Next Time, Bring The Sunscreen

So, one of the things I dislike most about work is the whole notion of being "stuck" at a particular place for a defined period of time. I'm not lazy - I just like to do things accordingly to my own schedule. Let me figure out the whens and wheres sometimes and you'll get 12 hours of work out of me. Put me in a box and I tend to be climbing walls after 8.

It goes back to that whole P-ness thing I wrote about a few days ago. I'm a critter who thrives on flexibility. I just ran into an old friend who told me he's gotten his employer to let him work at home 2 days a week now, and I was practically drooling with jealousy while we talked.

All that is just to say that yesterday was a beautiful spring day here in Baltimore. It was warm and sunny with clear blue skies and a very slight breeze that made the trees sway just a bit. It was short sleeves and no jacket and you'll be warm, but not roasting, kind of weather. We get far too few of those days around here - maybe a few week's worth in April and May and then again in October and November. The rest tend to be hot, cold or rainy.

So I got to work and I realized the thought of spending this entire rare, gorgeous day at my desk was making me downright sad. Up on deck first thing in the morning was a 2-hour meeting with a small group of us from the project. I'd scheduled this particular session, and I THOUGHT I'd booked us a conference room, but I'd forgotten. I swear, I didn't plan it that way. There were too many of us to meet in the project office I share with someone else, unless we wanted to sit on each other's laps, and the rooms had all been taken by people who were smart enough to schedule them. So we got creative and decided to meet outside.

We found an open outdoor table near the little cafe where I grab my coffee in the morning. Our meeting was to go through descriptions of over 100 reports we use and determine the best way to re-create them in the new system we're bringing up. I seriously underbooked our time when I thought we could do this in 2 hours. We ended up needing 4. But miraculously, none of us had anything else scheduled until later in the afternoon, so we just stayed there, stopping now and then to grab coffees or food.

The sun gradually rose in the sky. The day grew brighter and the air warmer. There were no walls or flourescent lights. We heard snippets of funny conversations as students or other staff strolled by. We looked up now and then at a canopy of leaves and we breathed in fresh air. And still, we worked our bums off.

It was wonderful.

One of the guys who was in this meeting is a consultant from Florida. He commutes to Maryland and stays here 4 days a week to be on our project. He has told me over and over again that "our weather sucks." He's used to heat and sunshine and surfing. He chuckles over what the rest of us consider "warm."

At one point, he laughed as he looked around yesterday. This kind of weather brings out lots of arms and legs that have been buried under cold-weather clothes for a long time. He said "Man, ya'll have the whitest white people I've ever seen!" I looked down at my own pale arms, knowing I was one of them.

Fast-forward to late afternoon. He and I were standing in our lobby with another co-worker, waiting for the elevator. I was chatting with the other co-worker when suddenly he burst out laughing. I looked down, and saw that the way I was carrying my meeting materials had pushed the sleeve of my left arm a bit - just enough so that you could see the glaring line where the sunburn I'd managed to get from our day of working outdoors ended.

I looked like I spent the day driving to the beach with one arm hanging out the window. The other is still perfectly pale, because I was sitting in a spot that was half in the sun and half in the shade. I'm a human checkerboard, or maybe a tie-dye shirt. Usually I try to even myself out when I sit outdoors, but you don't really think about that kind of stuff when you're in "work-mode." And you definitely don't remember to bring sunscreen to a day-drone office job.

"Damn," I joked. "I'm always telling my boyfriend and my family how friggin' hard my job is. How am I going to get them to believe me if I leave work all pale and come home with a sunburn?"

But today, as I sit here looking down at my one sun-kissed arm, which is already turning from red to brown, it makes me happy. Office drones aren't supposed to get a tan until they get a long sunny weekend or a beach vacation. We're supposed to be pale, flourescent-lit, bleary-eyed lab rats who blink when we step outside. That's the price we pay for a paycheck.

And we all know I just LOVE bucking the system, even if all I have to show for it is a lopsided tan.