Nuts-to-butts, an outrageously wasteful stir stick, and a business trip to Greensboro…

~Thursday~  Another morning on the Wolfline bus instead of the city bus, and another N-2-B situation. I listened to my iPod on the ride in. At first I put on Macy Gray, but finding her a little too edgy for morning music (I am not a morning person), I switched over to the melodious Norah Jones instead.

This is the second time I’ve seen this hot guy reading a book called, “The Other 90%,” and I wondered if it was about straight people. Turns out its subtitle was: How To Unlock Your Vast Untapped Potential For Leadership And Life.

Since I was working until midnight last night, I’d left both my laptop bag and my briefcase in my office overnight. As such, I was empty-handed getting off the bus, so I headed directly over to the library coffee shop where I bought a bagel, where they are $1.50 as opposed to $2.25 at the coffee shop next to my building on Hillsborough Street. I stopped for coffee at the atrium, which is right next door to the library, where the coffee is 50 cents cheaper than at the library coffee shop. But I digress…

Back at the library coffee shop where I wasn’t buying coffee but a bagel you might remember, while I was grabbing a plastic knife and a couple of napkins for my bagel, a co-ed stood next to me putting goop in her coffee, and I was appalled that instead of reaching for one of the very thin wooden stir sticks available, she took the very sturdy (unnecessarily so, in my opinion; they look expensive) plastic knives, stuck it in her coffee cup, swirled it once, and threw the knife away.

I thought, “It’s your planet, girl. You’ll have to put up with the consequences of your wastefulness here a lot longer than I will.” Obviously, she hasn’t heard—or doesn’t care—that there’s a “green” movement afoot.


At 9:15, I boarded a van with eight co-workers, all of whom I like, and we drove to Greensboro (about a 1.5-hour drive) to meet with IT professionals from UNC-G and Guilford College about outsourcing student e-mail to Google. Guilford has done it for staff and faculty e-mail as well. Here at NC State, we’re in the process of doing it only for student e-mail at this time. This trip’s purpose was twofold:

  1. To form a Google Apps for Education User Group
  2. To bounce questions off them about our implementation plans—both our technical plans and our communication plans—and to hear how they made many of the decisions they made in those areas, as well as to pick their brains for anything they encountered that we might not have thought of.

I sat next to my boss’s boss, whose last name is the same as mine, and I filled out my name “tent card” like this:

Stan North Martin
NSCU
John Martin
(← no relation)
NSCU

It was a very productive meeting. It was hosted at Guilford, and the lady who organized it, Teresa Sanford, did a phenomenal job. When we left, I said to her, “Thank you for your Martha Stewart-quality hospitality.” It was that good.

On the drive home, I sat next to Sarah—I was going to say “the other lady”—but she was the only lady on the trip, and all the way home we had great conversation—none of it about work. In spite of getting back to Raleigh at rush hour (5:15), the traffic wasn’t terribly awful on I-40 where it usually is, and running in and out of my office, I grabbed my bags and caught the Wolfline home.


I met Alex and Bill out at Flex for Trailer Park Prize Night, where another week night of excessive drinking occurred. (Notice the use of the “no-blame” passive voice as a rhetorical device in that sentence.) Love that.

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