The tale of the purple shirt
This isn't really a story about a shirt, but rather a pretty amazing day that just so happened to involve a particular shirt.
See, there's this purple shirt that's been hanging up in one or the other of my closets since I moved to Palm Springs in June. I've never worn it... until today.
While I was ironing clothes earlier in the week, I decided it was time to bring some new-ish clothes into what was becoming a rather limited wardrobe. So I got my purple shirt all gussied up and ready for its debut.
I thought the purple shirt would look good with blue jeans, so I put it on today and unwittingly joined the ranks of the purple people eaters at The Desert Sun. It was one of those days when a bunch of us all happen to wear the same color, and today, purple was definitely the new black.
Aside from being one of the cool kids wearing purple and just generally doing what I love and loving what I do, my workday was especially enjoyable because of a technical fail that cracked me up.
I'm on a companywide listserv for people who deal with video. All of us listserv members get a daily budget of notable video content from around Gannett, and the list is also often used by people who want advice or need technical help on something video-related. When one such general question was sent out to the list this afternoon, though, all hell broke loose.
For some reason, the Outlook system at a paper back east replied to the list on behalf of someone out there who's out of the office. But the e-mail system didn't just send one out-of-office reply; it sent at least 195 copies of the same "I am currently out of the office" message to everyone on the list in what was quite possibly the funniest 15 minutes of my week.
The steady stream of out-of-office e-mails prompted me to giggle uncontrollably, and other listserv members' often-frenzied replies got me to bust out laughing:
SOMEONE TURN THIS OFF NOW!!!!!!!!!!! I've got about a dozen of these same emails!!!!
This is going to crash my inbox, please turn his out of office message off. I've gotten 20 of these.
Please take me off this list!!!!!
SOMEBODY STOP THIS CRAZY THING...I'VE GOTTEN DOZENS OF THESE MESSAGES.
MAKE IT STOP!!!
IT'S CRASHING MY SYSTEM...AND EVERYONE ELSES!!!
Me too!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Take me off this list!!!!!!!
Since exclamation points are something that journalists are expected to use very sparingly, if at all, I feel like the collective response to E-mailageddon 2010 must've depleted Gannett's supply of available exclamation points through at least 2050.
But it was hilarious!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! AND TOTALLY WORTH IT!!!!!
Anyway, after work and a stop at my apartment, I went to the opening of my friend Jayel's photography exhibit at a local Starbucks.
There, my purple shirt came into play again (See why I'm using it as a thread here?) as friends and strangers alike told me they liked the shirt and/or asked where I got it.
After the opening ended, we all (well, most of us) headed down to the Ace, where we used a gift certificate that Stacy won during a recent Ace bingo night to get a bunch of food at the bar. Most of it was delicious, but there was one notable exception — the grilled cheese that Stacy ordered.
The offending sandwich was passed around the table, and the consensus was clear: It... was... awful. To me, the sandwich tasted like an amplified version of how my dirty/sweaty socks smell after a long walk. It was so bad that I couldn't even swallow the trial bite I took; I had to spit it into a napkin.
Apparently, that's just the taste of one of the more obscure cheeses used in the multi-cheese blend that fills the sandwich, but wow. I don't think any of us at our table could stomach much of that taste.
But we didn't let some iffy cheese get us down. Instead, we headed up to Toucans and danced the rest of the night away.
While doing so, we ran into some people we knew, at least one other person who just looked like someone we knew and (of course) quite a few notbooks I wish I knew. Good thing I was all up in their peripheral vision wearing my oh-so-nice looking purple shirt. (And you thought I had forgotten about the shirt, didn't you?)
Oh, and Jayel and I staged a very brief performance atop one of the platforms reserved for go-go dancers, as I believe they're called, before we were told to get down by an angry-looking bouncer-type fella, a la getting booted from the stripper poles at Cherry in Tempe. That was like the cherry on top of a wonderful, full 7i, purple-shirt-wearing day.