Standing Up and Standing Out
I drove up to the cities Tuesday night after work, because I had this big important conference to attend Wednesday and I figured it gave me the perfect excuse to see Melissa during the week. She's drowning in final exam and final project work this week, but we still found time to go out to eat and enjoy some quality copulation.
We ate at Ol Mexico Tuesday night, and much to my wonderful surprise, we discovered that they have NTN trivia, which is a borderline obsession with me. We ate and drank and played trivia until 11 p.m., and it was probably the most perfect Tuesday evening I've enjoyed in months. We got back to Mel's apartment and she insisted on a quickie because she wanted to get as much sleep as possible before taking her exam on Wednesday. Now, if there's one thing about condoms, they preclude any possibility of a quickie. Quickie's don't happen with condoms unless you're a 17 year old male about to boink a porn star. I told Mel that, since a quickie just wouldn't be possible, we'd be better off just going to bed. She wouldn't hear of it, so we proceeded to have a "longie" instead. I was fine with that.
Wednesday, I drove to the big important conference, which was the grand unvieling of a new technology enablement center put together by some company called MSI Systems Integrators. It wasn't an incredible waste of time, but from my standpoint as the product news writer for our magazine, they didn't bring much to the table. I arrived about five minutes late, and when I entered the conference hall, I became immediately aware that I was the only person wearing jeans. Not that I really cared, but I definitely stood out in the sea of suits and ties and loafers. There I stood in my 1969 boot fit jeans, Sketchers, and a Gap short sleeved shirt with collar. And I continued to stand because most of the seats on the outside were taken and I didn't feel like shuffling my way to seats in the center. So, I stood in the back, the young pup bucking the undeclared dress code, and the only person not wearing a name tag. I felt a strange power to my anonymity, keeping MSI guessing whether I was a crasher or some high-powered new-age Hank Scorpio company president. Nope, I'm just Ryan Rhodes, a guy who doesn't dress up unless somebody died.
I will say one thing for the $4 million MSI TEC center: that place has A LOT of high technology toys, most of which was "donated" by IBM, including a huge mainframe, an iSeries 810, a Shark storage rack with 1.5 TB of data storage capability, and a slew of other equipment that could keep a small country operating well into the future. Pretty cool stuff, even though I have no idea how most of works. All I know is that the technology is what I write about, which in turn pays my rent and other life expenses, so I was obligated to ooh and ahh.
MSI knew how to shmooze, providing everything from limo rides, to snacks, to drinks. I almost didn't feel worthy in my jeans and Sketchers.
Last night, Mel and I went back to Ol Mexico for food and drink and trivia, and we also watched the Wild hockey team show that they are hopelessly outmatched by the Anaheim Mighty Ducks. Oh well, it's been a great ride.
And I got to have some stellar morning sex this before driving back to Rochester, and that always makes the drive home seem pretty groovy.
Posted by Ryan at May 15, 2003 10:30 AM
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