Wednesday, April 20, 2011

the aftermath

Last week, much like Monday, was rough. Throughout the week, the people who were laid off still showed up at work because my work offered them outplacement services. We went to lunches and happy hours to spend some remaining time with those who were laid off. There was also a rush of requests sent on LinkedIn, which I still haven't personally found useful. On top of the sadness of watching people pack up and leave, there was also the reality that we will have to work even harder to meet schedules with less people. On my project alone, we lost 8 people, which is substantial because we only had around 15 people to begin with. More work for everybody!

On a completely unrelated note, Taylor and I watched the original Scream trilogy, refreshing ourselves for the newest sequel. I'm not a big horror movie fan, but the Scream series' mix of parody and horror works well for me.

I finished a book I started many months ago, Stranger in a Strange Land. I rated it a 3/5 stars on Goodreads. It was a pretty good book, and this might by attributed to the long periods of time where I stopped reading, but I found parts of it very long-winded and serving no purpose. I remember a part in the book that was about 6 pages of dialogue between two characters discussing statues. Why? The book overall was good, and showed an interesting perspective on our society and what we consider "normal." I had an internal struggle when deciding the next book to read: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo or The Dark Tower, and ended up deciding on the former since I've had it on my shelf longer.

We had our final two regular season flag football games on Monday, and they did not go well at all. We lost both games, but it's hard to be disheartened. We got screwed on scheduling, and they gave us a back-to-back double-header against the best two teams in the league. Let me give you an idea on the skills disparity between the teams in this league. We beat most of the teams in the league by 30-40 points, and yet these two teams beat us by 20-30 points. That's a huge disparity between the best, the middle, and the crappier teams. I should also mention that the people on the first team we played on Monday were all wearing wristbands with plays on them. Need I remind you that this is a super social league, which is categorized as a league "for players with limited football skills / recreational league." If you're going to be that douchebag team where everyone is wearing wristband playbooks, then go into the competitive league. Nevertheless, we still managed to make playoffs as a 3-3 team, and our first game is next Monday against a team we should have no problem with.

And now I leave you with something completely different: