The things you figure out at dinner

1. There is a generation of "New Yuppies" and they embrace cheap ideals ... like using olive oil on leather shoes to cover scuffs and super glue to fix their purses. You can't run from being a yuppie, you can only give in.

2. Lou Pearlman does in fact look like Fat Bastard.

3. Even on Iron Chef, its a bad idea to make a dessert around the "shrimp" theme.

4. Vision Quest was a fine film that included at least one Survivor song in their soundtrack.

5. There are a whole slew of things that a guy should not do on a first day, which include (but are not limited to): announcing that you 'have always loved' the person you are on a date with, asking if the lady wants children, and then announcing that you want seven. It's uncouth to tell a woman that "we're not going to have dinner, so make sure you eat something" and then order the lady too many drinks.

6. When traveling to Great Britain, always specify that you want an automatic transmission, lest you rent from Hertz in Edinburgh and wind up in a traffic circle, with a manual transmission, driving on the opposite side of the road from what you know, left to your own ingenuity to find your way out of the city.

7. At Cold Stone Creamery, the employees are forced to sing songs when a customer orders any one of the pre-determined ice cream treats. In our opinion, this is both degrading to employees and embarassing to the person who orders the item that "makes" them all sing. We had to leave quickly after we'd purchased our ice cream.

I found your resume over LinkedIn

It was a normal, hectic Thursday. The Director of IT and I were working together to get a new hosting vendor on line for the site we launched a while back. We needed to move our video files over to the new servers so that we'd be ready for an onslaught of visitors we were expecting on Saturday. And, in the process, we'd run into a little glitch and needed to speak to our rep over at the vendor. Easy enough.

I decided that we should go back over to my desk and see if Nathan (the rep) had called, and if he had not, we'd call him back, together from there. Emilio and I get over to my desk and behold! the little "new message" light is on, so I have a message. We sit down and I tell Emilio "That must be Nathan, let's call and see what message he left."

I turn on the speakerphone, dial in to the voicemail, and get into the message.

"Hi, Neomi, this is Lori, and I found your resume on LinkedIn. I'm calling to see if you might be interested in a position as a Senior Project Manager for one of my clients. " At this point, I'm thinking, oh crap. I've got the Director of IT sitting next to me and he's just heard that a recruiter is calling me. This is not good. But yet I can't turn off the speakerphone. I'm strangely drawn to hear more...

"We'll need to talk about your salary expectations, and I think that you'll find that my client will be quite competitive. The company itself is mypleasures.com," she pauses and giggles, "and they are an adult entertainment site. It's a progressive environment, with great benefits ..." and right then I just hit the fast forward and then the delete button. My heavens! I've been called by a recruiter, from an adult entertainment site, and I've managed to take the call with another person listening in. How do I do this kind of thing?

I turn to Emilio and say "I'm so embarrased, first that you heard a recruiter calling me, and second that they were calling from an porn site. I don't even know what to say."

And Emilio says, "What, you're not going to call them back?!?"

Fast forward to the next day, when I'm still thinking that some crazy porn site tried to recruit me, and since a director heard the call, the news is probably all the way back to the senior management team by now. I run into my good friend Russel at a bus stop. And Russel says, "Hey, I heard that you got a job offer yesterday from mypleasures.com. Congrats!"

And I look at him like he's crazy, and then I get it. This was a prank!! Russell knows about it! And, he works at the company I used to work at, and one of the women there loves to do crank calls. Of course!

It took several days for me to really piece the story together, but it turns out that Jenny called me on her last day at that company (she'd already given notice and accepted another job), and she made the call at a big project manager meeting. They all listened in! They all thought it was hilarious, and when they found out I'd taken the voicemail in front of someone at work, they all laughed even harder.

Now, how do I tell Emilio that that was all a prank call?

Uh yeah, hi

So I kinda want to brag, but that's not really my style. Let's just say I went away and produced a really big website. It involved a 3 day video shoot, and some time in Salt Lake City. And then, after the big site was launched I got really sick. Because adult life is just like when you were in college, except now instead of crashing after finals, I crash after a big project. Oh, and I don't live in the sorority house, and I make money, and I don't party as much, and I don't live by the beach. Meh. Still, I was on antibiotics for 3 weeks and diagnosed with my first migraine ever. Which is sad.

Today at work, one of my co-workers, a nice guy named Larry decided to IM me a link to a fart sound mixing board. (This shouldn't surprise you, because I also love self inflating whoopee cushions.) I did some really nice fart mixology, and was quite pleased with myself this afternoon. My newish neighbor, Janice was laughing pretty hard at some of the tracks I was laying down. Then Larry called and was playing farts for us, and we put him on speaker phone and were really dueling it out, all West Side Story-like. And then, of course, the president walks by my desk and says hello.