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Yesterday I had lunch with Amanda and Cathryn for work. I just didn't mention it in yesterday's post because Amanda asked to push the 12:00 lunch to 12:30, which was fine, but that also allowed me to share yesterday's post before 12:30 rather than waiting until, like, 1:45 to post it. I figure I could just mention it today, and here we are!
At Gabby's suggestion, the three of us are working on an "eLearning" script to use for sharing with anyone new who needs access to HQ, the item maintenance system we use, for looking up item information (prices, costs, promotion adjustments, etc). It's been a long process and has now involved either three or four meetings, I'm losing track of how many. In the first couple of meetings, Amanda and Cathryn and I found ourselves having a great time, laughing a lot, even as (sometimes especially as) we talked shop. We identified ourselves as the three "Power Users" currently at PCC—fifteen years ago, that would have been Kibby, Jared, and myself. Amanda is now in Kibby's role and Cathryn is in Jared's; I've just never been replaced, and as I've noted many times already, I have now used HQ longer than anyone else at PCC by a fairly wide margin (since 2004). Anyway, the idea got brought up early on, like two months ago, for the three of us to have a "Power User Lunch."
Scheduling was a challenge, even more so now that we have already pivoted to diverging days of the week for in-office work, to mirror what we expect after the office move in late August. Last month we were supposed to do it on a Wednesday but Amanda had a last-minute meeting get scheduled and she had to bail; Cathryn and I went to lunch anyway. I sent out another invite, this time for June 12—the day after I got back from PTO for my trip to Washington, D.C.—and this time it finally worked.
Amanda was still busy at 12:30 and said she'd catch up with us, so Cathryn and I went ahead at 12:30. Amanda got to us maybe ten minutes later. We went to Moto Pizza, currently the best place around this office, and which will be missed after we move. There's a lot more options around 4th and Union, though.
Anyway, it was a lovely lunch, as can be expected. A lot of it was spent with both Cathry and Amanda (in that order) detailing all of the steps that ultimately led them to their jobs here. I didn't have as much need to share that story, both because it was far less complicated and because, as of this coming August anyway, for me it was 23 years ago—far longer ago than either of them. That's not to discount the many years they have both worked here either; I think they've both worked for PCC either slightly more or slightly less than about a decade. In both cases though, they had several years working at a store first. I never did that, thank Christ.
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So then, late yesterday afternoon, I left work early at about 4:08, to meet Laney for the 4:30 screening of the new Wes Anderson film,
The Phoenician Scheme, which was . . . all right. I was leaning toward B-minus but went with solid B as I was giving the grades to separate elements of the film. There's no question, though, that I liked his last film,
Asteroid City, a lot better.
It was right at about 4:30 when we met at the theater. I rode my bike there, but I walked with her up to Broadway with my bike afterward, which gave us about 20 minutes to chat and catch up a bit. Not a huge amount of time, but that's okay. We're repeating the same process with a movie at exactly the same time again tonight, so that'll give us more time too.
I thus got home at probably sometime between 7:30 and 8:00. By the time I was posting the review to my socials it was about 9:00. I spent some time after that updating the draft of the next Social Review, and the links I use in the list of my social activities—I hadn't even updated it since before the weekend trip to Fox Island. Sheesh! I've got a lot of catching up to do there. At least it's now updated
through Fox Island. Now I just need to update it with all the shit I did with Shobhit in Washington, D.C. Hopefully I can find time for that over the weekend.
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[posted 12:35pm]
