Update No. 1: Week 2

RALEIGH, N.C. -- I just spent probably two full minutes trying to put a title up there. That's a good sign that you should just hit the tab key and start writing. So I will.

It's been two weeks of bullshit and bliss, two weeks of heart-warming and heart-pounding. Two weeks of wonder and two weeks of fear.

Each week was highly emotionally charged, for completely different reasons. At some point soon, I'll write about each.

I'm going to write about them in reverse, and separately.

The thing which I kind of glossed over earlier for Week 2 was this:

My father was diagnosed with colon cancer. He had surgery Aug. 2.

Right now, all is as well as it can be. The upsides are that he's relatively young (57) and it was found relatively earlier. The downside is that he's profoundly disabled as a result of a 1987 car accident, and that adds a serious level of complication to, well, everything. Oddly, even that has an upside; because of his disability, they were able to remove more of the parts that might be cancerous because they didn't have to worry about his future mobility; to put it simply, they could safely remove more of him and leave more of him disassembled 'cause he wasn't using it anyway. Or something like that.

We await results of testing to determine whether the cancer had spread to his lymph nodes. Those results were supposed to be available Monday. We're still waiting.

The rest of the family is waiting back in Anytown; The Wife and our kids wait in Florida, and I wait in North Carolina this week and Iowa next week.

The Wife, the Mini-Humans and I arrived home from Colorado in the single-digit hours of July 31. In the single-digit hours of Aug. 1, we had deposited the kids with a friend and were on another plane to Missouri. I've driven nearly 2,000 miles in the last 20 days, none of which were in my car.

I don't know how everything is going to turn out, but I have no reason to believe it'll be anything other than OK. We're survivors; my dad and his brothers have cheated death in some highly creative and stunning ways, and my dad's parents lived way longer than any actuarial tables would have expected them to. So we wait, and try to keep the worry to a minimum as things move on.

But I can tell you this: I've never wanted to go home more than I do right at this very second. Never.

I'll go back and write that head now, and do Week 1 later. Something tells me I should be sleeping now.

Pollo sin cabeza

What request of yours have I not fulfilled today?

Ugh.

Drip, drip, drip

The kids are home from school today, but instead of doing fun things, they'll be waiting while Mama tries to convince the insurance adjuster that our dirty laundry was on that closet floor and therefore needs to be part of the settlement.

This is the fallout from Thursday's toilet catastrophe. Apparently, after a routine flush, the toilet never got the signal that it was full. The water dutifully kept running, and by the time it was discovered — at a point in another room, 15 feet and three walls away from the actual toilet itself — nearly $10,000 in damage had been done.

Where there was Pergo and carpet, there is now bare concrete. Where there was peace and quiet, now there are fans, roaring. I like sleeping with the sound of a fan, but this one is a little extreme.

But where there is disaster, there is The Wife, who kept her head even as she sloshed her way through our bedroom. After it was determined that towels weren't going to cut it, the first phone call went to a friend knowledgeable about house stuff. He said her next call needed to be to the insurance company. Barely an hour after the initial discovery, the fans and dehumidifers were roaring. This prevented even more damage and more disruption. I shudder to think
of what would have happened if it had been me left in charge while she was somewhere off working.

And because she's smart like that, where there could have been a seriously bad weekend, there was instead Easter, and a great time. We took the kids fishing yesterday. Didn't catch a thing, but it was worth the time anyway. And Saturday, we were distracted by the news from a distant dog show, where Champion Dog 2 won big ribbons for being the best in her breed and one of the top 10 of nearly 650 entries overall.

And in a couple of hours, the fans will be gone, and we'll be able to hear the usual chaos again.

Stop

And read this. Now. Seriously. It's worth your time; just like so many other things that you think you don't have time for.

High and dry

CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas -- I'm looking out my hotel window at Corpus Christi Bay. If I had a really powerful telescope, I could look straight across the Gulf of Mexico, through St. Petersburg, Fla., and across Tampa Bay to my house, where apparently a toilet exploded, leaving several inches of water on the floor in the bathroom, bedroom and adjoining areas, and possibly enough water under the floor to necessitate replacing it. All of it.

Meanwhile, The Wife has houseguests of both the human and canine variety. In short, we could not have picked a worse day to schedule a plumbing disaster.

Just another day in the life of a guy who makes rich guys richer

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa -- Here we go again, go, go, go, go, Iowa, Illinois, North Carolina, Illinois, Iowa, go, go go, the kid in 2C has been screaming since takeoff (actually he’s been screaming since we were at the gate), turn up the iPod, let Patrice Pike scream at me instead, at least she has some sense of tone, go, go, go, “I presume you’ll send the updates on this document tonight,” yeah, I’ll do that, after I land at 10 p.m. after I’ve been working since 7 a.m., go, go, go, THEM: got time for a question? ME: no THEM: just a quick question? :) , ME: k, what’s your question? THEM: can we do blah blah blah blah blah? ME: no, we can’t make the system do that, THEM: why not? Shouldn’t it work that way? :-( go, go, go, can I get a decision on this document I gave you Tuesday?, go, go, “no, we’ll have to put that in front of the committee,” go, go, go, Wendy’s for lunch, McDonald’s for dinner, I can sleep after I’ve made some more money for these other people, go, go, go, what a team player you are, what a professional, “the most professional person I’ve ever worked with”, go, go, go, gotta go, answer the phone, “got a question,” it’s a two-parter, a three-parter, let’s go back to the first thing you said, I can explain that part, “why does it work that way?” I don’t know, I’ll never know, it wasn’t my decision, I don’t defend the functionality, I just describe it, go, go, go, go, go, it can always be worse, at least you have a job, at least that’s not your kid screaming in 2C, it could be so much worse, go, go, go, let’s get going, but wait, there are storms, somewhere, we’re not going to go just yet, can’t go, it’s not safe, ok, now let’s go, on to the next thing, no time to do this thing right, it's about 90 percent there, "well, that's enough, let’s just go on to the next thing, we can go back to the other thing later," go, go, go, go, I gotta get back to the other thing, but I can’t remember what it was, go, go, go, phone’s ringing again, can’t get it now, hit the Ignore button, if it was important they’ll leave a message, gotta send a message, go, go, go, hey, you know, I don’t think I can do this anymore, “yeah, me neither, things are tough all over, did you update those spreadsheets I asked you to update?” go, go, no time to listen or evaluate or try to come up with a way to go more efficiently ‘cause we gotta for christ’s sweet sake go, where are we going? hell if I know, I just know we gotta go, 'cause that’s what we do, we go, next place, “ding” you have new mail “ding” THEM: I think we found a bug ME: what kind of bug? THEM: it does this when it’s supposed to do that ME: let me check on that for you THEM: I’ll be waiting :-) ME: k, I’ll get right back to you after I “ding” come see me when you have a second “rrrrrrrrrrrrrrring” I need some help right now, THEM: you there? ME: no, go, go, go, keep going, goddammit, because if you stop, you’ll be forced to think about how ridiculous it all is.

Ribbit

When you live in Florida, you accept that you're going to find critters occasionally in places you don't expect to find them. We've had plenty of untimely sightings of the 2-inch cockroaches euphemistically known as "palmetto bugs"; we've had a lizard or two pop up in the house; and not too long ago, we had a snake in our son's bedroom. (The Boy thought it was pretty cool.)

But I certainly did not expect to be awakened from a my-flight-landed-at-12:40 a.m. fog at 7 this morning by the Old Daughter screeching, "There's a frog in my toilet!"

Thank God she tends to look down before she sits down. (That's great advice for anybody to follow, by the way.) Try to imagine, if you will, the feeling of little amphibious toes tickling your butt. Yeah. That's an image you didn't need. You can thank me later, when that pops back into your head as you get ready for some relaxing commode time this evening.

Anyway: Because "that's why I got married," said The Wife, I had to go in and deal with the frog in the toilet. After verifying that he was still there, I did what any manly dad would do: I closed the lid on the toilet and flushed.

No such luck. That's one smart frog: He was clinging to the edge of the bowl. I prodded him gently with the toilet brush, and the sumbitch jumped nearly 6 feet from the rim of the toilet to the top of the mirror over the vanity. Pretty impressive, I thought. I opened the door to the outside and prodded him a few more times. Jump, jump, and he was outside, none the worse for wear.

That's a happy ending for all involved. So imagine my surprise when, in the midst of work that I shouldn't have had to be doing at 9:30 p.m., the Old Daughter screeches, "There's a frog in my bathroom!"

Holy shit. I have Instant Replay on my day! And today's the worst damn day for Instant Replay. I would pick about 1,000 other days I'd rather go back and relive.

So, I grab the broom, and once again help Kermit hop to his semi-natural habitat.

Now, all this begs the question: How did a frog find its way into our house? Is he coming up through the toilet? (The palmetto bugs occasionally make their way up through the drain.) The door to outside wasn't left open. There are no windows. There are no openings in the ceiling. And when I asked him as he was hop-hopping outside, the little bugger didn't even have the courtesy to say, "Ribbit."

Pretty rude, I think. Next time, he just might get flushed.

What five years can do

Five years ago, I was one of the top news editors for the eighth largest newspaper in the United States. I was 33, and had been a professional journalist for more than a decade and a half. I had assembled sections for some of the biggest stories ever -- the first World Trade Center attack, the Branch Davidian siege, numerous World Series and Stanley Cups on impossible deadlines.

All ego aside, in whatever newsroom I was working, when something big broke, I was the go-to guy on the production side. I don't know much, but I will put my newspaper production and design and decision-making skills up against anyone anywhere in the world. I know how to put out a daily newspaper.

At 9:34 a.m. CDT on Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001, I was summoned to work early to put out the most important edition ever of the nation's eighth largest newspaper. I covered the 34.8 miles to work in 32 minutes, hitting my car's electronically governed 112 mph limit on the way.

As I pulled up to the building, with the newspaper's big Gothic nameplate on the side, it started to hit me. I pulled my car -- somewhat more slowly -- into a parking spot, near the news helicopter pad for our TV station. I got out. I closed the door. I began walking to the employee entrance, just like any other day.

Then I stopped.

A thought kept ringing in my head:

I don't know how to do this.

I stood there, on the top floor of that parking garage, for probably three minutes. Just stood there, the staircase down to the door in front of me, the car behind me. To my right was the skyline of the eighth largest city in the nation. A city that, for all I knew could have been the next target, being as it is a symbol of American consumption and oil power.

There I was, the Go-To Guy, just standing there. I don't know how to do this.

I took probably 100 deep, deep breaths. Somewhere around breath No. 45, I thought about going back to the car, back home to my family, and pretending it never happened. That thought went away before breath No. 46 came out. But I still stood there for another minute and a half. I don't know how to do this.

It was 10:01 a.m. My deadline for the extra edition we were publishing was 2 p.m. A quick review of a post from 2002 tells the story something like this:

I got out of the car and stood in the parking lot for a second, trying to get my pulse rate back down to normal. It hit me then that this was the Biggest Story Ever. I don't know how to do this, I thought. I don't have any idea. It was as if my brain had been wiped clean of everything I had learned over the past 16 years.

As soon as I was in the building, I was herded to a computer terminal and told I was designing the cover of our Extra edition. Deadline was 2 p.m. God only knew what more would happen between now and then. I didn't worry about it. I started designing, and fast, because everybody on the newspaper's masthead -- the publisher himself, the editor, the executive editor, the managing editor, and assorted others -- was standing behind me.

I hit the button on that page at 1:58, and turned my attention to the regular paper. The final page count was 48. I don't remember a lot of specifics from that exercise. We were just hunting and gathering and trying to determine what was true and what wasn't.

Back then I wrote, "I stood there for a second." I remember now it was much longer than that. Over and over in my head, I don't know how to do this.

I was responsible for the front page, back page and two inside pages of that Extra edition. I did the other pages fast enough to be able to spend time on the details of the cover. I remember fussing for several minutes over the spacing between the words "of" and "terror" in our main headline, "Day of terror." I switched the main photo five times, as a different photo editor brought me a new and better photo for the front page.

The front page I did that morning -- with the entire masthead of the nation's eighth largest paper standing behind me, watching every mouse click -- is now hanging in the Freedom Forum's Newseum. Everything on the page was spelled right. The words "of" and "terror" were properly spaced.

The main story was being written and revised right up to the point when I hit the button to send the page. It went out two minutes before deadline.

It was, in short, the culmination of everything I had learned and everything I had done in 16 years in journalism. I was handed a monumental task, and I delivered at a level that I never had before and never did again.

I worked more than 14 hours each of those first three days; then, one night, I broke down. Cried like a baby. I was able to ignore the full impact of what happened to our country, to a bunch of people whose only crime was not calling in sick on a beautiful Tuesday morning. But I could only ignore it for so long.

Dick Cheney tells us that the administration policies are working, and proof of that is that we haven't been attacked in five years. Excuse me, Dick, but we also weren't attacked in the 60 years before Sept. 11, 2001. Dumbass. The administration has accomplished nothing, and in many ways has made things worse. We've created chaos in a little country that had nothing to do with the attacks. We're stirring up shit in another. Meanwhile, the man with the money behind what happened is still out there, somewhere, with full ability to do it again if he wants to.

As for me? That was probably the beginning of the end of my journalism career. I damn sure never want to be part of another story that big, or that awful. The stories in the years afterward -- Afghanistan, Iraq, the threat from North Korea, day after day after day of human suffering and awfulness -- I just didn't want to know anymore. I still do know, of course, but on my own terms.

I'm not the go-to guy anymore. Journalism is a young man's game. I aged a lot those last few months of 2001. I just hope the young people who are taking it over learn to ask the right questions and don't accept everything that's being handed to them. It's more important that they know how to do it now than it was for me to know how to do it then.

Just sit down and write

My life doesn't really allow much time for calm reflection. As I write this, I'm in an almost-empty house. It's basically pretty quiet, except for the two 5-year-old girls screaming at each other at the top of their lungs. Well, actually, it's just the Young Daughter who's screaming. She does that a lot. That's how she earned the nickname Diva of Decibels. The other little girl, YD's best friend, generally gets her points across more quietly.

The rest of the group is out at a local water park. YD and I aren't much into water parks, so we stayed home.

I'm on "vacation" this week. It's my first extended time off since last year's family trip to Washington, D.C. It comes at the end of a(nother) marathon travel stretch, the kind of travel I thought I was going to be able to avoid after having been promoted. The deal was that, rather than project trips lasting 5-8 days, I'd be doing support-type stuff and management schmoozes lasting a day or two each. That's basically true. However, I just did five of them in the last three weeks.

My 20-year high school reunion will be held this weekend in Anytown. I won't be there. A small part of me wishes I was going; I'd love to renew some of those connections and hear what these people are up to. But that small part has been drowned out by the larger part, the part that doesn't want to see the interior of another aircraft for a good long time. I'm tired of talking to my wife and kids on the phone.

I'm still taking the week off. There's a garage to clean, walls to paint, kids to watch. It's nice to prioritize those sorts of things above work, for a little while.

I've been thinking a lot about writing. I've been thinking I just need to sit down and tap keys for a while, just to see what comes out. I've certainly had some interesting experiences the last few weeks, the kind that in years recently past I would have chronicled almost immediately.

In fact, I just spent the last 20 minutes chronicling one of them before giving it the Click-Drag-Delete treatment. After writing it all down, I decided it just wasn't that interesting.

Not all that long ago, I had a voice in this forum. I can go through the archives and see that time was when I could sit down and construct a series of coherent sentences. I've learned many things in the last two years: How to install and manipulate a database, how to manage an enterprise-wide software installation project, how to get a flight on another airline when my originally scheduled flight is hopelessly delayed, how to read and speak rudimentary Danish and French.

Somewhere along the way, however, I seem to have forgotten how to appreciate the things going on around me. That's a skill I need to regain.

Data transfer interrupted

I am reachable, by one medium or another, pretty much 24 hours a day, every day. The only time that I am completely out of pocket is during the one or two hours that I am on an airplane going somewhere.

Being constantly available, of course, does not mean that I am providing better service. It just means that I can half-ass more stuff. It means that I can be in a meeting while driving a rental car from a customer site to an airport. It means that, while a customer is paying some absurd sum for me to be on site, I can simultaneously be helping two other customers who are not paying for the privilege.

This is a true story, and yeah, it's a little gross, but it's an illustration of what American business has become: Yesterday, I was on the phone with a customer and answering an e-mail ... in the bathroom. Hey, when you gotta go, you gotta go.

And don't think that I don't know where to find the "Ignore" button on my phone. There are plenty of unanswered items in my Inbox. At some point, I do have to sleep. At some point, I'm with my family, and that means With My Family. At some point, the sign has to turn around to "Closed." But every one of those Ignored calls and unanswered e-mails is still a tiny little failure.

One thing that makes my job extremely complicated is that the European co-workers on whom I depend heavily have a minimum of five weeks of vacation. Over there, it's acceptable to basically accomplish nothing in June, July and August. Over here, it's not acceptable to be unavailable while you're in the john.

I'm not complaining. I have a family which is very well-provided for. My roof covers a large number of square feet. The bills are paid and times are largely good.

But I know in some way, I'm paying for all this prosperity. And I also know I'm not the only one. This is the way We live. I just wonder what the end result really is.

As the fog descends ...

What would be fun, really, is to sit here and write while I'm at the complete edge of exhaustion, just to see what would happen. I've been in constant motion since last Wednesday: fly, drive 2 hours, meeting, drive 2 hours, fly ... one-day weekend lull ... fly, drive an hour and a half, meeting, drive an hour and a half, fly, get another rental car, hey! why is there a traffic jam in downtown Boston at 11:30 at night? lost in Boston, find freeway, drive an hour and a half, meeting, and eeew, that was why there was a traffic jam in downtown Boston.

So I'm in New Hampshire right now, with another day of meeting, fly, drive in front of me. And yeah, with the downtown Boston tunnels closed, it's going to be a bitch getting into Logan. Tomorrow's flight goes to North Carolina, where thankfully the meeting will be held in the same city in which we're landing. Then, fly and drive home Friday night. Weekend lull, then off to Southern California next week. Fly, drive an hour, two days of meetings, drive an hour, fly.

Then, a week of vacation. No plans, just vacation. The plan does not include moving eight miles a minute, as Seger once sang.

So writing all that was a long way of saying no, I'm not going to go to the reunion. That would be another three days of flying and driving, and I'm just not up for it. I can come up with more reasons to not go than reasons to go.

The fog is coming faster, the eyelids are getting heavy, the thoughts are coming both fast and slow at the same time. It's like the gears are turning without any actual power, the perpetual-motion brain that is spinning 7,600 rpm on the way to nowhere. I'm pretty sure I've forgotten why I'm in New Hampshire, and why I'm going to North Carolina. I'm just here, typing, not even in full control of the text I'm currently entering. I wonder how much longer I can do this.

On the clock

I have 20 hours to complete two PowerPoint presentations for an upcoming conference. During that 20 hours, I must also have dinner, sleep, have breakfast and get children ready for school, and I'll lose one more hour to commuting.

How do you like my chances?

Another day, another airplane

Sitting in coach Sunday afternoon, on an airline where I don't carry Gold status. It's much more entertaining to people-watch in coach. In first, you see several variations of the same person, either the old white guy in a suit or the overdressed 50-ish woman self-consciously knocking back a bloody mary before takeoff.

From Seat 7D, I quietly look around from under the earbuds, only seeing, not hearing. It's much easier to make up stories about people when you can't actually hear what's going on ...

-- At the bulkhead, there are the young parents with the 5-month-old baby. They're trying desperately not to be Those Parents. They're both looking around just the slightest bit; whenever they make eye contact with someone, they give the apologetic "I'm sorry she's so loud" look. They're doing fine, though, in comparison to ...

-- ... The Militant Single Mom, three rows back and across the aisle. She sits in the middle as her kids (I'll call them Tyrone and LaKeisha) fight over the window and the aisle. Tyrone and LaKeisha are generating enough volume to get in under my Shure E300s. MSM, meanwhile, doesn't give a shit, and she just absolutely dares you to say something about it. Her big brown eyes are spitting fire; it might be directed at the kids, and it might be directed at you. Best not to find out. It's all she can do to get these kids back home. She's been taking crap from them for an entire week of "vacation," and she doesn't care at all that you're going to get two hours of it.

-- Taking a deep breath and running his fingers through what is left of his hair is the guy on the aisle across from MSM and her brood. He's wearing a white polo shirt with a logo of some small software company, as anonymous as the one for which I work. Clearly, he's carrying the entire weight of the world on his shoulders. It's written all over his face. I'm reading it line by line. He's been traveling too much and working too hard, his marriage is faltering, and he'd rather be getting an ice-water enema than making this particular trip. Two things are true about a business guy traveling on Sunday: 1/he's outbound, not inbound, and 2/he's leaving behind stuff he'd rather be doing and stuff that, in the scheme of things, is more important than whatever he's headed off to. Both, I can tell, are true of this guy. He's been sitting in his seat quietly enduring MSM to his right and the baby up front; he gets his laptop out of its briefcase and taps away idly on it. If I got out of my seat to go to the bathroom, I'm pretty sure I'd see a typical business traveler's work: a half-hearted game of solitaire.

-- The Young Lovers, he in a New York Giants jersey and gym shorts, she in a pink sweatshirt and flip-flops. Their spring break didn't go well. They probably won't be talking come May. Wonder who paid for this trip.

-- The old fellow next to me has a hospital bracelet on. He apparently broke his arm during his Florida business trip. He takes up way more of his middle seat than a guy his size normally would. He looks very fragile. I'm scared to bump him for fear he might shatter.

Turn off your electronic devices, turn off your brain, watch as everything that's really important to you disappears at 1,000 feet a minute. Sit back, relax and enjoy the flight as best as you can.