Our new CEO starts on Tuesday. The crack PR staff has made his arrival the lede story in the company newsletter. It reads thusly:

"Welcome, Mr. *****. Our new CEO of ********** and president of the **********, officially will become part of the ******** family on Wednesday, July 15. He wants to meet as many employees as possible, so plans are being formulated for an Employee Open House and System visits. Watch for further details."

Yep. That would be wrong. July 15th falls on a TUESDAY. That ought to give him a really good idea of the quality of the staff he's got in that office.

Written, edited, proof read and published. AND sent to me to post on the website, and nobody ever figured out that the date was wrong. Except me. And my friend that I called up to read it to. Of course, we are not PR professionals, so any aptitude on our parts is negligible.

Forgive me while I make rude cackling noises behind my hand.

That's me. I'm a book whore. If its got ink, I'll read it. Here's the summer reading list. It's incomplete, and some of them are already finished, but for the bookworms among you (and you know who you are) this is what's on the current stack.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (J.K. Rowling)
Fluke (Christopher Moore)
The Sweet Potato Queens' Big Ass Cookbook and Financial Planner (Jill Conner Browne)
Gramercy Park (Paula Cohen)
Absolutely American (David Lipsky)
Benjamin Franklin (Walter Isaacson)
Pirate Hunter: The True Story of Captain Kidd (Richard Zacks)
The South Beach Diet (Arthur Agatston)
Designing Web Usability (Jakob Nielsen)
Macromedia Dreamweaver MX Hands On Training
ColdFusion MX with Dreamweaver MX
Dreamweaver MX Killer Tips

In the case of the Sweet Potato Queens, I've already read all of the others. Ditto for all of Christopher Moore's books. Brilliant, spew coffee from your nose funny work.

The South Beach Diet is working for me, so I recommend it for anyone else who hates the concept of dieting but still needs to lower their cholesterol or drop a few pounds.

I am converting from Adobe GoLive to Dreamweaver/ColdFusion MX at the office, that explains the pile of code warrior texts.

But as you can see, my tastes are eclectic. Got any suggestions?

Here's a question for all of you: why is inane drivel spoken into a cell phone infinitely more irritating than that same inane drivel spoken to a physically present person? And why does the volume go up when delivered into a cell phone?

For the last time, I do not wish to be privy to every detail of strangers' lives. I barely tolerate being privy to those of my friends.

I don't want to know what is missing from your pantry, as you cruise the grocery store aisle with your cell phone attached to your head, asking your significant other if there is enough toilet paper under the sink. Use a pencil and make a list. Then take it with you and check the items off.

I don't want to know what kind of trouble your children gave the baby sitter, or any other thing you need to tell your mama at eight in the morning as we sit on the train going to work.

And here's something else: put your makeup on before you leave the house. Trim your child's fingernails after they get out of the bath, not as they sit next to me on the train. There is a lesson you are teaching them, and it isn't very pretty.

Private acts should be done in private. Don't floss your teeth in a restaurant. Don't piss on the side of a building. And don't teach your children to do it, when there is a public bathroom inside that very building: the lobby to the public hospital.

One of my favorite lines from one of my favorite of Ms. Hepburn's movies was this:

"We're all barbarians."

It was from A Lion in Winter. Rent it. And the next time you feel like shouting into a cell phone, remember it.

So one of the things that I have been doing is loading up our medical forms into a library of PDFs on the hospital's intranet site. This is accomplished in one of several ways. The form can be sent to me as an electronic file, which I convert to a PDF because the secretary who builds the forms can't manage to do that, or I can receive a paper copy of the form from the print shop because they seem to have a deal with the last typesetter in the world, who gives them forms as hard copy to put on a copy machine and then I scan the forms and created PDFs from the scan ( a real fucking pleasure to do, because they are multiple page forms and have to be converted in a "special" way) or finally, sometimes, the print shop sends me files and I can convert them from PageMaker to PDF.

Yesterday we had a department meeting where it was announced with great anticipation and pride that we were going to be putting all our medical forms into wireless tablet PCs for the docs to drag around. Uh, yeah, I have a question.... since I have a stack of 57 forms waiting for me to scan in and convert to PDF because NOBODY, but nobody has them in any sort of electronic format, could you tell me where the forms for the tablets are going to come from, and can I get copies?

Later in the same meeting, it was revealed that we were going to be rolling out the new, great on-line job application program. And what will we be doing with my existing job listings? Will I be linking to somewhere else? Throwing away my page? Re-directing? Anybody? Anybody? I'd like to buy a clue, please.

And then the meeting wrapped with the presentation of the new, improved splash page which it was also announced I was currently producing. I am not. I was not at all involved in the "development" of this new look and feel for my site. The infamous PR department used an outside designer to create the new look. They had been tasked with developing a new organizational structure for the web to make it more marketing driven. They came back with a Photoshop sketch of a new splash page.

I cannot tell you how many times I have pleaded and begged and expounded about splash pages being a total waste of bandwidth and an artifact of first-generation web design which was nothing more than brochure ware.

And there I sit, with the department director beaming at me and announcing that I am responsible for our new look.

If I wasn't on this stupid carb-free diet, I would be stinking drunk.

For whatever reason this morning I woke up in a blue funk. Possibly it was my dreams, although I don't remember anything that would have been depressing in them. Possibly it was the undercurrent of worry I'm living with these days (Mummy has Alzheimer's and Daddy has just been diagnosed with a chronic form of leukemia, and they are both 85 and live hours away from me). It could just be a post-beach depression, as the tan begins to fade and the job regains its hold on my soul.

Whatever. Blue fucking funk. So I did the only thing I could do: I got to the office, booted up the old green i-mac that sits on the desk next to where I really work and loaded up the mp3s. All the Springsteen boots that I could cram on that old hard drive. And I cranked it up and clamped on the headphones. A couple repeats of Badlands ("It ain't no sin to be glad you're alive"), a lost and live accoustic version of Bobby Jean, and an extended Rosalita and Sandy, and you know what? I'm ready to face the world again.

In fact, I'm ready to call my rocker girlfriend and ask if there's room on the tour for me. Just a long weekend, pledged to the church of rock and roll.

And on Friday, I'll do the thing I've done every Fourth of July since 1976: I'll put on Greetings from Asbury Park, lay on the floor and turn the volume up to 11. And listen one more time to Sandy.

I recommend it for you, too.

"The calla lillies are in bloom again, such a marvelous flower. I carried them on my wedding day, and now I carry them for another reason." Or something like that. It's the only impression I do of a famous person. And now, Miss Hepburn has joined the pantheon of the dead.

Well, the village theatre group where she and Greg Peck are now is just going to have the best season ever.

Actually, I do a fairly mean "I coulda been a contender." but that's another story.

I'm stalling here. I do not want to eat my oatmeal and fruit. I do not want to take my shower and dress, and I most certainly do not want to climb on the train and go back to work.

But since when has what one wants to do have anything at all to do with what one MUST do?