I woke up friday morning knowing it was going to be a strange day. A good day, but strange. First of all, it was Friday. This is always a cause for celebration since the week is over at five and then you can be all stupid and irresponsible and do crazy things and not have to worry about waking up on time or looking nice for anything the next day. But what Friday meant to me was that i could wear jeans to work. For those of you who paid attention to my wardrobe, normally i wear a grubby pair of jeans and a t-shirt for some band you probably never heard of. However, at work, i almost always wear a nice, clean pair of dress pants and a clean button up shirt. Sometimes a tie but not always. After two weeks of this every day, my boss, Mike, pulled me aside and said "you notice how everyone else dresses here, right?" and i said that i hadn't really been paying attention since i was busy working in the Bat Cave all the time (far from the rest of civilization). He said that dress code was not exactly enforced at the Fire Marshal's. In fact, a lot of people wandered around in jeans and t-shirts all the time, not just on Fridays. He told me i was kind of making him feel bad for showing up in jeans when i was dressed up all the time.
So at least one day a week, i am allowed to wear my jeans and let me tell you, after all the corporate camoflage, it's quite a relief.
Second off, I was going to be working on collecting and marking keys in the Bat Cave. What this meant was going around to every station and collecting the extra keys to the cabinets and drawers, marking their place on a map and writing down their serial numbers. Not the most exciting job, but it has to be done. As i was doing this, i noticed that a schematic of the room already existed and that 15 of the 24 positions had already been numbered on it. This helped immensely and i got those 15 positions marked down quickly.
But then i got to the next room over which is being used as offices now, but in an emergency will be converted to executive offices for the people in charge. Since this is a whole separate room and will have a bunch of VIPs in it if something should happen, i thought a new classification system was in order to make it easier to find the keys in a panic. I thought (logically enough) that if the Bat Cave had numbers for the stations, this room should have words. That way if you needed a quick reference, you coulod grab all the keys with the words on the tags and figure out the specifics later (if you were ever in that big a hurry that you couldn't look at the schematic.
I came up with two classification systems that i liked and were easy to use. However, being indecisive as i am, i couldn't decide which one to use. What i did was go to the computer where the schematic lived and typed both systems in and printed them out. I brought both to Mike and said "which one do you like?" He looked at the first one and asked "Why are these labled Red, Orange, Yellow and such?" I said that that system was based on colors. Each station would have a corresponding color and you just had to grab the key ring with that color written on it. Mike said that this wouldn't really work since it might conflict in people's minds with the Homeland Security Threat Level colors and it might cause more confusion than it prevents.
He then looked at the next map...looked at me...looked back at the map. Before he could say anything i blurted out "Oh come on. Naming the stations after characters from Archie Comics is a GREAT idea!" apparently he didn't think so but hey, it was still fun working on it. (it ended up being numbers all around)
But what was really neat was that someone at work found a big box of Daredevil comics. They had been printed in 1995 and were actually done to teach kids about fire safety (hence the reason we have so damned many). But i was amped. this was so cool. me and April (the resident computer geek with a tattoo of TUX the lynux penguin) sat and read the comics and tried to find out of they might be worth anything because then we might be able to get some cash for the employees and we could buy...stuff, coffee and sodas and such. We found one website that said the comic was worth $5.00 in good condition. This being all found money to us, we were pretty primed. We called one of two comic shops in Springfield and asked if they would be interested. The guy's response was quite memorable.
"what, are you fucking joking?"
apparently since this was a fire safety comic and hadn't been printed before 1978, they didn't even want to look at them.
Unphased, our hero presses on. After work i went to a discount book/comic shop near the office (where i bought the stack of wolverine comics from Adventures in Funkytown 2) and asked if they would be interested in one or two. A 35 year old comic nerd looked at them, looked at the comic price guide and said "we can probably offer you four bucks a piece." Hey, it's not five but it's all found money to me. The nerd told me to come back around seven and talk to the boss. I did this and this guy's response was similar to the one earlier (although less colorful).
I put the comics back in my car and sighed. I knew that there was a carnival on the street near where i lived so there was going to be streets blocked off (which means tooling around a maze of one-way streets). This is not my favorite thing and this was a dark spot on an otherwise good day...
but then...it happened!
I had been noticing classic cars around the streets all evening since this was the Historic Rout 66 carnival and people from all around the state were coming to show off their cars. I glanced into the window of a red car with a lot of chrome, and there in the driver seat was Elvis Presley! He was wearing his dark sunglasses (despite it being 8:00 at night and dark) and he had his sideburns (looking pretty real from where i sat) and he had a shirt that singlehandedly kept the rinestone business running for a year or so. I turned down my music (Tool) and leaned out my window. Feeling like a complete twit, i yelled "ELVIS!" He turned around and looked at me and smiled. I shouted "Happy late anniverssary!" (this summer had been the anniversary of Elvis' death).
Elvis snapped his fingers and swept his arm around to point at me and said "thankyouverymuch"
Instantly, my awsome day was restored to it's full shining happiness level and i didn't even mind having to weave around cars that probably cost more than i do and dealing with the road closures.
Thank you Elvis, wherever you are