Today was kind of a weird day at work.
For starters, I was in the office for ten hours. Went in early and worked through my lunch. Tara and I are headed to Sheridan, Wyoming on Friday; it’s a three-hour drive and we’d like to get an early start, so I’m banking time in lieu of using valuable PTO. I almost never work more than eight hours, so doing that two days this week (so far) kinda makes it feel like the longest week ever.
Then, I got hung up on by a woman I was trying to deliver good news to. Every year, my company honors five local nurses in the community who have been nominated for their outstanding achievements. It’s a fun event that includes an awards banquet and heartfelt speeches (at least in normal, i.e., non-COVID years). Most people are thrilled to be nominated, but when I called the first person on my list, all I got out of my mouth was “Hi Nurse, this is Mark with Black Hills Parent magazine…” before the line went dead. She apparently thought I was trying to sell her something! I waited five minutes before calling her back, and when she answered, I turned into the World’s Fastest Talker. This time, I was able to spit out that a patient had nominated her for this prestigious award and we wanted to honor her. I could tell she was annoyed when she answered the second time, could in fact practically sense her finger hovering over the button that would end the call, but her tone softened immediately when she learned I was not, in fact, a telemarketer trying to sell her a magazine, but rather, a Bearer of Glad Tidings. Suddenly, she was super gracious. I even pretended it was the fault of Ma Bell and chuckled about how “we accidentally got disconnected” even though I know damn well that was not the case.
But: lesson learned. On my follow-up calls, I skipped the whole Black Hills Parent preamble and led right off with “So-and-so nominated you for an award, congratulations, you’re awesome!” instead. This made all the difference in the world.
That was the fun part of the day.
Later that afternoon, our Digital Director came over to my desk and asked me to open up a new tab and do a Google search. He wanted me to look up “Deep Float Rapid City,” but I thought he said “Deep Throat Rapid City.”
Holy hell.
10/10 I do not recommend that, unless you’re comfortable pulling up a list of porn sites while a coworker, one who is pretty much your de facto IT guy, is standing over your shoulder.
Honestly, what was I thinking?! I didn’t even question it for a second. Just assumed we had landed an oral surgeon as a client, I guess.
Gotta admit though, my first thought was, This is going to make for a great blog post!
Annnd, here I am. Hi, guys! {Waves to the internet}.
After work, I walked down to kōl to meet up with Tara for dinner. They’re one of our favorite restaurants, and we just learned yesterday that they are closing for good at the end of this week…thanks to COVID, no doubt.
Major bummer, and to make matters worse, we had a $100 gift card* to the restaurant from my parents. We figured we’d better use it up, and because it was so much, I told Tara we should really splurge. “Let’s go all out!” I said excitedly. “Cocktails, apps, dinner. We’ll even order dessert!” The bill came out to $108. This was almost perfect! I gave our server the gift card and my debit card, instructed him to use the $100 on the gift card and put the remaining $8 on the debit card. Great plan, right?
Imagine my surprise when he came back a moment later and informed me there was $22 on the gift card, leaving us with an $86 balance.
Oops.
We had both forgotten we’d gone to kōl months earlier for a very nice dinner.
In our defense, this was pre-pandemic. The world was a lot different then. I barely remember the last time we went out to eat.
Quite the day I had, wasn’t it?
Mark My Words 
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