You choose, you lose.

I am thinking if I have anything to say right now and nothing’s coming to mind. One thing: I notice that my desk is just ten or twelve feet away from the CEO’s. He has a cubicle, too. It will be HARD to convince management that I deserve an office.

Has everybody gotten over their election fever yet? Midterm cases are usually pretty mild. It is easy for the election to sneak up on Utah voters – hardly anyone advertises their candidacy on radio or TV. Contrast that to Arizona (where I spent part of last week) – yikes! A talk-radio listener gets warnings, sometimes stentorian and sometimes full of throaty passion, about all the horrible things that will happen to your beautiful state if so-and-so is elected to such-and-such. I wonder if Arizona voters’ minds are trained to take it all in – for me it all started running together in my head. Voting for whom will cause cancer? Which proposition will reverse the earth’s gravity? Which judge sets sex felons free and gives them your daughter’s cell number? These negative ads seem to cast an indiscriminate grey pall over the whole proceedings, and induce a voter to feel bad about everything.

Nothing like that in Utah! A benefit of one-party state politics is that you are never troubled to hear opposite views or dissenting opinions.

Working for a living

I am writing this at work, during my lunch break of my new job at a watch merchant's corporate headquarters.

So, if anyone ever wants an answer to the question, "What time is it?" they know who to ask.

This is a funny place, since there is an office, warehouse, and watch repair place all in the same building. It's like a big garage. Small companies are funny: the HR dept is 25 feet away from me, and marketing is about 10. I tread an imaginary border between operations and finance. I have a cubicle on a concrete floor in the middle of a big garage. Three feet away from me on the other side of my cubicle wall, craftsmen are tinkering with watches, fussing at gears and springs and hitting tiny things with tiny hammers. An aircraft-carrier-grade heater whirrs intermittently above. There are no windows on the walls. If I don't go outside and get some sun, I'm going to get all pale and wretched and start saying "Gollum" a lot.

Some folks are dressed like artists, some are dressed like businessmen, and some are wearing sweats and jeans as they lift and move things around.

It's funny how well the office people dress for their job in the garage. Dark socks, nice shirts, and so on. Almost as if to say, "I'm dressed too nice to move any boxes! Find someone else to do the physical labor!" At least, that's what I'm hoping my dress says about me.

People are pretty nice. I'm still trying to get to know them. A man just came by and said hi. He introduced himself to me and I asked what he does for the company. He answered, "I am the CEO."

Whoops!