saint-louise's Diaryland Diary
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Another reason why I may be the antichrist.
Monday morning meetings are by their very nature beloved by me. Especially if they are masochistically early Monday morning meetings.
To jog my brain, I poured a cup of coffee over my head and grabbed another to slug down as quickly as possible, then joined my boss in the scheduled conference room. Eight am. Motherfucker.
I slid into a chair across the table from him. I was proud of my sense of foresight for that early in the morning. I was careful to keep a large piece of furniture between us lest I suddenly spring forward and throttle him to avenge my extra hour of sleep he brutally murdered.
“What is this meeting about?” I asked, only partially interested.
“Next year’s early release,” he chirped. “We need to make sure we keep on top of it. It’s huge. And there is a lot on the line for this one. If we don’t deliver, our competition gets ahead of us.”
All I could think was that pretty much anything could get ahead of me at that hour. Snails. Tortoises. A dog in one of those wheely chariot things for its useless back legs. Scraps of crumpled up paper. Dead things.
But my boss had continued talking, “We have four major projects going into this release. And they aren’t small either. The Big Four.”
I laid my head down on the table, hoping to catch a quick nap without him noticing. “The Four Projects of the Apocalypse.”
He perked up. “Hey, yeah! That’s pretty funny. We should change the release code name. It could be Apocalypse.”
I chuckled, leaving my head down on the table. But there was no responding laugh from my boss to indicate he was kidding. I snapped my head up.
“What? You’re serious?”
“Sure,” he said cheerfully.
I blinked several times to see if his tail and horns would disappear. “But…but we’d have to fix the build process to accept a new name, and edit the change control system…”
“Okay. You can do all that.”
“I don’t want to do all that.”
My boss leaned toward me, looking Very Earnest. I wished he wouldn’t get quite so close. I was thinking of that one scene in “Silence of the Lambs.” Yeah, that scene. Well, actually, any of them. And me without my mask.
“We could use some humor around here,” my boss was saying. “It will help the mood, the morale.”
“The Apocalypse will help the morale?”
“Yeah. You know. Like self-deprecating humor. You like that sort of thing. It’s funny.”
I rested my chin on my hand, never taking my eyes from him. “Let me get this straight. At this point, in this level of stress, under the boulder-sized burden of importance you have just explained to me. NOW my humor is funny?”
He did the squish-down-forehead thing at me in an attempt to distract me (I never can figure out how the hell he makes that many folds of skin suddenly appear on his brow), but I was not to be deterred.
“So,” I said. “You rejected my ideas to code name the releases after condom brands, serial killers, lethal viruses…hell, even the martyrs tortured by the removal of body parts was a no-go. And now you want to name our most important release in five years after the end of the world. Am I getting this right?”
He nodded. “But Louise, you’re not seeing my point-”
“Death and destruction.”
“Yes, but-”
“Exploding. Burning. Complete melt-down. Miserable failure. Possibly a goodly amount of bloody dismemberment.”
“Uh. Yes.”
“But this is funny?”
My boss frowned at me. “Louise, be serious. We were not going to really code name our releases after condoms.”
“And I am not going to release the Apocalypse.”
At this point, our early Monday morning meeting had gone on for 15 minutes, and all we had done was discuss a whole mass of lunacy. The coffee was drying in my hair. I stood up. “Right. Okay. You take this code naming thing to heart, and I’ll be busy at my desk making sure the programming for Pestilence, War, Famine and Death is moving along nicely.”
When lunchtime rolled around, I had the strangest urge for deviled eggs.
10:29 a.m. - 2002-10-15
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