It was a bright and windy day in Olde Towne Gaithersburg, MD. A little chilly, but not too bad. I had been closing the blinds at my desk window for the past month or so because at this time of year the sun seems to want to make a grand appearance in my eyes around 10:00 AM while I’m drafting mechanical piping on my hi-def monitor. I was waiting to be called up to a conference call about a project that I didn’t want to attend in the first place for fear of spending two thirds of my day on a phone call with someone who doesn’t really know how my equipment works telling me where I should move it to.
11:45 AM I still had not been summoned to the electric chair in the conference room. So I figured that I was either going to be called in during the afternoon or they were going to break for lunch and start up later. I wasn’t hungry yet, so I figured I’d hang around and keep drafting and pick up the unanswered phone calls during the time our receptionist goes to lunch. Around 12:15, I noticed that the little black light next to the phone line of death had gone out so everyone must have gone to lunch to revive themselves from the 2 ½ hour eulogy that began around 9:45 AM.
So I kept drafting. Then like a flash of lightening, an massive hunger sensation rushed through my body, topped off with an furious growl of the stomach. So I gathered myself at about 12:50 PM to walk across the street to the lunch stop, affectionately called The Train Station, for a turkey sandwich garnished with crisp lettuce and tomato and two slices of bacon and a bottle of Nantucket Nectars Cranberry Juice to wash it all down. I make my way back up to my cubicle, a white-walled ecosystem plastered with Dilbert cartoon strips and complete with desktops covered in unused plans from someone else’s desk where they weren’t necessary, I prepare myself for my late afternoon feast. A quick rush to the kitchenette sink for a hand washing and I’m ready to dive right into my cold-cut fowl paradise.
At 1:05 PM, I take the first bite of my sandwich masterpiece, the perturbing sound of my desk phone overshadowed the sound of 106.7 FM, the local sports radio station, blaring through my headphones. I nervously reach my hand over to the receiver to find out who would have recklessly interrupted my mid-day nourishment, and I find out that it is the same architect who had already eulogized two other people about the locations of the electrical equipment on the drawings for 150 minutes this morning. Of course, NOW he wants to talk about my mechanical equipment. F*#K!
To my surprise, he was informed that I alone was going to be around at this time to field questions about a project that I have not fully seen or worked on in nearly a calendar year, because my comrade had another appointment at 1:00 PM. Since we all had been expecting to talk about these issues earlier, I felt it was my duty as the only other Mechanical Engineer in the office working on this job to defend our work, even if I had to apprehensively tell the architect, “I don’t know, I’ll get back to you.”
This was easily the most enduring 45 minutes of my life as my chilled poultry perfection seductively stared in my face while this degreed space planner is trying to tell me where to move my piping risers and how I should change the size of the ductwork supplying cooling units in the rooms that his co-worker designed. Every five minutes felt like an era had passed as I watched my lunch morph into a room temperature dish. I felt style trends changing and paint peeling off the walls as the dark brown hairs in my head were being replaced by long, silvery strands. My mind was torn between three different thoughts at this moment: 1. Remembering information from the project I didn’t felt like talking about; 2. Why I couldn’t have been notified about this phone call earlier so I would have eaten at 12 and 3. I’m REALLY hungry looking at this food!
Finally, at 1:55 PM, I hear the heartwarming words on the other end of the phone I had been waiting to hear since 1:10: “I THINK THAT’S IT!” A feeling of relief came over me and large exhale of comfort was released from my lungs. The dark raincloud that had been covering Olde Towne for nearly an hour had broken up and the sunlight began to pour back through my venetian blinds as I celebrated victory over my unexpected phone call and relief from the anger of not being notified of it. A small group of skater kids from Gaithersburg High School began rejoicing on the corner across the street from my window and birds soared across the blue sky in unison. I let out a cry of “THANK YOU GOD!” as I transferred the call to my co-worker to talk about lavatories and water closets and proceeded to triumphantly finish my turkey sandwich and cranberry juice.
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