I went downtown last Thursday to find I had been excused from jury duty. (Why they can’t tell you that on the phone, I don’t know.) I was handed a slip of paper to take to the jury room in the basement, where I encountered the same woman I’d given the third degree three days earlier about bicycle parking.
She processed my paperwork and I left, but after going ten steps, I went back and apologized for being grumpy about the bike parking. Her face lit up and she smiled and waved her hands as if to say there could be no thing in this world less needed than an apology from me. She said it was totally fine and wished me a nice day, making me very glad I took the few moments to do that. That must be a lousy job, dealing with an endless stream of disgruntled prospective jurors.
Every four or five weeks, when my name comes up on a list, I have a hideously stressful week at work, which of course was last week, the same week as jury duty. You might think one would do anything to get out of it, but because it’s so horrible, it’s extremely poor form not to show up, because then it gets dumped on someone else.
Really, the only acceptable excuse for not being present is if you yourself are dead, so after I was excused from jury duty, I hastened downtown to my cubicle and its soothing endless flow of emails to find that my boss had announced he has been promoted and that his last day with us will be in two weeks.
I’ve had this boss for almost three years, and though I didn’t have any pressing reason to make a major change, I had begun to fear my life might be exactly the same for the next 20 years, so it was kind of a relief to see this manifestation of impermanence.
When I came to this boss’s group, I was somewhat surly because I’m just naturally surly and also because I was leaving a group with a hundred people in it, where I had many, many friends, and coming to a team of about ten people who were deployed in three or four cities, with only a few of us here in San Francisco. I felt isolated in the new building for a long time.
I was also a little worried about expanding my customer base from 50 or 60 developers, whom I’d come to think of as my flock, to thousands of strangers, as I’m not really a natural customer service person. I was pleased to find that I was able to feel sympathetic about the problems of people I didn’t know and would never meet in person.
My boss took a little getting used to—I’m sure he’d say the same about me—but I came to appreciate the clarity he brings to all situations. His department is free of chaos and crisis. He also has a soft and kind heart. If there is a nice way to say something, he’ll say it that way.
He is also completely relentless when he decides to achieve something, in a polite and firm way, so he has been a tremendous advocate in our dealings with other groups. We love that about him. We smile with evil pleasure when one of us says, “I’m going to have them meet with the boss.”
Over the weekend, I finished The Red Carpet, a collection of stories by Lavanya Sankaran, who can write rings around Jhumpa Lahiri, even with a hit-and-miss approach to capitalizing proper nouns and even given that nearly every story fell apart at the end, lurching awkwardly to a stop. Sankaran’s characters are vivid and her stories draw you in immediately.
If I’m going to live 40 years, give or take, and there are 52 weeks per year (that part is certain, anyway), and if it takes me, on average, what with one thing and another, three weeks to read a book, there are only 693 books left! If there are a hundred books on my library list, that’s one seventh of all the books I will ever read. That’s why I feel no obligation to finish a book or magazine article that does not immediately grab me.
On Saturday I did my cooking and in the evening Tom and I watched Bend It Like Beckham, which I loved, especially Juliet Stevenson in the role of the mother of one of the main character’s teammates.
On Sunday I did the same thing as last Sunday: Took BART to
Hammett is doing well. He’s proving to be a top talent when it comes to transferring cat litter from the box to the bathroom floor. I see in retrospect that Thelonious (who I miss terribly) must not really have been trying.
2 comments:
Linda, your dry sense of humor provides me with more enjoyment than I can convey.
I am borrowing your paragraph on how many books one can read in a lifetime and so not to waste the time for one of my posts soon. I love it.
Glad to hear that Hammett is so skilled. Good for him.
I think there is a mat to go under the box that is supposed to help that, but I don't know from experience that it does.
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