What a drag to have to be back in the office after nine days of blissful languor and merry feasting. Except for some cooking on Christmas Eve and leaf-raking on the 26th, I spent the entire time in blithe indolence.

It took some serious effort to get out of bed before dawn today, and it seemed strange to have to drive to work (or anywhere, for that matter); I hadn’t so much as gotten in my car since the 23rd. Yet, here I am, once again hitched to the sledge, propelled as much by muscle memory as anything, plodding down this cold furrow of mortal life.

O, woe! These precious, irreplacable fragments of time, each one birthed as a shining bauble of glorious possibility, forever tarnished by the wholly mundane, lackluster tasks to which they were sacrificed. Would that Man was finally freed from such drudgery, but alas! Only Death’s icy hands can remove this burden of toil, so long affixed to Mankind’s shoulders.

Guess I should have taken another week off.

Today one of my august colleagues got a phone call from a “Sarah” at EMC, asking for someone who works in a related department. Since he smelled a cold sales call, Sarah was asked if this person was expecting her call. She said he was not, and that she was simply calling to “introduce EMC to your corporation”. This was an instant failure on several levels, since:

• We send out RFQs and RFPs, and don’t accept cold marketing/sales calls. Ever.
• Having already purchased EMC products, the campus is well aware of her company’s existence, and the most basic internal research with her own sales department should have revealed this.
• We are a public institution of higher education, not a corporation.

When she was politely referred by said colleague to our Purchasing department (which is where all vendors must start, without exception), she icily reiterated that she was not selling anything, and was only trying to “introduce” her firm to our “corporation”, and hung up on him. I guess “people skills” are no longer de rigeur in the current economy.

In a possibly related story, EMC stock drifted downward another 10¢ today to $10.99 a share, as news of astoundingly incompetent sales staff reached the trading floor.

On Monday and Tuesday, I served on a jury for a criminal trial. The case itself was not particularly interesting, but it was interesting to see the justice system at work, and far more pleasant that I had imagined. I learned new things from some of my fellow jurors, and the deliberation process was, if not exactly fun, certainly enjoyable enough as an intellectual excercise.

In all, despite the popular concept of jury duty as drudgery to be avoided or weaseled out of at all costs, I felt pretty good about having served, and would do so again, were I summoned.

It appears that the site’s contact form has not been functioning properly for a few days, or possibly a week or so. This problem has been corrected.

A cursory scan of hit logs indicates nobody has used the form in a while, but if you used the contact form to send me a message recently and got no response, your message was lost, and will have to be resent. I apologize for any inconvenience.

December is always a pretty hairy month, money-wise, and not just because of the usual fiscal demands of the Christmas holiday. Half my property taxes are due as well, adding well over a thousand dollars to the month’s bills, and both the mortgage and the taxes are due near the beginning of the month, leaving a depressingly low checkbook balance in their wake. “Merry Christmas”, I always tell myself, then start squirreling away money for the next tax payment, which is in April.

Which got me thinking. What instantly springs to mind when the month of December is invoked? Christmas. And April? Easter. The celebrations of the birth and rebirth, respectively, of the Christ. And yet, both nominally celebratory months are darkened by the imposition of taxation.

Does my county assessor hate Jesus?