« A Bridge Too Far | Main | Madison This Morning »
December 3, 2010
Five Miles Cold
Geese rise like locusts above frozen fields as I drive north on Highway 151. So cold you just can't know.
Imagine that it's 14 degrees F and I'm going 75 mph on a dirt bike. With 100% humidity. Imagine driving like that for five miles.
The odometer ticks off tenths of miles as the life drains out of me through the gaps in my clothing.
At first, I'm watching for patches of ice and running somewhere near the speed limit, but after a while, I just can't stand it so I open the throttle and let it breathe.
My left hand shields the air from entering the bottom of the helmet near my face. The wind is so cold you can feel where it worms its way into your skin. Working and twisting and tunneling down until it finds and burns the skin.
Nothing now but pain and throttle and adrenaline. Bare trees. Great clouds of geese heading anywhere but here. Anything must be better than this.
At work, a little patch of ice where I turn in but somehow I miss it. Always I just barely miss it.
This is my last day in Wisconsin, so I try to be strong. Try to put a brave face on but when I walk in, I can't see. I walk in like a storm trooper. Helmet. Gloves. Jacket.
Everthing fogs up and I walk in late, in the middle of a teleconference. It's my last day, but no, they've decided I need to stay in Wisconsin for a few more weeks so we just freeze the code and start migrating everything into production. Hundreds of programs and screens, tables and fields, portal objects and sql objects. Everything we've created and tested over the past few months gets migrated into production.
Thousands of lines of code are moving up into production and while this happens, I call John and ask him if his offer still stands. If he'll store my bike for me and he says "sure, come on".
I drive my bike north through the bright pain of December's fields. Great fields turned under by the invisible farmers.
At John's place we load it in the trailer and he drives me back to work so that we can keep working.
Back at the office, this beautiful little girl comes in and she's leaving next week apparently. Now, she wouldn't give me the time of day when we worked together, but now she suddenly shows up and wants to get her picture taken with me and I'm like "seriously?" As in, "you've never spoken to me before today. What gives?"
I'm now completely sure that I have no idea what goes on inside a woman's head. No clue. Not that I ever thought I knew before, but today I'm more sure than ever that, not only do we not understand what goes on inside a woman's head, but we can never know. It is beyond scrutiny. A woman's brain must work something like a Pachinko machine, I think.
Posted by Rob Kiser on December 3, 2010 at 4:54 PM
Comments
Ah, to think of the stories she can tell about this handsome young man she worked with in Wisconsin. See here's a picture of us together at work. It was a special winter....and she smiles a secret smile and those around her just know she has oh such grand memories. One must think outside the box.
Posted by: Pachinko on December 5, 2010 at 12:09 AM