Super Bowl Sunday taught me an important lesson: if it ain't broke, don't fix it. usually, i spend a quiet evening in with the wifey and watch the game and have some tasty eats. this year i attended a Super Bowl Fellowship at my church. the Men's Ministry hosts it every year; last night marked their sixth time doing it, i think. very successful - lots of brothers came through. fed some kids from two group homes. a few even gave their lives to Christ. while i was definitely doing the right thing, i can't say that i totally enjoyed myself. too many people, too loud, too much. i live a relatively quiet existence. plus i had some memos on my mind that i had to deliver to one of the ministers (i agreed to be their secretary - why the HELL did i do that?), so i was thinking about that the whole time and ended up working on one of them while i was there. no good deed goes unpunished: i should know this by now. all i'll say is this...after last night, i was actually looking forward to monday morning.

enter Mitsubishi Imaging - my new location to bring home the bacon from. still customer service, still surrounded by purchase orders and phones ringing, but a much shorter commute in the other direction and i get to ride the Metro-North train. doesn't even take me 20 minutes to get to work and the gym's along the train route as well. the learning curve is a beast, but i gotta take it one day at a time and act like i know this isn't supposed to be mastered overnight. everybody's been quite helpful in showing me the ropes and all that. this one cat that's been training me's pretty cool, laid back cat. it's weird, though: he kinda looks like Darshan from Metro Area. i keep wanting to say to him, you shouldn't be here. shouldn't you and Morgan be rocking some party in Europe somewhere? and when's the next single coming out?

for the most part, i work with some good people. they have their perverted moments, but it's not like GOD isn't still in the process of fire bombing the porn shops that still occupy the far corners of my mind, so i really shouldn't talk about other people's shortcomings. but i do have to wonder about the natural tendency of co-workers to gossip. somehow or another, part of my training has involved learning tidbits about various team members - stuff that obviously isn't necessary to know, stuff that i never asked to learn, stuff that i know won't be on the test, but i know it anyway. this one is irresponsible with paperwork. this one freaks out when people are out of the office because they know they'll have more work to do. this one silently passes gas at their desk. after a while, i just didn't want to know any more secrets.

my next door neighbor in the office is a lovely woman. perky, talks fast (and loud), kinda reminds me of someone i knew in college. her voice is sort of a cross between Fran Drescher and the sound of a cheese grater across your face, but i mean that in the best way possible. between her CD collection and her internet radio habits, i'm held captive to selections from Heart, Def Leppard, Mariah Carey, Bryan Adams...mostly lite-fm '80s style, with the occasional shake-up of new Gwen Stefani or other stuff (when she plays Sade, it's all good, though). and me with no WFMU - it's like dying a slow death. at the moment, i have a small cassette player with a speaker on the back acting as a mini boombox to give me relief. it does the job. but as soon as i get a pair of speakers to hook up to my computer, it's ON.

so yeah, the team's chock full of good eggs, but it didn't take long for me to notice the scabs that cover the scars. one minute two members are talking, the next moment one of them's talking about the other that just left the room. it happens so often that it's hard not to wonder when your number's gonna come up. it's only a matter of time before i'm the subject of somebody's bitch session. big whoop - i care not for the trivial. but the trivial seems to be a regularly served side dish around here. knowing this, it's best for me to crank the music a little louder, dive deeper into my work, and remember that as a child of GOD, i ultimately work for Him and not for man. keeping that in perspective becomes challenging at times, of course...

p.s. one of our members walked away with a slight cough. another jumped up, huffing and puffing about not wanting to catch stomach flu, then borrowed another's can of Lysol and began spraying everything that wasn't nailed down. in hindsight, it would have been the perfect time to ask her if she ordered a hyperbaric chamber for the office (like the kind Michael Jackson sleeps in). i've worked at three different office locations - one in Greenwich, CT, one in NYC, and now Harrison, NY - and it's always the same: show any common cold symptoms and you're liable to get treated like a war criminal by your co-workers. ah, smell that team spirit...