My Ass Today

July 14th, 2004

gather round and lemme tell you a little story about what happened to my ass today. you read right, my ass.

we had invited members of a local interactive media agency to join us here at much for a production meeting about a new muchmusic.com project that you will be hearing more about in august.

so muchmatt and i headed up to the boardroom where this meeting was to be held. en route, i asked one of my other colleagues if we needed to print any specific reference materials for review…and he suggested that i take his files and make some photocopies while he went downstairs to escort in our guests.

matt, marydeath and our lead developer installed themselves in the boardroom while i tried to figure out the photocopier. here’s where things started to go awry. for some reason, the copy machine wasn’t going to have any of my copying. i kept getting beeps and error messages about paper refills that left me scratching my head.

now, in my day, i have done loads of temping, so i’m used to the quirks and kinks that office equipment likes to throw at a girl. and i’m sure the equipment gets some sort of satisfaction out of denying you the simplest task that is their primary duty to provide (ie. copy this piece of paper), probably even thinking, “ha, take that you bitch.”

and of course, as always happens, when someone else comes along, miraculously the machine starts working and you look like the crazy person. this is what happened to me. the lovely tim from much creative services came by to make a copy and i whined to him, “but…it doesn’t work…wait, how come you can copy and i can’t? it doesn’t work for me!” tim looked at me with pity, grabbed my papers and snap! copied them all.

of course this whole copying debacle had thrown me off my game and all i wanted was to get back to my seat in the boardroom and polish off the strawberry smoothie that was waiting for me.

instead, my ass got in the way.

this boardroom is one of those that has windows that face outside as well as windows that face the hallway. on the hallway windows, there are blinds…for meeting privacy, i assume.

the blinds were drawn. as i walked into the room and tried to sidle my way behind some chairs and the wall, my ass brushed against the blinds. specifically, the buttons on my very fancy striped, cropped pants brushed against the blinds…and the cord that holds the blinds together. as i took another step and heard the blinds come with me, i knew i was stuck.

i looked at muchmatt and marydeath as they looked at me, puzzled. in between bursts of laughter, i confirmed that indeed my ass was stuck to the blinds, and could someone please come over and unstick me. marydeath got right in there and spent several minutes trying to untangle my ass from the blinds. the longer that she took, the funnier and also more frightening it became. what if i couldn’t get unstuck? our guests were on their way up and while i would enjoy sharing this joke with them, i would prefer to do it after the fact, instead of them walking into the boardroom while my butt is glued to the blinds and my friend’s hands are glued to my butt.

marydeath’s suggestion was that we needed scissors. somehow in that two seconds of walking by, i had so entangled my pant button with the blind cord, that no amount of finger fiddling was gonna set me free.

i yelped that she should run NOW to the desks outside the boardroom and canvas for scissors. now keep in mind that we’re in a boardroom on another floor, within another department, of another tv station. and while i know these people, they are not my day-to-day fellow workers and so as i waved from the boardroom and marydeath rushed back to my butt, i could very clearly hear their laughter as they realized my exact predicament.

at this point i’m starting to feel a little desperate as i can HEAR our guests making their way down the hall. i yelled, “Cut it! Cut the blinds!” Snip! Snip! The blinds are broken and i was FREE. i love scissors, don’t you? at that moment our guests walked into the room and as i was still unable to control my laughter over the whole ordeal i blurted out, “Hahaha, my ass was just stuck to the blinds!”

and i really think that set the tone for the rest of the meeting.

do you think the copier and the blinds were in cahoots? i do.