What did you do with your day?
The ClubHouse: The Game II - Mysterious Puzzler: Discussions/Challenges:
What did you do with your day?
Ocean_Islands | Friday, February 02, 2001 - 06:58 pm  A friend of mine has a theory -- or perhaps it's a policy -- that when you email a friend or a family member, you should tell them what you did the exact day that you are writing. That way, eventually, all the events of your life will be a part of the public record. I just got home from work at 9 p.m., late again; but the day was much more interesting than most, at least to me. I have a theory, myself. I think you can make just about anything interesting if you look at it the right way. In my work as an auditor I have to periodically go and verify that a company is doing an inventory correctly. So that is what was on my schedule today – to go to a small town in New Hampshire and figure them out. I set off at 8 a.m. this morning for a long drive to western Mass to the first facility they have. Then, at about three, I left to drive up to New Hampshire to the main work site. After an hour on the expressway, you have to turn off and make your way up through the country roads to a small town in the woods. It takes forty five minutes to get there from the expressway on roads that curl up and around frozen reservoirs. Imagine a winding country road, large oak trees hanging over snowy fields, stone bridges over frozen rivers, and blankets of snow covering rooftops sporting smoking chimneys. Imagine the sun coming through the trees and warming a waterfall coursing through craggy icicles, and 200 year old houses with wooden porches and white clapboard siding. Imagine a town square with a wooden steepled church and a town hall built out of chipped bricks. Imagine an old woman brushing the snow off her car with a straw broom, and a boy coming out of a video store that is also a grocery store and a gas station, carrying firewood. Arriving in the small town it seems like you are in another world. The company has taken over an old mill in the middle of the village. The old paper mill is built of bricks and has white trim around the gothic shaped windows. There is no one in sight. I ring the company's doorbell. Believe it or not, the door is locked. Stepping into the company you enter yet again into a universe of its own. Vast banks of servers cased in black steel and displaying flashing lights and video screens. Behind them a monstrous spaghetti of cables pours down along the edge of the room towards the 20 foot high satellite dishes they have stashed out back in large chain link cages. The sight is as shocking and unexpected as if you happened unknowningly upon Dr. No's mastermind world control room in the middle of Siberia. The room itself has a wooden floor, wooden beams and window panes looking out onto the mill pond and spillway, which is a giant waterfall 40 feet wide and thirty feet high. Half of it is covered by a large snowy iceberg-like chunk of frozen water that looks as if it might go smashing down any second. I'm only there to verify that they are doing the inventory correctly; I don't do it myself. After a long day of working, round about 7:30 p.m., the employees are waiting for my sign-off of their work so they can go home. It has started snowing. I approve their work. Shortly afterwards, turning out of the parking lot onto the town's single main road and driving away, I quickly leave the village behind. I find myself in the middle of the darkness, bumping over frost-heave broken roads, happening upon an isolated home hear and there, through its window panes shines a lamp out into the darkness, or the house is dark but lit only by the ghostly flicker of a television screen. Deer lurk in the shadows. |
Juju2bigdog | Friday, February 02, 2001 - 07:08 pm  Thanks for taking us on the trip, Ocean. I was there! (of course, I got cold) I pretty much subscribe to your friend's philosophy without consciously making it a policy or philosophy, which is how I ended up with about 116 stories about life in San Francisco. Of course, now that I am "in the house" I can't really write stories about that... My e-mail correspondents think I have died.
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