Blog Number 185

Greetings and welcome to today's random thought.

Today was "Take Your Son To Work Day" or more generically "Take Your Sons and Daughters To Work Day" but since the daughter is a little young I opted only to bring the son.  He has been counting down the days since I told him about it 2 weeks ago.  He wanted to do everything that daddy did (including eating breakfast in the car on the way to work - though we opted for a bagel from the cafeteria at work instead).  There was a registration and a kick off meeting and then they were split up into groups for the next 3 hours.  The parents had the options of staying with the kids but he seemed to be ok on his own (and I did not really want to spend 30 minutes making my own trail mix which was the first thing they did - not sure how that has anything to do with what I do at work really).

I picked him up around noon, we got in line at the cafeteria and then met a friend of mine for lunch.  I have a friend that I meet each Friday during lunch for a game of chess.  I have never won a game against him so I opted to let the son play today and even though he eventually lost, he did play an excellent game.  By the time we were done it was about 1:00 and I had an important phone conference at 2:30 (that I was leading) so I spent some time preparing for that and answering the son's questions about what I do and what I was doing.  He did get to use my phone headset which he thought was really cool and then I took him and showed him a very vital skill set that would get him far in life.  Briefly, here were my instructions on performing this task...

1. Empty the old coffee filter.
2. Place a new coffee filter in is place.
3. Open and empty the pre-packaged coffee into the coffee filter.
4. Hit the BREW button
5. Wait
6. Poor cup of coffee

He was not paying attention so it might take a few more lessons.  My meeting went long but it went well and afterwards we walked around a little and talked to some co-workers.  He was still smiling as we drove home.  All in all, a great day.

One word of note, a co-worker has started blogging so check out his sight - http://www.xanga.com/skonecny.

Thanks for reading my Random Thoughts.

Jon