Workin' 9 to 5:30ish...

I should mention that I am now employed again. So now I'm going to have to make my life about something other than my unemployment. What to do, what to do....

I'm working in downtown Seattle, at a non-profit I don't want to disclose, in case I have Internet stalkers or something, so please don't out me in my comments sections, and run-on sentences are fun. But being that I'm now a city girl, or at least a one who is employed by an organization located in the city, I'm realizing that I will have lots of good fodder for blogging, or just conversational pieces. Not the confidential stuff, of course, because I would like not to get fired. Also because breaking confidences are not cool. But the other stuff. Like the naked man.

So I'm sitting in my office last week, and all of the sudden I hear the woman at the front desk say "there is a naked man out there," with kind of the same inflection one might use to say "those are some ugly pants he's wearing." Except he wasn't wearing pants. Or anything else. Not even socks. So she said the former, not the latter. The bike cops were already talking to him and trying to convince him to put some clothes on, once they located some. Apparently he wasn't very responsive. This might have been a good thing, since one of the responding officers was telling us that naked people can actually be some of the most dangerous and aggressive--the nakedness being an outward manifestation of some serious crazy. I always thought of streakers as peace loving hippies. Not so, apparently. At least not in Seattle. Maybe in Berkley or something. Anyways, of course when you hear something like that you can't stay in your office, even if you don't really want to be scarred with the vision of nakedness. So I started to come out front, and the staff said, "oh, no, you don't want to see this," as she picked up the phone and paged another staff by saying "(Staff name), please come to the front, you've got to see this." Apparently I must exude Mormon-ness because she knew right away that my virgin eyes could not handle the sight of Naked Man. Pretty quickly a cruiser appeared with a real policeman (something about the bike and the neon yellow coat tells me that the bike police pretty much have the authority to direct traffic). Then a fire truck showed up, and I believe a medic. I've been told that the fire station is called to medical scenes because they have trained medics or something and can usually get there first, being based in stations out in the community. Or I could be making that up. But that's what I think I was told once. Anyways, so at some point he sat down on the sidewalk, and eventually one of the officers coaxed him into putting on some pants or something. I was trying not to do the whole standing around gawking thing, because I was supposed to be working or something. As opposed to all the hecklers I hear were across the street yelling things at Naked Man throughout the spectacle.

This didn't happen at my old job.