Wednesday, February 21, 2007
There’s something inherently unfunny about working 12 hour days for many, many weeks in a row. That has stopped recently and I’ve since been intoxicated for at least two or threeve solid weeks. Please pardon the delay.
For the record, people who neglect to put contact information in their email signatures are dead to me. I get it; they don’t want to be stalked. I don’t either. Honestly, unless someone is a complete social retard with no friends (picturing a few in this office right now) no one wants to be stalked. But guess what happens when some self-important ass clown doesn’t put phone/fax number in their signature. They have to be tracked down. This means that a small herd of third party people are now involved in the hunt, irritated, and wasting even more time in their already meaningless days. Worse are the people who don’t fix their return setting to include a signature at all. Do they not realize when they randomly get cc’d to answer a question, etc… that their contact info is not anywhere in the fu**ing email? Obnoxious.
For an outsider (I’m assuming – fortunately) the island of Manhattan would seemingly be the last place you’d expect to constantly experience “small world” stories. After all 8.1 million people live here, even more are here working on any given week day, and then there’s the tourists. Not backed by any legitimate statistic, I’d say there are at least a million of them walking around my neighborhood on an average day, stopping in the middle of the sidewalk, bugging me to take their picture in front of 30 Rock. I digress. Anyone making the aforementioned assumption would be dead wrong. Those of us lucky/smart enough to live here know that you’re always one stampede of tourists away from running smack into the person you just mentioned two minutes ago.
Perhaps the strangest breed of these occurrences is stepping onto the same subway car as someone you know. At the risk of sounding completely cliché, I’ll say it. What are the odds, right? The first time it happened to me here, I was rendered nearly speechless. Leigh and I stepped onto a crowded car and pushed our way to the side only to find another friend from prep school sitting there on the bench. In this case the chance encounter was particularly positive; we hadn’t seen Meredith in a long time and we spent the afternoon shopping Upper East boutiques together. I dare say that rarely would one of these meetings be a negative thing, save ex-boyfriends, people whose calls you’ve been avoiding, or any emotional terrorists you might find in the eighth circle of Hell, i.e. creatives or either of my old superiors from McPrison. I’ve now come to expect “small world” stories, any way they come.
In a slightly less PG version of running into someone on the same subway car, or working in the building across the street from two of my sorority sisters, we have my Saturday night. Kim and I found our A-game, put on our drinking boots, and headed to the bar. Whoa cheesy… and yet not edited out. Anyhow, sucking down bourbon at bar #1, with its five other patrons, we get a call to go meet Erin’s bachelorette party and soon find ourselves in a cab headed to Naked Lunch. For those of you unfamiliar with the place, it’s a normal sized bar that on Friday and Saturday nights packs in more people than a U2 concert at the Garden. They play a delightful mix of 80’s and hip-hop, so as you might imagine, it’s an obvious pick for b-days and bachelorettes. Either that, or it’s 3am and someone remembers how much fun they had there the last time they were there, on the verge of blacking out.
On the way down there, I tell Kim, “Maybe we should harass this boy I met in the Hamptons last summer. He and his buddies don’t really go out at less than 100% and he lives nearby.” We stumble out of the cab and hop in line. A few minutes later I mention to Kim that I think I know the guy standing a few people in front of us. He turns around. It’s “Ben Hamptons.” Small world. We go in, pay, and separate, as our friends are in different areas of the bar, but don’t worry. It gets better.
A few bourbon drinks and some really inappropriate tequila toasts later, we are reunited and get to chatting. He asks where I went to high school. Being that he is from the Midwest, I question why he would care, but let him know I went to Bolles in Jacksonville. He says he knows one other girl from Jacksonville, that she works on his desk at Merrill and asks do I happen to know Erin. Funny, that’s whose bachelorette party I just met up with. Funny, he’s going to the wedding. Small world.
It also came out in conversation that he’s skilled at the art of the flying trapeze, but who isn’t these days? Seriously, upon mentioning that to my KatieBee’s fiancé, he said he also learned how while vacationing at Club Med resorts as a child. He just neglects to freely advertise the talent. Small world.
Anyhow, this is a boy I met in the Hamptons in August (at the Drift – those of you who have been there know what an important detail that is). I didn’t speak to him until September, when, after an entire day of watching football and drinking beer, I was finally cocktailed enough to ask what he might be doing. Immediately following this feat of liquid courage, an extremely intoxicated Mandy was making me promise to eat pizza and drink water in order to be allowed to go down to the party, for which I desperately needed a wingman. I was given an hour to “make it or break it” at this party. We walk in the front door, through the fog machines/strobe lights that were going at full blast, and Mandy and Ellen know everyone in the room, everyone that wasn’t a hired Hustler dancer, that is. Again, small world.
In maybe the only major metropolis in the world undefined by one particular industry, we actually have a built-in system that kind of perpetuates these chance meetings. If advertising is any indication of how other industries work, they’re all completely inbred. Everyone knows everyone. Then figure in the clients, etc… that each industry services. Then figure in the friends you have across all of different industries to whom this city plays host. You get a lot of crossover. So maybe we’re all just connected through a few mysterious direct dial/ fax numbers that some self-important asshole refused to put in his/her email signature, and the longer we work here in some kind of professional capacity, the more likely we are to run into each other in line at the Naked Lunch.
Don’t be fooled by the pearls.
VENN
There’s something inherently unfunny about working 12 hour days for many, many weeks in a row. That has stopped recently and I’ve since been intoxicated for at least two or threeve solid weeks. Please pardon the delay.
For the record, people who neglect to put contact information in their email signatures are dead to me. I get it; they don’t want to be stalked. I don’t either. Honestly, unless someone is a complete social retard with no friends (picturing a few in this office right now) no one wants to be stalked. But guess what happens when some self-important ass clown doesn’t put phone/fax number in their signature. They have to be tracked down. This means that a small herd of third party people are now involved in the hunt, irritated, and wasting even more time in their already meaningless days. Worse are the people who don’t fix their return setting to include a signature at all. Do they not realize when they randomly get cc’d to answer a question, etc… that their contact info is not anywhere in the fu**ing email? Obnoxious.
For an outsider (I’m assuming – fortunately) the island of Manhattan would seemingly be the last place you’d expect to constantly experience “small world” stories. After all 8.1 million people live here, even more are here working on any given week day, and then there’s the tourists. Not backed by any legitimate statistic, I’d say there are at least a million of them walking around my neighborhood on an average day, stopping in the middle of the sidewalk, bugging me to take their picture in front of 30 Rock. I digress. Anyone making the aforementioned assumption would be dead wrong. Those of us lucky/smart enough to live here know that you’re always one stampede of tourists away from running smack into the person you just mentioned two minutes ago.
Perhaps the strangest breed of these occurrences is stepping onto the same subway car as someone you know. At the risk of sounding completely cliché, I’ll say it. What are the odds, right? The first time it happened to me here, I was rendered nearly speechless. Leigh and I stepped onto a crowded car and pushed our way to the side only to find another friend from prep school sitting there on the bench. In this case the chance encounter was particularly positive; we hadn’t seen Meredith in a long time and we spent the afternoon shopping Upper East boutiques together. I dare say that rarely would one of these meetings be a negative thing, save ex-boyfriends, people whose calls you’ve been avoiding, or any emotional terrorists you might find in the eighth circle of Hell, i.e. creatives or either of my old superiors from McPrison. I’ve now come to expect “small world” stories, any way they come.
In a slightly less PG version of running into someone on the same subway car, or working in the building across the street from two of my sorority sisters, we have my Saturday night. Kim and I found our A-game, put on our drinking boots, and headed to the bar. Whoa cheesy… and yet not edited out. Anyhow, sucking down bourbon at bar #1, with its five other patrons, we get a call to go meet Erin’s bachelorette party and soon find ourselves in a cab headed to Naked Lunch. For those of you unfamiliar with the place, it’s a normal sized bar that on Friday and Saturday nights packs in more people than a U2 concert at the Garden. They play a delightful mix of 80’s and hip-hop, so as you might imagine, it’s an obvious pick for b-days and bachelorettes. Either that, or it’s 3am and someone remembers how much fun they had there the last time they were there, on the verge of blacking out.
On the way down there, I tell Kim, “Maybe we should harass this boy I met in the Hamptons last summer. He and his buddies don’t really go out at less than 100% and he lives nearby.” We stumble out of the cab and hop in line. A few minutes later I mention to Kim that I think I know the guy standing a few people in front of us. He turns around. It’s “Ben Hamptons.” Small world. We go in, pay, and separate, as our friends are in different areas of the bar, but don’t worry. It gets better.
A few bourbon drinks and some really inappropriate tequila toasts later, we are reunited and get to chatting. He asks where I went to high school. Being that he is from the Midwest, I question why he would care, but let him know I went to Bolles in Jacksonville. He says he knows one other girl from Jacksonville, that she works on his desk at Merrill and asks do I happen to know Erin. Funny, that’s whose bachelorette party I just met up with. Funny, he’s going to the wedding. Small world.
It also came out in conversation that he’s skilled at the art of the flying trapeze, but who isn’t these days? Seriously, upon mentioning that to my KatieBee’s fiancé, he said he also learned how while vacationing at Club Med resorts as a child. He just neglects to freely advertise the talent. Small world.
Anyhow, this is a boy I met in the Hamptons in August (at the Drift – those of you who have been there know what an important detail that is). I didn’t speak to him until September, when, after an entire day of watching football and drinking beer, I was finally cocktailed enough to ask what he might be doing. Immediately following this feat of liquid courage, an extremely intoxicated Mandy was making me promise to eat pizza and drink water in order to be allowed to go down to the party, for which I desperately needed a wingman. I was given an hour to “make it or break it” at this party. We walk in the front door, through the fog machines/strobe lights that were going at full blast, and Mandy and Ellen know everyone in the room, everyone that wasn’t a hired Hustler dancer, that is. Again, small world.
In maybe the only major metropolis in the world undefined by one particular industry, we actually have a built-in system that kind of perpetuates these chance meetings. If advertising is any indication of how other industries work, they’re all completely inbred. Everyone knows everyone. Then figure in the clients, etc… that each industry services. Then figure in the friends you have across all of different industries to whom this city plays host. You get a lot of crossover. So maybe we’re all just connected through a few mysterious direct dial/ fax numbers that some self-important asshole refused to put in his/her email signature, and the longer we work here in some kind of professional capacity, the more likely we are to run into each other in line at the Naked Lunch.
Don’t be fooled by the pearls.
VENN
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