Monday, January 08, 2007

Monday, Monday

My Monday just got really easy. My boss called me this morning to tell me not to come to work because the office is under quarantine. I work in a section on Congress Avenue where they found a passal of dead birds, and they want to keep the people out of the area until they determine that the area is safe. They think they might let us in by noon, but that's unclear.

Now, I could, of course, work from home this morning, but it's still pretty well guaranteed to be a less productive day than I would normally have had. It's crazy -- I wonder if we'll send an email to all our customers regarding our unexpected unattended office this morning. If we did, I think it should be something like this.

Dear Customers,

We don't normally slack off on taking your phone calls on Monday mornings, but today we have a good reason. There were a bunch of dead birds found on the street near our office, and EMS shut down the area for the whole morning. Most likely there is no toxin in the air and this was a prank, but in our ultra-terrorist-sensitive society, we have to be excessively cautious -- shutting down businesses for hours just in case. Hopefully, there won't be any dead squirrels tomorrow.

We'll be back in the office when the paranoia lifts. Thanks for your patience.


I'm sure there'll be no backlash from that. Right?

3 comments:

Unknown said...

didn't know you worked downtown. we should get together for lunch sometime. not that I work downtown, or work for that matter, but you know, I'm in the area.

Anonymous said...

My wife got to stay home today also. Weird thing is, when I used to work at the IBM plant, sometimes we'd notice lots of dead birds lying around. Of course, this was before 9-11...

Heather said...

James, I think that's the part that makes me feel like fear is at work way too much in our country now. Birds die in big groups all the time, and it's almost always some kind of local poisoning if it's not the weather, but now with our over-abundance of caution since 9/11, it seems to be perfectly acceptable to lose a whole lotta man-days of productivity in downtown Austin, "just in case." I don't want my days to be ruled by fear.