April 10, 2006

• WEEK FROM HELL

  
  

   

  
  

  I realize it’s been over a week since I updated. I haven’t fallen off the face of the earth; I simply had the “week from hell.” Have you ever had one of those weeks that was so full of ups and downs and was so busy that you “survived” it rather than “lived it”? This was such a week. I don’t usually do play by plays of my life, but I did this time. Here’s all the news from the week:

  
  

   

  
  

  SUNDAY – (Bad News) I am the interim music director at my church. They stopped looking for someone to fill the position when I took over. Whenever I take my pastor aside and explain that he apparently does not understand the definition of “interim” he throws his head back, laughs maniacally, and walks away.  Our organist and choir accompanist of the last 20 years (who is one of the sweetest most wonderful people on the planet) has been battling ovarian cancer for the last several months. She has been doing better lately and was actually able to come home from the hospital last week. On Sunday morning a blood clot lodged in the base of her brain and she was gone in a matter of minutes. The choir and I got the message that she had died 10 minutes before the service. Sunday pretty much sucked.

  
  

   

  
  

  MONDAY – (Good News) Every Monday morning the sales staff at my job has a video conference which links our offices in eight cities together. This way we can waste our time on a national level, as opposed to just a local level.  Each week a different sales person has to make a presentation to the group. This was my week.  These presentations tend to be painfully dull and I was determined to make mine funny. I thought I could get away with this because our company President never attends these meetings. I’m sure you see what’s coming. About two minutes before I was to present, I see our President walk into the conference room in our Oklahoma City office. I went ahead and gave my rather “tongue-firmly-in-cheek” presentation and waited to get an unhappy phone call. Instead I got an email from the President later in the day addressed to me and all the division managers. It congratulated me on a great presentation and asked the division mangers to please preview their employee’s future presentations to make certain they were on par with the presentation I had done. Later in the day they had to increase the size of my office door so my enormous ego could get into the room.

  
  

   

  
  

  TUESDAY – (Mixed News) For those of you who don’t know, I’m in the commercial sound & video contracting business. On Tuesday morning I made a presentation to a local casino for large video wall they had requested. This will show you where the money is in our society: I did a video wall last year for the Bank of New York in a critical 24/7 Network Operations Command Center. The project total was about ¾’s of a million dollars. The wall for the casino is much larger and the project total is well over a million, and all they are going to do with it is blow up cable TV sporting events that people are betting on. The good news is that the presentation went well; the bad news is that I lost $50.00 on the slots before I left the casino.

  
  

   

  
  

  WEDNESDAY – (Frustrating News) I spent all day frantically putting a proposal together for a project in St. Louis.  I was frantic because the architect on the project won’t send us CAD files and won’t return my phone calls. I have this problem with architects all the time. My apologies to those of you who are reading this who are architects, but as a species you are vermin and should be eradicated from the planet.

  
  

   

  
  

  THURSDAY – (Bad News) Thursday morning was the funeral. Eight million people attended. I helped officiate and directed the choir. It was a very difficult morning.

  
  

   

  
  

  Later that afternoon I had to fly out to St. Louis to present the proposal I worked on the day before. There were tornadoes touching down all over the area. My flight was delayed five times and once we finally got off the ground it was like being inside a bag of “Shake and Bake.”

  
  

   

  
  

  FRIDAY – (Mixed News, Weird News) The presentation in St. Louis went well. The casino called and asked if I would put together a graphic showing what the wall would look like in their facility. I spent about six hours putting a photo shop image together. Luckily, I had time to do this at the airport because the tornadoes that had been in Tulsa had moved to St. Louis and my flight back was delayed several times.

  
  

   

  
  

  My pastor had left to go to Ohio for the burial of our organist and had asked me to cover a wedding for him while he was gone. I barely made it back in time Friday afternoon to make the rehearsal. I had never met the couple before and it turns out they are Goth.

  
  

   

  
  

  I also got an email Friday afternoon from our national sales manager saying they enjoyed my presentation Monday so much, would I mind putting together another one for this Monday?

  
  

   

  
  

  SATURDAY – (Bizarre News) I performed the wedding for the interesting couple. The wedding gown was solid black.  I’m all for whatever people are into, but I wish I had a photo of this dress, you would have to see it to believe it. 

  
  

   

  
  

  Just after the wedding was over I got a call from the casino saying that they really liked the photo shop image I sent them, but would I mind doing four or five more from different angles so that they could see how large the wall would be in relationship to the remainder of the casino. Oh, and by the way, can we have those by Monday morning?

  
  

    

  
  

  SUNDAY – (Good News, Bad News) It was Palm Sunday and the children were supposed to march into the morning service with Palm branches while the choir sang an anthem. The Children’s Minister (who just gave their notice last week) didn’t bother to actually organize this, so only three kids showed up to march in. Our “Triumphant Entry” was a little less than triumphant.  

  
  

   

  
  

  As soon as church was over I raced out to the casino to take additional pictures from different views. Does it seem weird to you that I left church to go to a casino?  It seems weird to me.

  
  

   

  
  

  I got home and spent the rest of the day working on the new photo shop images and my power point presentation for this morning. I finished about midnight.

  
  

   

  
  

  Final News from the week - The casino called and loved the images. Out of the four companies that bid on the project they have chosen our design to take to their board of directors.

  
  

   

  
  

  My presentation this morning included pictures of Bill Murray as Private Winger from the movie “Stripes” so I’m sure you can guess how serious it was.

  
  

   

  
  

  If you’ll excuse me now, I’m going to go lapse into a coma.

  
  

   

  
  

  

  • 1:24 pm
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