The visit to our friends as planned last night did not go off as planned. Figment had unforeseen delays getting here -- the street was blocked off by my apartment again, so he wound up finding a long way around and a place to park.

This wound up having us arrive late at dustraven and trystan_laryssa's, and the porch light's inactive state indicated that they'd probably crashed out for the night. So we grabbed dinner and went over to Figment's to watch The Sixth Sense. (I swear, the man's getting me up to speed on current culture.) After that, I changed into the nightgown I'd brought and crashed out on the couch; we had vague plans involving Saturday morning cartoons for when we woke up. He'd gotten chocolate milk just in case I wound up over there. (He's so very sweet...)

I woke up around nine to Figment urgently shaking me by the ankle. "My parents are here!" he hissed.

Now, for background, Figment is a good 12.5 years older than I am, but he is also the baby of the family, and a member of a conservative religion that would generally frown on having a scantily-clad pagan girl sleeping on the couch, just in case something steamy might potentially go on, or even if it wouldn't, just because it looks bad. He has never had to sneak around with girls with his parents before.

He has recently been having your standard assortment of homeowner headaches, mostly involving plumbing, and the tearing-apart of walls in order to fix same plumbing. His parents have been helping him out.

I grabbed my clothes and scattered for the guest bathroom, which was perhaps not the best of choices. I dressed there, then judged that the coast was clear and came out and sat in the den quietly, figuring that this would work with whichever way Figment wanted to play it -- either I'd be dressed and presentable to introduce to the parents, or I'd be out of sight so he could maintain plausible deniability by finding somewhere for me to hide.

Figment opted to have me hide somewhere.
"This is one of those things that's going to get worse, rather than better, the longer it goes," I cautioned, thinking that what would be worse than Figment's parents walking in and seeing a strange woman sleeping on the couch would be for Figment's parents to unexpectedly discover a strange woman who Figment had been hiding from them, long enough after they got there that there would be no doubt that we'd been trying to conceal my presence, leading to uncomfortable questions like, "Just how well do you know my son, anyway?" and those other ones about religion.

Figment ran me down the hall and into the closet in the master bedroom. He settled me on the floor, slid the door closed, flipped on the light, and zoomed off to interact with his parents. I curled up on a convenient blanket and attempted to take a nap.

Figment eventually came to check on me, and at my hissed instructions, turned off the light. The closet was large, for a closet, but cluttered and crowded, without any room to stretch. I was getting very thirsty, and I needed to use the bathroom. A nap sounded like my best option. I tried to shift position silently.

There were intermittent brief conferences with Figment, mostly involving how to get me out in time to go home in a timely fashion, and how to convince his parents to leave. He'd never been in a situation where he'd wanted or needed to boss them around before.

Shouldn't I have been through with this in high school? I wondered, and diverted myself by trying to think back and remember if I'd done any hiding in closets during my high school era, or if I'd had anyone hiding in a closet. (I hadn't in high school, but there had been a guy hiding in a closet in my dorm during my first attempt at college for G-rated reasons, and then there were a few comedies of panic involving BJ's mother and her not seeing me in BJ's room.) In any case, the situation struck me as far too juvenile to be the sort of thing that a woman my age, let alone a man his age, should be engaging in, and that struck me as hilariously funny. I kept myself from laughing.

Figment eventually managed to imply that he had stuff to be getting done that he wanted to get done without tripping over parents. "You have about two minutes if you want to sneak out now," he whispered to me, and left the closet door open.

I looked around me. He'd moved my bag with my keys to a convenient location nearby, but I didn't know where my shoes were. I slid the door back mostly closed again, caught Figment's eye, and shook my head vigorously. No! Your cunning plan has failed! He acknowledged my signal, and I ducked out of sight just as his father came into view (ahead of schedule according to Figment's two minute estimate).

His parents left, then, and I was able to come out of the closet. Figment apologized profusely for the entire situation; I cracked up laughing at long last.

It's those little bonding experiences...

Other than my brain falling apart far too late the other night, I've been having a good couple of days. Work yesterday was insane but otherwise decent -- I was running check-in, and while my hours were adding just fine, the day was made to be nutso by a batch of very irate callers around 7pm or so. One lady was mad because we were calling her at 9:20 pm (and I can see being annoyed, but this was serious off-the-handle stuff involving screaming, profanity, threats to sue and/or fire people, and the CEO's contact information), and one guy absolutely positively needed to talk to a supervisor because he needed us to send him a free box of cigarettes. (WTF? We're trying to gather opinions, not send out boxes of death sticks.) After that, someone got upset about being called "man" (the fellow in question has an accent, and was actually saying "ma'am") and someone else threatened to fly down to Phoenix to take care of things in person.

It's the end of the month and stuff is closing down, so all the phone goons but a last little cluster got off early, leaving just one supervisor cleaning up the last stuff, me, the Stressy College Chick Shift Ops Super, and the Lead Trainer Monitor with a clutch of n00bs in training. I needed to stay to do the paperwork, the Stressy College Chick can't leave until after I do, and then Pirate Comic Super was taking care of the computers and kickin' it and gossiping about his youthful sexual misadventures. Many lessons can be learned from his counter example...

• When you are a high school kid with a girlfriend, the walk-in freezer sounds like a pretty good place to get it on.
• Once.
• After that, you prefer the refrigerator.
• Or the roof.
• Or the ladies' room at the park.
• Or, in fact, anywhere else you can get it on.
• In some cases, it's advisable to check the religion of your partner before the act.
• Once your partner has informed you that she's a member of the Church of Latter-Day Saints, it's very much not advisable to say, "Well, at least you're not a fuckin' Mormon."
• After she hits you (hard), you should at least apologize.

Today, I was on the phones (in theory); I was testing one of the re-written surveys for next month until well after break, and that was a pain in the arse. We were comparing the survey on the computer to the paper survey, noting the discrepancies, and noting the other things wrong with it.

There were a handful of questions from the old version that popped up out of bloody nowhere in the middle of the thing, causing me to cuss, yowl, scowl, write up a handful of furious notes, and utterly doubt my sanity. The survey branched without warning, and one combination of choices caused it to go on one track, and another handful of choices caused it to go on another, and I wound up making a flowchart (color-coded) to illustrate what was going on. Sadly, my favorite line from the snarky commentary (Inevitably, VAR_043U is followed by VAR_043V, but not by inner peace, for neither of them exist, according to the paper survey!) could not be used, because it turned out that it was only Q through T that were not supposed to be there; U happened some pages later in the paper version, albeit out of sequence with what was actually going on with the computer version.

Another question had been re-worded from the paper version and wound up asking an utterly different question (the paper version wanted to know how important it was that $COMPANY do such-and-such an item; the computer version wanted to know how $COMPANY was doing on the issue), and I'll leave it to the fine people in the back room to figure out which the fuck is supposed to be there.

A third set of questions had other issues. Comic Pirate Super came over to ask me how it was doing. "Found anything?" he asked.
"Yep, it's dreadful."
"That was not what I wanted to hear."
"But it's not a really big deal."
"Oh, good."
"But it is."
"WTF?"
So I explained: the formatting of the question was screwed, so the question's three responses with letter-perfect identical beginnings had the all-crucial different endings shoved so far the crap over on the screen that they went off the screen and were therefore invisible, and therefore unreadable and indistinguishable. It made the question useless, but fixing it was not a programming issue, just a reformatting issue, and therefore easy.

My obsessive attention to detail resulted in the Short Chick Super not having to do half as much work, because I'd already found the major problems with the survey and yelled about them at length, and she didn't need to duplicate my work.

Once we'd finally gone through and found all the problems, and gotten enough test surveys input to make the people in the back room happy, we wound up back on the phones. By that time, though, there were only a few hours left. I wound up getting one survey, and two and a half pages of random scribbling. The respondent was a nice and well-informed one, and there were things that didn't fit into the survey, sure enough, so we'll see what happens when that survey gets reformatted again. (It was already re-done just the other month, so it's got bugs out the wazoozie.)

So, yeah. Work. Fun. Stuff closed, so by 3:15, I was off the phones and cleaning up. I got in a half-hour of cleanup, including the much-needed refilling of the 409 bottles, then off home!

Life has struck again, and ...

What do you say when one moment you're panicked for your Evil Twin's immortal soul, and then a half-hour later, your spate of button-mashing has produced the exact effects you were looking for, if not in a way you were expecting?

My newest bondmate is now single-minded in purpose, and we've established for once and for all that his church is, in essence, a church of perfectionists looking to get absolute control over their lives to avoid unpredictable emotional spikes, for ill or for good. I'd die without emotional spiking.

I can taste some of the farewells in the air already. It's rare that I start out-and-out bawling these days, and even more rare that I do so when not in the company of either my Priestess-Confessor or her left hand man.

On the one hand, I got what I wanted. It took more than a month, but I wound up doing what I set out to. I was the woman, the gimp for the job.