out of reach
I was going to take myself to a movie last night, and King County Transit dashed all my hopes and dreams for the evening.
I was going to see God's Own Country, which actually had played at the Seattle Queer Film Festival but it was one of the ones I didn't see, at the Uptown Cinemas on Lower Queen Anne. I had walked home from work, and made myself some frozen gnocchi for dinner (I mean, I did boil it). Checked One Bus Away and it said the #8 was due to its stop on 15th and John at 6:11, which was perfect for making it to the 6:45 showing -- the bus usually takes about twenty minutes to get there. It should have been a red flag that all the #8 stop times were only showing "scheduled arrival" and not any delays, which really meant the system was not getting any real-time arrival info on that bus. I was an idiot and really should have gone for a #2 instead.
But, I left home right after 6:00, got to the Safeway where that stop is at about 6:08, and then proceeded to wait . . . and wait . . . and wait. Literally three #10 buses and two #2 buses headed the opposite direction stopped at the bus stop across the street while I waited. Not one bus came to my stop, until I finally gave up at 6:26. I looked up how long it would take to drive a car, and it said 21 minutes. I wasn't going to drive -- I'd then have to pay for parking -- but I wanted to gauge how much traffic was affecting regular cars. Transit would take far longer.
In the meantime, I watched this guy also waiting at the stop (among at least fifteen other people) eat the entirety of a bag of Fritos, along with a Fritos-brand tin of bean dip. He had his food set on top of the newspaper dispensers we were both standing in front of, and when it was done, he just batted his garbage with his hand so it fell behind the newspaper boxes. What an asshole.
It was raining pretty heavily. I finally resigned myself that the movie was not happening, opened my umbrella back up, and walked back home.
So then I watched the three episodes I needed to catch up on of The Mindy Project on Hulu. I've been waiting to catch up on most regular weekly TV shows until Shobhit gets back, but he tends not to be interested in that one. Sometime over the weekend we might get to catching up on Modern Family and Headline News and The Big Bang Theory. I did keep watching the Bill Maher and John Oliver shows regularly while Shobhit was gone because those are too time-sensitive to be relevant weeks after the fact.
Shobhit's plane from Amsterdam -- to which he had flown from Delhi -- was scheduled to land at 11:32 this morning in Seattle.
We just had our Town Hall meeting at the office, which we have every six to eight weeks (although our last one was actually 9 weeks ago). It was pretty run-of-the-mill. I kept debating whether to bring up the weirdness of the Digital Department being dissolved a couple Fridays ago, resulting in two staff members finding out they were losing their jobs that day -- they were offered employment in stores, so they were not laid off -- but ultimately decided not to. It's not my department, not something that affected me directly, and I only heard about details second-hand from a person in that department who was not one of the people whose jobs were eliminated. Still, the whole thing was weird -- and it was weird when Darrell, the Director of Merchandising, had gathered us all in our department to tell us the news, and even he was clearly working off limited information, referring to a printed email.
Our CEO went at one point on a rather long tangent about reassessing budgetary considerations across all stores and departments, and I thought maybe she would touch on this herself without being prompted. She never did mention it specifically. I still can't decide whether I should have said something or not. I feel like if anyone should have, it would be someone in Marketing, but whatever. It was a little odd to have this "Town Hall" long presented as a means of being transparent, and everyone apparently just pretended this bizarre turn of events from a couple of weeks ago never occurred. I suppose if I really wanted someone to address it then I should have spoken up? I'm just not really sure how appropriate it would have been.
The meeting was otherwise fairly informative, also fairly run-of-the-mill, no major revelations or anything. Major revelations are rare, of course, and that is to be expected. They fed us Pagliacci Pizza afterward. Sometimes when we have pizza we get it from a PCC Deli, and I kind of wondered why not this time. There is no store near this office location -- the Fremont store is nearly three miles away -- and I suppose it puts a burden on a store to make a whole bunch of extra pizzas for the office. I did think about that as a possibility.
They didn't provide any dessert. I snagged a Coconut Bliss ice cream bar from the Merchandising freezer on my way back to my desk.
