An important voice mail message, possessive doctors, & all work and no play makes Johnny a dull boy

~Tuesday~  I caught an earlier-than-usual bus in this morning, and so did Logorrhea. What luck.

She looked an absolute wreck this morning and was not in uniform. Several of the university dining venues close for the summer, so she was probably either not working today or heading to another no-uniform-required summer job.

She was on the phone when she boarded—and bless her heart—she was trying to whisper. Those of you who know this buscapade character know that her “normal” speaking voice is off the high end of the decibel chart, so just imagine her whispering as the volume at which you and I normally speak, with a little bit of stabbing emotion to the words—and in this case imagine that emotion to be anger.

“You got a message on the phone from your lawyer that you need to hear! Just come and listen to it!”

After a second while the person on the other end said something, she yelled—so much for the “whispering,” I SAID COME OVER AND LISTEN TO IT!!! IT GOT THINGS ON IT YOU NEED TO HEAR BEFORE YOUR COURT DATE!”

And after another second or two, “NO! I’M ‘BOUT TO LEAVE NOW. JUST GET OVER HERE AND LISTEN TO IT TODAY!” Click.

A girl sitting across from me had on a work uniform that had DoctorsVisionCenter on it, and I thought about apostrophes and whether it was one doctor’s vision center, or several doctors’ vision center, or how it could be used in a non-possessive way at all. Inquiring minds want to know.

Of course, I had to Google it once I got to work, as surely (Don’t call me Shirley!) they wouldn’t omit an apostrophe on their uniforms if was part of their logo.

Logo showing no space between the three words, which are inter-capped, and no apostrophe


I started a very arduous and tedious project today that is going to consume a lot of my time until its end date on June 17. It involves coordinating the responses for a bitch of an IT industry survey that our university participates in each year.

Although I made decent progress on it today, the fact is that I should have started it weeks ago, but I just haven’t been able to prioritize it. Oh well. That’s what happens when you don’t backfill lost resources. This is a task I inherited at the retirement of my previous boss, whose position was never filled with somebody newor old, for that matter.


At about 6:15, I went out in front of my building to wait for my friend Desiree to drive by and hand off her printed copy of Bossypants that she has so graciously offered to loan to me so I won’t have to travel with that Kindle. Thanks, Desiree!

I caught the 7:00 bus home, and I ’bout fell over when I entered the bus and went right to posting this Facebook status update, because I knew everyone wanted to know:

OMFG I think the HEAT is on on this #12 outbound CAT bus. #Stifling #84DegreesOut #RiDamnDiculous

An African-American fellow got off the bus at my stop, and walking side-by-each a little ways he said, “They need some A/C on that bus. That reminds me of my kids. They’re always saying, ‘Turn on the A/C, turn on the A/C!’ When we were kids, only my mother’s room had an A/C. It was that kind that you put one in each window.”


After having some dinner, I returned to my office at about 8:30, where I worked some more on that survey and then for about two hours on a communications plan that I have to present at an 11:00 meeting tomorrow.

I left there at about 11:30.

At home I turned on the Kindle, which indicated in the bottom left-hand corner of the page that I’m 68% done. I want to know how many pages that is!

Since I had a printed copy of the book, I found the page I was on in it, which turned out to be 191. It had a total of 275 pages, which my calculator concluded was actually 69.4% done.

I’m guessing the Kindle is factoring in the couple of “Acknowledgments” pages at the end of the book that I didn’t count—since I’m not going to read them.

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