before anyone but Brent, the head of corporate campaigns (and also the loudest snorer in Cabin 12). I immediately went about setting up a WiFi hotspot for my laptop using my phone (placed in a window, where it had a tiny trickle of reception). It worked better than expected, and not only could I do a git pull from a big repo, I could do so while checking all my usual newsy internet haunts. But then it seemed the stuff in the git repo was wrong, so I couldn't do the work I wanted to do. This setup was handy, though, when Nicole showed up and needed to do some last-minute work on the PowerPoint presentation she'd been working on for our IT Department presentation. Our comedic hook, which was really Dan's idea, was to ape the style of meme where there are multiple pictures about something showing the view of that thing from different vantage points. In ours, it was the vantage point of how IT is viewed and versus what we think of ourselves. (Dan got the idea wrong, though, but he's bullheaded with is ideas and his wrong way persisted right to the final product. Normally such memes have four or six panes. His only had two, for two vantage points, which was less funny than it could've been.)
A couple presentations after breakfast, it was time for IT to do their performance. We did a good job, but a second comedic hook (a bunch of random interesting facts about members of the IT team presented as a randomized anonymized list read by Allison) went on too long (and, it probably won't surprise you to learn, most of the best ones were about me).
Just before lunch, Jake, the head of Operations, announced that staff at Camp Hollywoodland had discovered evidence of alcohol consumption on the grounds even though alcohol is absolutely forbidden. It probably came in the form of a few cans found in the trash. Jake said the staff had decided to give us a pass this time, but that if any more alcohol evidence were found, that would be the end of the retreat and we'd have to find our ways home. I panicked a little, wondering like a paranoiac if perhaps our bunks would be tossed and my secret stash of unlabeled booze discovered. Those barracks certainly look like places where one would have no expectation of privacy.
In the afternoon, we had a lecture that was a bit more practical than most guest lectures had been last year. This one focused on the very concrete example of how to give a good handshake. We were made to pair up with strangers, so I ended up with the VP of legal, a woman of Indian descent. There was a lot of handshaking and staring into each others' eyes, and it was weird and intimate, but it went better than I would've expected.
After the Love Bubble, again I was walking around in a daze wondering what to do with myself until whenever it was my people would go out drinking. At that point I think it was Sara the chicken lady who asked if I wanted to join in on a game of Bananagrams out on that concrete picnic table where we'd played that hilarious telephone pictionary game yesterday. I'd never played Banagrams, but it's an easy game if you know how to play Scrabble. Everybody builds their own Scrabble-style assemblage asynchronously using the tiles they randomly get in any grid they choose, and when they've used all their tiles they shout "peel" (I only just got that) and everyone has to grab a new tile from the mystery pile in the center. The one who shouts "peal" when there are insufficient tiles for everyone to get one wins. I was pretty bad at this game (as I am in any game that requires quick decisions), which seemed to surprise everyone at the table who'd assumed (mistakenly it seems) that I am some sort of all-purpose genius. I did have one good game, but even then I didn't win.
I'd heard there was spaghetti and "meatballs" for dinner, and so stayed for that. But the spaghetti was a real disappointment; it had been cut into two-inch segments, so there would be no twirling on forks. That might sound like a small thing, but it totally destroyed everything about spaghetti that makes it one of my favorite forms of pasta. The meatballs were good, and the dinner conversation (mostly with strangers) was good, even if it was a bit dominated by Dan and a new loudmouthed lawyer guy.
Again Luke and I rode with Dan and his new wife to the evening's adventure, which tonight was happening at my favorite Los Angeles restaurant: Mohawk Bend. There, we met up with Allison and Cameron and Nicole and her husband Billy. Eventually we even got a table big enough for all of us. I'd eaten so much spaghetti (and even some chili) that I had no room for food. So I drank beers instead. Mongo is my go-to IPA at Mohawk Bend. As for conversation, it was wide-ranging and mostly work-related, with plenty rehashing of the traumatic events of the summer that led to what is widely referred to throughout The Organization as "the New IT."
As we all said our goodbyes out in front of Mohawk Bend, a large subset of us did some last-minute pot smoking right there on the sidewalk. Pot is legal now in California, though probably not when smoked on Sunset Blvd.. It's great (if a little weird) that so many people in IT smoke pot, an "outing" that I am proud to have initiated early in my employment.
Back at Camp Hollywoodland, it was late, but there was someone at the gate to let us in. Sadly, the crazy nightlife of last night seemed to have been snuffed out by the hard-ass talking-to we'd gotten from Jake about alcohol earlier today.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?170824 feedback
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