Warm weather is not conducive to blogging, turns out

But here's my feeble attempt.

Over the weekend we had a little reunion of people who were in certain editing trenches together at the Lord's University back in the day. It was fun to see people I'd lost touch with and it made me reminisce about the good ol' days and the things that made our office great and also insane.

Treat Days on Friday. We took Treat Days to new heights. Fondue Day and Soup Day were my favorites. Everyone else got to smell our food and suffer. We even created a cookbook in Adobe FrameMaker, which I own to this day.

Promotional Fridays, wherein we were blessed to wear awful, hideous shirts every Friday but no jeans. Year 1 (in what was clearly a post-9/11 move) was a long-sleeved navy blue polo top with American flag patches on the sleeves. Year 2: The Safari Shirt. I spent every Friday for a year looking like I was about to vomit. Oatmeal is just not my color. Year 3: The light denim button-up--they finally asked for estrogen input. These tops were all so massive that there was no way to wear them without looking a) pregnant, or b) like you just raided a fat man's closet.

Office Cleanliness Raids. Every now and then The Power That Was took it into his head to mandate an office clean-up which usually involved removing absolutely everything from our desks, including the various tools we used to perform our jobs. We usually played along, with the exception of my Last Act of Defiance before leaving for England.

The Chicago Manual of Style. Oh, how I miss that lovely thing.

That One Time I Was Told to Send Cicada Home to Change. Apparently her skirt was too short. Because she's trashy like that. Arguing with the Power that Was was getting me nowhere, so I told her not to clock out. And to walk slowly.

Working with Word Nerds. Because we are the best.

The Sock Rule. Women and men absolutely could not wear shoes without socks or nylons of some kind--it was part of the office dress code. Which led to me wearing things like striped toe-socks with open-toed sandals. While conducting job interviews. I imagine this may have kept people from taking me seriously, but I was more interested in proving my point, which was that the Socks Do Not Necessarily = Professional. (Note: I do hold my efforts at least partially responsible for the repeal of said rule. You are welcome.)

Making BFFs like Daltongirl, Cicada, Sakhmet, Jonboy, and many, many others.

Getting picked to be in promotional materials. Except for when they stopped picking me because they had enough blond-haired whiteys. If you happened to be a black student employee you were pretty much chum in the water, though.

That one time the girls convinced Jon Boy to grow out his hair, and it turned out that he was a curly-haired stone fox.

BYU Creamery runs. Nothing like getting an ice cream cone every single day in the summer if you want one. Also jalapeno poppers, which are the nectar of the gods.

Delivering calendars. Every year our department produced a calendar that was delivered to every office on campus. We few, we happy few, got to spend a day or two delivering them. Which was kind of fun because it wasn't actual work. Except one time when the then-BYU football coach Gary Crowton thought I was following him. Which, hi, like I'd follow any football coach around, much less one who was about to get the sack. And then the other time when some old person who clearly had clout complained about how a woman on the calendar was wearing open-toed shoes and that he found her toe-cleavage offensive. So they Photoshopped over her feet and then reprinted all the calendars and made us redeliver them--this time without the toe porn. And we weren't supposed to tell anyone the real reason behind the change. Woops!

Wacky things aside, I probably had the best campus job ever, and it's because I worked with the best group of people.

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