Tag: work

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#75 Surprises

Leo woke up not to the sound of his alarm clock, but to a loud knocking at his door. It was 4 AM, well before his 5:30 AM alarm. He put on his robe and went to the door to find a policeman.

“Are you Mr. Hickman?”, the cop asked.

“Uh… no – Hickman lives next door”, Leo said, gesturing toward the right, as the officer apologized and excused himself.

Leo couldn’t get back to sleep, and when his alarm rang it felt like the world crashed down on him. He reluctantly got up, got ready for work, and walked out the door. No sign of the police, and interestingly the lights were on in Hickman’s house – he never had to wake up early! Leo paid it no mind and got in his car to drive to work.

At work, Leo received word that his request for a raise hadn’t come through, although he had received 2 extra weeks vacation each year. He wasn’t aware that this was an intermediate option between raise and no raise. Leo spent the first half of the day annoyed, and cooled by mid-afternoon. At least he had something good in the surprise, even though it wasn’t exactly what he wanted.

That night Leo came home and told his wife about the day.

“That’s OK Leo, two extra weeks gives us more time together”, she said as they sat down to dinner.

“Oh, by the way, did you hear about the Hickmans?”, Leo’s wife asked.

“Naw, just saw a cop this morning looking for them. Didn’t have a chance to look into it further”, Leo explained.

“Their daughter was in a major car accident this morning. She’s hurt pretty bad but they think she’ll make a full recovery – just might take 6 months or longer”, Leo’s wife reported.

“That’s horrible”, Leo exclaimed. He couldn’t help but think about his own daughter, living away at college. He’d call her later tonight just to make sure she was OK.

[SSDay]

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#70 Routine

Jenny walked out of the elevator toward her office, with Winston beside her. He seemed to lag a bit behind, and didn’t respond to her continuing conversation about tasks at hand.

“You ok?”, she asked as she peered behind herself.

“Yea… just noticed that they put down a new rug in front of the elevator”, Winston said as he studied it carefully.

“I hadn’t noticed”, Jenny replied.

“You know what’s weird?”, Winston said as he caught up to her a few steps away,”I didn’t see it – I didn’t even feel it beneath my feet…. I realized I was slightly higher off the ground than I usually was”.

“What do you mean?”, Jenny said in confusion.

“Well, it’s hard to explain – almost like my eyes glanced onto the hallway in a new way – they were seeing everything from a slightly different perspective – one a small bit higher than ever before”, Winston said as they neared their desks.

“I guess I wouldn’t notice given that my height changes daily depending on my shoes!”, Jenny said with a laugh. Her proclivity toward extremely high heels, and days off from them after ‘over doing it’ were well-known throughout the office. Winston’s comment, though, made her wonder about how many things she took for granted in her daily routine. And if things were changing around her, was that a bad thing?

Her natural reaction was “Yes!” – she’d read enough stories about killers lurking in hidden corners, victims seeing things awry but not being able to put their finger on the exact source of the incongruity until the knife was already held at their throat. If the world was changing subtly around her, she should take that as a sign that she needed to be more diligent in her observation. For the next few weeks she watched her surroundings like a hawk (metaphorically speaking – she wasn’t looking for prey). She began to notice little changes day by day. The man handing out the free newspaper at the bus stop normally used the exact same motion to pull one paper from the crook of his arm, except when handing the paper to an attractive lady – then the motion slowed slightly, the man glancing away from the woman toward the papers to be sure he pulled only one. Perhaps a nervous affliction – one that men seldom had around her plain appearance. In addition to the newspapers, she inadvertently noticed work schedules of those serving her. The attendants at the gas station worked 4 days a week, and 1 weekend day, most working Monday-Thursday, and then Sunday. Jenny marveled at the new information she had picked up.

Until she realized most of it was utterly useless. It wasn’t as though her brain had a finite limit of things it could remember – quite the opposite, however Jenny had the sense that she had learned so much and had not once foiled a would-be criminal, or helped someone at the office by noticing a minute detail, or even been able to work her facts into idle conversation with her friends. All the work she’d done was useless. The work had tuned her brain, tuning that would last longer than the months she’d practiced observing, but had no noticeable benefit. Jenny moved on with life, abandoning her little project. She still noticed the odd mannerisms of the newspaper man and the gas station attendant’s schedules, but dared not work them into conversation for fear of being labelled that “weird girl”.

Many years went by, with the details becoming more or less explicitly forgotten. In fact, Jenny wondered if she even noticed them anymore. Until one day when she was walking home and had the urge to take a different route. She’d lived in the same neighborhood for years, and it had sadly declined over time. Still she never felt too unsafe, and it was broad daylight, so why bother changing her habits. Reluctantly though, the strong urge persisted and resulted in her walking into a coffee shop for a few moments to contemplate her odd feeling.

starbucks cup © by Cherrysweetdeal

Just as her coffee was served, she saw the police cars pull up in front of her house down the street. She could see the police moving up her driveway, and she anxiously sat in the shop until she saw a man running down the drive, tackled by the police as he tried to turn to run toward the shop. She took her coffee and began to cautiously walk down the street, toward the scene. The police met her a few houses down.

“Ms. Turner?”, the officer asked.

“Yes”, Jenny said, wondering how he knew her.

“Ma’am, it’s a good thing you waited a few minutes to come home today. The man we caught has hidden in the house behind yours – we’ve watched him for weeks. Today was the day we decided to move in, and we were going to do so before you came home. However we were delayed, and couldn’t move in until a few moments ago”.

As the officer talked, Jenny realized that she’d noticed vehicles parked along the streets over the past few months that were missing today, something she later inquired about and was told that they were indeed the watchful eyes of the detectives involved.

That night, the irony hit her: She changed her routine to notice facts she hadn’t before. Over the years, that itself had become routine, to the point she wasn’t even consciously aware of it. And while today may have been exceptional in the level of excitement this ability may have prevented her, she wondered how many other things in the past years she’d avoided without ever knowing. Did she avoid a speeding ticket by noticing the signs a cop was watching? Had she clued into the system used to mark down prices at her favorite stores, securing her the best deals? Or had today been the only time her “weird” ability had helped?

[SSDay]

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#44 The Inbetween Land

“Where am I?”, the man called out. The foggy grey space he appeared in did not answer. The cool feel of mist, alternating to light rain, swirled around him. He couldn’t figure out how he got here.

The last thing he remembered, he was sitting at his desk at work. After checking his list of items to attend to, his email, and his various websites for around the thousandth time, he sat there, staring at the walls around him. He was in between projects at the moment, or more aptly put, he didn’t have anything pressing and had little ambition to take on anything until it shoveled back to him. His work necessitated these ebbs and flows of action items, as coordinating with a dozen or more teams invariably left him with days where he was overloaded, and days where he was underloaded. Today was one of the latter.

But then it all changed, and he found himself in this space. A grey space, with no discernible start or stop. There was some light, but no visible light source. There was a breeze, accompanying the moisture, but no discernible hotness or coldness to it. With nothing concrete in terms of sensory input, he found it odd that below him, on the surface of the floor, street, rock, or whatever he was standing on, was a perfectly shaped circle, about 10 feet in diameter. He stood in the middle of it, its red outline visible despite the muted scenery.

red circle © by lucamascaro

He carefully walked closer to the edge of it, and reached down. Beyond the red line was solid, at least, so he abandoned his fear of falling if he walked beyond the ring. With great trepidation he stepped over the line. Suddenly the world around him changed. The rain became heavier, and colder. The wind picked up with an icy chill. It grew darker as well, the clouds seemingly bunched up as if crowding into an ethereal elevator. The man quickly took a step back. The climate began to return to its previous state.

Puzzled, he walked to the opposite side of the circle, and stepped out. Now the wind left completely, and the clouds began to part to show a gleaming white sun. The space became lighter, and hotter. This wasn’t exactly what the man wanted either, so he stepped back into the circle. The world returned to its middle ground.

And so the man found himself in the Inbetween state. He longed for it to change, but was unwilling to experience the extremities offered outside the red circle. However if he stayed in the circle, he would never experience anything more than the state he was in. The choice was his – venture beyond the safe confines, and learn how to cope with the hustle and bustle of the definite shift in realities, or stay put, safe but unfulfilled.

It was about this moment that he realized that he had a third option. He had merely stepped over the line, and backed into the circle as soon as things shifted. He turned to his right and stepped out of the line, and strode confidently away from the circle. The weather again shifted, however the extremes soon subsided. In moving into the chaos, he had embraced it. And by embracing it, he had conquered it.

[SSDay]

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#33 Eeek!

“Eeek!”, the author exclaimed.

“What is it?”, was said in reply.

“I didn’t write my story for today yet”, was all she heard as he flew to his computer.

“Now what can I write about…”, he said, as visions of sugar plums and dynamite, cannons and catnip, dragons and bagpipes, and all other forms of fancy arrived into his consciousness.

“But should it be serious?”, he thought as he banished the humor from his brain. Proverbs and wisdom, wit and thoughtfulness fluttered into the fingers. Maybe he should write about how life is short, or how self-imposed problems are long, or how annoying car alarms are when you’re trying to write.

“Light-hearted fiction” he thought, as he envisioned a story entitled “99 ways to murder that guy who can’t keep his car alarm from going off during my writing”, or perhaps one called “How to get your cat to stop biting your toes while you sleep”. Oh the possibilities could be endless – or had he used that phrase before in this story? Sugar plums? No, he’d definitely used that before. At least he didn’t write “sugar plus”, which he caught just in the nick of time. Otherwise one might think he was writing ad copy for the latest sugar substitute.

“But what should it be about? I have an audience to entertain”, he mused. “Perhaps they won’t notice if I blow off one night. Maybe they’ll be too entertained with Jim the Bunny and Jabberpaw and all those dark depressing stories I’ve written in the past few weeks to notice that #33 is phoned int!”. The plan began to take shape in his mind. He’d rush to his computer and just type any darn thing that came to his fingers. His 1 or 2 faithful readers wouldn’t notice – and if they did, maybe they’d be entertained, or at least bemused.

“Well, it’s not like they’re paying anything for it”, he said as he comforted himself. He’d come up with a better, more fleshed out idea tomorrow, he assured himself. Until then, they’d just have to deal with this quickly conceived and ill-designed short work of semi-fiction!

[SSDay]

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#27 Monday

It’s Monday again, the work week does start
Once more we wish it Friday, with all of our heart
But perhaps if we try
To revise our view
We’ll see it isn’t that hard, to make it through.

[SSDay]

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Encryption – It’s Not Just For The Paranoid

Recently I purchased a few external hard drives for backup purposes, and the first thing I did with them was to encrypt them using TrueCrypt. When I mention this to people, I generally get a sorta weird look. Sort of a “If you aren’t doing anything illegal [which I’m not, if you care], why do you need to encrypt your drives?”. While one could use encryption for nefarious reasons (and claim 5th amendment rights against forced decryption), there are a number of reasons why encryption of even non-sensitive data (i.e. my music collection) makes sense.

First, let’s talk about the costs of doing this. Using TrueCrypt, my product of choice (and a proven and secure open-source solution), the cost in dollars is $0. TrueCrypt is free, and runs on pretty much any operating system. The only other cost is time. On my computer, I was able to encrypt an entire 1 TB drive in just under 12 hours. To read or write files to this drive, I must mount it in TrueCrypt (Which takes about 5-10 seconds), and unmount it when I’m done (5-10 seconds). The speed of data writing/reading is a bit slower, however since I’m storing files there (and not doing video editing), it’s a negligible difference.

So those are the costs – a few seconds here and there, and an initial 12 hour investment if you want to encrypt an entire 1 TB drive (Encrypting smaller drives, or creating encrypted ‘containers’ (which look like files but act as small encrypted drives within a drive) takes less time).

And here are the benefits:

  1. Peace of Mind with Offsite Backup. You’ve probably heard before that you should keep a copy of your data ‘offsite’. This means, practically, ‘not in your home’. While online services are out there that can do this, for large chunks of data that you want to keep handy, the easiest way I know to do this is to keep a copy at your office or place of business. If that won’t work, your car (assuming it wouldn’t get burned up in the same fire that got the house), or a friend’s / parent’s house would also work. (Fireproof safes, while a good idea, shouldn’t be your only line of defense. Even if they protect the data, it might take days or weeks post-fire to get into them, so a true offsite solution maintains data security and data availability).So you have your offsite location picked out, and you have your external hard drive sitting there. Great. Now just schedule a task or calendar appointment to remind yourself to back up to it regularly, and you’re good to go – right? Well, maybe not. Most of us don’t have exclusive control of our workplaces. While we might have desk drawers that lock, or private offices, someone else usually has a key or can easily obtain one (If you don’t believe me, check out this site that will sell you any desk key you want, provided you can give them the number from the outside of the lock. Not exactly hard to get information!). Now imagine that someone gets into your desk, finds your external hard drive, and decides to power it up. Now they have access to your files, and while you might not have anything all that important in them, do you really want a stranger to have unbridled access to those files? They could peak at your resume, your vacation photos, your home movies, any backed up emails, word documents, budgets, etc… Nothing that will cause you to go to jail or compromise state security, but still – unsettling stuff.
  2. No Worries When Obsolescence occurs. So eventually that shiny 1 TB (or 2 TB, or 3 TB or whatever) drive is going to seem just as great as a 100 GB drive did 5 years ago. When that happens, do you really want to go through all the work to securely erase all of your personal information off of it? Or are you content to throw it out and let someone access everything because all you did was a quick format? If the data is encrypted in the first place, it’s never in danger or in need of secure deletion, provided the key is unretrievable by the finder.
  3. Got company data worth legal action over? Have you ever signed a Non-disclosure agreement? Ever read the fine print about what a company could do to you if you ‘leak’ out any of their information / databases / lists of customers / etc…? No one intends to break a NDA, however one of the most unfortunate ways one could be broken is through unencrypted hard drives. If you’re storing company backups with your own (because, say, you’re the IT guy at a small shop and it’s just easier to have a copy of the backup for piece of mind), then you need to secure it. Otherwise, bad things could happen.
  4. What’s the downside, exactly? So I’ve just made three good arguments for keeping your data secured. I told you that it takes me about 5-10 seconds to open my encrypted drive, and that read/write speed isn’t greatly impaired (If you’re encrypting a system partition, you might take care to use just 1 level of encryption with TrueCrypt, such as simply AES, since it’s secure and reasonably fast). So really, what is the excuse for not using some form of encryption? Remember, if someone gains access to your data, you can’t simply tell them “Sorry, I was ignorant and too busy to secure this stuff – can you please delete it and give me a second-chance?”.

So there you have it – some very good reasons why you might want to take a bit of time this week and encrypt your backup hard drives. It’ll give you some piece-of-mind, if nothing else.

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#26 Flash

It had been 6 months since the day when Mark found the list in an old hoodie he was putting on for the first time that September. It wasn’t too remarkable – just a list of chores for the day, 11 months ago.

call insurance agent
buy eggs
call Kelsey’s school
drop off Jo’s car
print resume

Mark paused as he recalled the day he wrote the list. He’d just been in an accident the day before, hence the call to his insurance company. Jo was having her boss over for dinner, and needed the eggs. Kelsey had been caught smoking in the bathroom at school, and her principal wanted to speak to her father. Jo’s car was acting up, and he was tasked with getting it fixed. On top of that, he had been told a few days earlier that his temporary assignment, which he hoped would be made permanent, was ending. He’d have to get his resumé out there once more. It was just another rough day after a series of rough months in the life of the 43 year-old divorced father of 1 troubled teenager, who was trying to make it work with his fiancé of two years. The previous 6 months had been hard on her as they struggled with her parent’s deaths. Kelsey could care less, but Mark had grown to think of Jo’s parents as the ‘good’ in-laws he’d never had with his first wife.

But all of that was before he got the call that changed everything. He remembered that his phone rang while he was buying the eggs listed on the note. He could barely hear the voice on the other end as he stood in the supermarket, and he didn’t recognize the number. Finally after a few moments of exchanging whats and huhs, he figured out it was Jo. She was at the doctor’s office, and needed him to pick her up. He didn’t understand – she had his car while he drove Kelsey’s old beater. Why couldn’t she drive home? When he reached the doctor’s office, Jo’s doctor took him into her office. They exchanged pleasantries, and while they talked for at least 30 minutes, Mark couldn’t remember anything after he heard the word “cancer”.

She hung on for 5 months, but it was aggressive and it took her. Today, six months after the funeral, he found himself thinking how 11 months ago, dozens of tiny annoyances kept him aggravated and upset.  In a flash, all of that changed. Somehow during her struggle, he found a job that was sympathetic to what he was going through, allowing him to start a few weeks after the funeral. Kelsey came out of her ‘rough’ period and tomorrow he was scheduled to drop her off at school. It was hard without Jo, but he was getting through. He crumpled up the old list and threw it out as he replaced it with the shopping list of things to buy for Kelsey’s dorm. Life wasn’t less hectic now, but given the alternative he experienced in those 5 months, he was happy to have a mile-long list.

“Ready to go, Dad?”, Kelsey said as she came bounding down the stairs. “The stores might be crazy busy today!”.

“Yep, I’m ready for anything”, Mark said in reply.

[SSDay]

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#25 Road Warrior

He settled into the seat with the drink.

“That kinda tastes like chocolate milk”, she said as she glanced over at him. He nodded in reply, and she went back to her papers.

He opened up the lid of the laptop and connected the wireless. A few dozen new emails poured into his inbox just as quickly as the coffee had poured into his cup moments earlier. He braced himself – it was going to be a long afternoon.

That morning, he’d visited several clients, each more demanding than the last. He found himself with several different notes from the morning, waiting to be entered into the customer database he was logging in to. A quick scan of the emails revealed three that would need immediate attention, the rest could wait until the notes were entered. Given the loud complaints of two of the clients he’d met this morning, the faster the notes were in the system, the better. They were the type that would call up this afternoon and demand access to the perks he had recently capitulated to. No notes meant the representative on the phone would have no idea what they were talking about.

A quick sip of the drink and a long grimace as he found that Client number 1 had already called, and met with resistance by an uninformed rep. The coffee grew cold as he wrote three quick emails of his own to put out the fire he knew was starting.

He had been in this position for far too long, driving his life away, visiting clients who couldn’t care less about his life, immersed in their own struggles. About two hours into his work, he looked up at his surroundings. No one who he had seen when he arrived at the coffee shop were still there. The attendants were different, shift change had happened an hour ago. He had lost himself in the world of his work, unaware of the changes. Honestly, this coffee shop, in the middle of his territory, was more familiar to him than his own office, which he only saw in the mornings during the meetings.

“Hey Rob, back here again?”, the night manager said as he wandered out from the back.

“Yea, I suppose I should leave a bigger tip!”, he man said wearily to the manager, Joe.

“Eh, you’re not the one we wish would leave!”, Joe said with a smile. “You at least buy something, or several things, depending on how long your work keeps you here. And you do tip, which is very much appreciated by my staff”.

“Everyone has to make a living, right Joe?”, Rob said. He had just written the last email of the day, and was packing up his laptop.

“You want a refill for the road?” Rob gave Joe his cup in an appreciative manner. Joe knew that Rob seldom asked for a refill, even though his loyalty card, punched religiously, entitled him to a dozen or more if he asked.

“Joe, do you mind if I ask a question about your work?”, Rob said as he walked up to the counter.

“Sure Rob, you’ve hung around here long enough to notice how everything works though – not much I could tell you about!”, Joe said as he handed Rob the coffee.

“How many emails do you write a day?”, Rob said, half jokingly and half serious.

“Oh, I don’t know, maybe 4 or 5 – just stuff to the day manager, emails to our regional guy, nothing major, more FYI stuff”, Joe said.

“Really… and how often do you have to deal with difficult people in a day?”, Rob asked. He assumed that retail must be a special sort of hell, given his experience in business to business sales. People must be even worse to cater to, especially those seeking their daily caffeine rush.

“Actually not too many”, Joe replied with a smirk, “1 less if you leave”.

Joe’s grin made Rob laugh as he started walking out. As he got to the door, Joe called out

“Have a good night Rob, see you tomorrow!”. Rob waved back as he left.

Over the course of the next few weeks, the man spent his usual hours at the coffee shop, working and drinking enough coffee to keep him awake through the drive home. He was growing more and more tired of his job, but honestly couldn’t conceive of doing anything else. He’d been in sales for a long time, had an income to maintain, and while it wasn’t perfect, there wasn’t anything else he could do.

Until the day Joe came up to him around closing time. It had been a pretty bad day email wise, and Joe could see that the man was emotionally destroyed by the demands of his job.

“You know Rob”, Joe began “Our day guy is leaving next week – he’s going off to become a regional manager somewhere. Want to apply for his job?. Rob was surprised by the invitation. He’d never managed anything in retail before, never even worked in food service or retail in his entire life. Why would Joe ask him this.

“Oh you can’t be serious”, Rob said in reply. “I don’t know anything about this job”. Joe smiled.

“Actually, I think you do. I’ve been watching you and realized that you spend probably 90% of your time doing just one thing – trying to make your client’s happy”. Joe said.

“Well, a happy client is one who will stick around, and not darken my email door quite so much”. Rob said in reply.

“This job is really no different – managing this place is just about keeping people happy, employees and customers. There’s a small amount of corporate junk to deal with, and some annoyances, sure, but it’s not as bad as one would think.”, Joe said as he walked over to the door to lock it.

Rob looked at Joe, and for the first time realized that he wasn’t just a kid working here till he got a real job. Joe was a man, about the same age as Rob.

“You have any kids, Joe?”, Rob asked.

“Three”, Joe replied, “One in college, two in high school”.

Joe could see the skepticism in Rob’s eyes.

“The job pays enough – you’re not going to get rich, but you may add some years back on to your life in exchange for a little bit less money”, Joe grinned, “After all, what would you rather be, rich and dead or comfortable and able to attend your grandkid’s weddings?”.

The man started the new job a few weeks later. It was surprisingly easy to transition into, since he spent so much time there already. And it helped that the day shift remembered his generous tips, and were open to listening to his experiences while telling him theirs. After a few months, Rob noticed a man had started frequenting the shop in the early afternoons, sitting where he used to sit, and feverishly pounding away at his keyboard as Rob wiped the counter and counted the cash drawer. He couldn’t ponder the man for long though, a family he knew walked in the door and waved to him before they even reached the counter.

[SSDay]

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#23 Does Dinosaurs Wear Socks?

She sat there quietly, lost in her work. The keyboard clicked away as she wrote another email, the icons growing smaller and smaller on the screen, the more work she did. Pages of text, documents scattered about, and an overflowing table of material. She was working in the library, and seldom noticed even the slight distractions the workplace afforded. She worked for a few hours, then packed up, and headed out to the subway.

She had a 20 minute ride back to the small apartment she called home. It wasn’t much, and it wasn’t exactly where she wanted to be in her life, but it was where she was at that moment. She was resigned to that, and on the worst of days she longed to escape. The best of days were almost acceptable, and the absolute best of days allowed her to feel at home, even so far away from her family.

As she sat on the train, a rare luxury, she lost herself in her mind filled with work. Things still to be done tomorrow, things to be done tonight, things that should have been done weeks ago, and things that she realized wouldn’t get done despite her best intentions. These always fell into the ‘personal’ projects. Work paid the bills, and work got done.

“Does dinosaurs wear socks, mama?”, the little girl three seats down yelped loud enough for the entire car to hear. The mother was tired, a long day behind her, hoping that her daughter would stop asking questions about extinct animal’s footwear.

“I don’t know”, she mumbled to her child.

The little girl wasn’t happy with that response. She had recently learned about dinosaurs – these great big huge beasts that dominated all around them. They were magical in that they didn’t have to do anything all day other than look cool and eat things. They didn’t have parents to listen to, teachers to mind, or rooms to clean up. They weren’t bossed around to death, they were the boss. And their feet may have gotten cold, for all the little girl knew, and so would they have dinosaur sized socks or not? She had to find out.

So the little girl jumped up and wandered down the slim aisle of the train car. The woman, still pre-occupied with her thoughts, became aware of the little one’s presence approximately a second before she spoke.

“do you know if dinosaurs wear socks?”, the girl asked the woman.

Any other day, the woman would have smiled, but politely said “No” or “I don’t know”. But something in the girl’s eyes spoke to her. The girl, no more than 4, seemed to have nothing but excitement and wonderment in her eyes. No worries about the world, about asking people she didn’t know strange questions, or about spending her time on frivolous Jurassic explorations. No, the little girl just seemed innocently interested in the claw coverings of the T-Rex, or of Mosasaur mitts.  Something begged the woman to indulge her.

“I suppose they must have”, the woman began. “Dinosaur’s didn’t live in houses”.

The girl’s eyes lit up further. “Ya… they lived outside!”, she eagerly said. The mother looked slightly down the car to see whom had started speaking to her daughter. Seeing the woman, the mother nodded in tacit endorsement of the interaction, happy to have the child spend time bothering someone else for once.

“And do you know what it’s like outside?”, the woman asked.

“It’s COLD!”, squealed the girl.

“Yes, so they must have had socks to keep their feet warm”, said the woman. The little girl nodded in approval.

Ten minutes later they had parted ways, their chat expanding to all sorts of dinosaur clothing and lifestyle. The girl, tired from her long conversation, curled up in the stroller her mother pushed, and the mother smiled at the woman, thanking her for making the child a bit more manageable. The woman would never see the child or mother again, thus was life living in the big city. But as she walked away, she mused to herself about the interaction.

“Life in the city is cold. But perhaps every so often, breaking away from the concerns of my life can make it warm. Just like the socks that the dinosaur’s wore”

Dedicated to a friend.

[SSDay]

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#22 Jim the Bunny Learns to Knit

Jim hopped through the forest with a giant grin on his face. He’d just grabbed a bunch of files from Jabberpaw, and had covered his internet tracks by paying off Sylvester the snake. Now he just needed to get home and load up his found files.

On the way, he tripped, since he wasn’t the most coordinated bunny in the world. In doing so, his Lucky Rabbit’s Foot USB drive fell off of the tuft of fur he’d attached it to, and it fell into the mud puddle. For the next 3 days he spent most of his time trying to remove all of the mud from the contacts so that he could read the drive once more. This was annoying, so he decided he needed to buy a cover for his drive.

Unfortunately, Amazon doesn’t sell covers for Lucky Rabbit’s Foot USB drives. Jim was in a proverbial, thankfully not actual, pickle. His only solution was to make one. So that’s how it came to be that he hopped over to the sheep flock, and found Kay the sheep.

Kay was well known throughout the Woods as the premier knitting expert of all of the Animals. She used only the best yarn, which she stole off of her husband, Jay the Sheep. Jay had the best wool in the Woods, when he had a chance to grow it before Kay shore it off.

Kay was impressed to see Jim hop up.

“Here to learn to Knit”? She asked.

“No, I just want a cover for my USB drive”, he responded. Kay always wanted to teach people to knit.

“OK, that’ll be $400”, Kay responded without batting a sheep eyelash.

“WHAT?!?”, Jim’s bunny jaw dropped. Prices had gone up considerably since the last time he’d worked with Kay.

“Well, Jay’s charging more for the raw materials, but really the bulk of the price increase is that I’m just too busy to help you these days, Jim”, she said with a grin, “You see, I’ve become a world famous knitting sheep”.

Jim was incredulous. He’d been a customer of Kay’s for years. She’d knitted his tail cozy, his carrot-shaped shopping bag, and his winter coat.

“Can’t you cut me a break?”, he asked.

“Well, I might have a solution”, she responded.

So it happened that Jim the Bunny was compelled to learn to knit, to become Kay’s assistant, in exchange for a custom lucky rabbit foot’s USB cover. Initially reluctant, Jim was at least consoled by the regular pay. Plus he was able to trade his knitted work for access to Jabberpaw’s extensive media library. The bear might have been a loaner, but he did enjoy custom sweaters.

[SSDay]

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