One Sentence, technical communication issues, rewarding work, and dancing…

About One Sentence
One Sentence is about telling your story, briefly. Insignificant stories, every day stories, or turning-point-in-your-life stories, boiled down to their bare essentials.

Here are my four favorites so far:

JDRose

He told me I was pretty from certain angles.

tags: beauty love [add]

N

On his last day of class, the middle school foreign language teacher concisely summed up his opinion of the year with the words, “Fuck off,” then left the room without looking back while his co-teacher translated what he just said into Korean.

tags: Korea teaching teacher middle school foreign language travel job humor [add]

annabelle

Drinking at a bar, sitting between her best friend and her best friend’s husband, she whispered to him, “I get affectionate when I’m drunk”.

tags: affair [add]

natalie

My mother just told me that my father accidentally had a ladder delivered to my apartment and my first thought was “How big of a ladder?” instead of “Why did he do that?”

tags: ladder inadvertent delivery odd [add]


I started my day off with technical communication problems, which you can imagine that as a technical communicator for a living, pisses me off to no end.

I dragged my ass to the Wolfline bus stop in plenty of time for the 11:04 stop—with my backpack sticking to the perspiration building on my back with every nearly 100° step of the way, my laptop bag slipping off my shoulder because its strap rubbing against the backpack strap is more like Vaseline than Velcro, and my hands full of two bags of “goodies” I was brining into the office today.

11:04 comes and goes. No bus. 11:10 comes and goes. No bus. 11:15 comes. No bus.

I call the Wolfline, where I get this message: “Starting Wednesday, June 27, and through June 29, we are running limited bus service. Buses running on a limited schedule today are the #5, #6, #7, and #8.”

I think, “Whew! I’m waiting for the #9, so I’m not affected.”

11:20 comes and goes. I call back to the Wolfline, and press “1” to speak to a manager. “You’ve reached the voice mail for…”

11:25 comes and goes. Now I’m pissed. I drag my sweaty, loaded down, and now angry ass back to my house to drive to fucking campus.

On the way, it occurred to me that the communication: “Buses running on a limited schedule today are the #5, #6, #7, and #8,” meant that those were the only buses running today, and they are on a limited schedule. Silly me, I thought it meant that those buses were running on a limited schedule, but all of the rest of them were running their regular schedules.  Wrong!


We (Patti, Myra, and myself) had a great 2.5-hour meeting today, and I felt good afterwards about the preparation I did in anticipation of the meeting. It was explicitly acknowledged and appreciated, which is one of the main satisfiers of this job to me.

In a follow-up note, Patti said, “John—Thanks again for the supreme organization behind our discussion today. You do add so much to our team, and it is a pleasure to work together!”


We had an antipasto for an appetizer tonight, even though the main dish was Chinese. A mixed metaphor of food, if you will. Some beef Hoo-Mee (Yes, you!) Chow Mein was the entrée.

The antipasto consisted of crispy, crispy pepperoni slices wrapped up in strips of thin slices of ham with a dollop of cream cheese on them, along with slices of tomatoes and fresh mozzarella.


Dancing was festive enough tonight. We had plenty of dancers, and there was a fair number of bar patrons early in the evening.


<TMI>At home, we MMMMMMed and then MMMMMMed again. MMMMMMM.</TMI>

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