The gaps in the filter

I've just come out of a major case of the flu, and it's nice to have a body temperature back near 98.6F. It got pretty high there, and due to everything I was working on sleep was in short supply.

The fever was unusual, but the pushing myself into a vaguely altered state of consciousness via stress and lack of sleep isn't -- I'm one of those children of the .com era that came to view crunch times, and sleeping in your office, as normality (I'm learning).

Unfortunately, every time I come out of one of these cycles the first thing I have to do is figure out who I owe an apology.

Everyone has a filter in their brain -- it's that mental membrane that exists to filter what you're thinking into what you actually say.

Under normal circumstances, I would have been recalled at birth due to mine being faulty, but I've sort of had to live with it and it usually just means some weird metaphors and jokes get thrown about. However, when I'm in one of those cycles, international incidents are just waiting to happen.

As an example, there's the story of when I was coming off of a project, and the project manager of another project was AWOL. I'm not a PM by trade, and not a particularly good one when forced to wear the hat -- I know good ones, and value them, and pretending I was mildly in their league would be an insult.

However, in this case the clients were flying in the next morning for a meeting, and as mentioned the PM had gone AWOL, and someone had to do a sit down with the client and everything that entailed. The problem was that I'd already been coming out of a crunch, and was low on sleep, and had to spend all night going through documents and files to understand the project so I could talk intelligently about it.

This led to a situation where, in the client meeting, I said (among other things) "Your market isn't the special olympics, you don't get credit just for playing."

From that line you can probably imagine how entertaining the meeting minutes were, and why they got passed around the office, and why I got to have a nice long chat with the CIO.

Trust me, I'm not proud of it. I'm the equivalent of a functioning alcoholic -- only verbal -- and I've had to learn how to work around the foot in my mouth. And when I'm in one of those cycles, and not working around it, things come out that shouldn't.

So, things over the last week that I owe some people apologies for:

To her, after offering to make me chicken soup:

"Well, I have to go, but I'll say a prayer for your health"

"Damnit! I just prayed to Satan for the same thing, you canceled mine out!"

Ticket #1423 in Hell for that one...

To another her, while sharing a meal at a restaurant. It should also be noted that she's 5'10, weighs 120lbs on a fat day, and she gives me hell over my vices and I give her hell over her (lack of) body weight:

"They didn't bring you a steak knife, do you need one?"

"No, I'll just use your elbow."

To another her, who on the one hand didn't know me that well, but on the other has spent enough time with me that she should've known better than to ask such an open-ended question:

Yeah? What was the first thing you thought when you first saw me? Your first impression.

"Dry-humping and trucker hats."

"???"

"What?"

To a him, who was filling me in on the current population estimates because he really cares about such things:

"Ugh, the UN just announced the population is going to top 9 billion by 2050."

"Oh well. One day closer to eating the extra."

"The extra???"

Unfortunately there are more, but I can't really repeat them here in good conscience for a whole variety of reasons... So we'll just have to do a blanket apology for the rest.

yummy alcohol posted button Posted by drunkenbatman
    March 03, 2005, at 12:26 AM


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