I had a work emergency. As I mentioned a while back, my boss here is, in addition to my tattletale duties, asking me to build email and web tools that, as far as I can tell, already exist in the form of open source projects, giving me unprecedented amounts of free time.

Except on Tuesday afternoon, he pulled me into his office, all excited, and showed me an article he had been reading in one of his multi-level marketing guru websites about an exciting "program" that could be repurposed for spamming.

It came complete with screenshots.

So Devin has me look at this and says, "This is a lot like one of the projects I’m having you work on, but with some cool extra features. Could you add those features to the project?"

What I did not answer was, "Sure I can, because I found this utility about two weeks ago, had inserted the company logo and removed the opensource citations from the interface, and was planning on giving it to you next week, saying I had come up with a few new features you might be interested in, therefore making you think I’m the best employee in the world even though I’ve spent exactly 90 minutes actually working this month."

Instead, I said, "No problem, but some of those features may not make it into version 1.0" and then I’ve spent the past two days doing the first actual hard work I’ve had to do for this job: covering my ass. I’ve been skinning the interface to make it look completely different (and let’s face it: worse) than it used to. I’ve disabled or hidden the interface to some of the features he was excited about. Then I can add them in later.

I think I’m safe. I also think I need to start paying attention to the work-related sites Devin reads, to make sure this doesn’t happen again.

Anyway, that’s why I haven’t had time to post.

I should recap really fast what happened in that lunch with Mary, even though it’s nowhere near as fresh in my mind as it used to be.

Basically, she told me how hard it is to resolve her faith with her "animal urges," as she called them, and that she hoped I would not tell Devin either about her "devil-sent desires" nor about her "disgusting" workplace porn habit.

And I did the weirdest thing: I started laughing. I told her I was sorry for laughing, even though I was suppressing a laugh while I did it. And I told her that I didn’t really care about what kind of porn she looks at, as long as she stopped pushing religion on me. And that I didn’t plan to tell on her or anyone else in the company.

When, a second ago, I said laughing was the weirdest thing, I was wrong. What came next was the weirdest thing. She offered me her hand, and we shook. As if we had just concluded an important negotiation. If I would have thought about it, I would have suggested we spit on our hands before shaking.

And then, later that afternoon, Mary sent me an Outlook meeting: a recurring Thursday lunch meeting. I accepted. Hell, why not?