I got an email back inviting me to an interview. They were looking for someone to play video games.

My desk is on the bottom left of this picture. It is smaller, but I had less to do than either Phil or Mary (the two officemates).

I think the company bought most of the room's decorations from Showcase Furniture in Richmond. Basically, if you have two hundred or more dollars to spend, you can also go in and buy things that you could never imagine putting in your home.

You will notice my backpack and mini-cooler on the seat. I travelled light, but not that light. About 50% of the time, I would wait until everyone else had gone to lunch, and then I would walk down to VCU and eat/people watch. I was always thinking that maybe I would run into someone I knew and I could tell them about my awesome job. I did eat lunch with people, but it was normally because I scheduled it. VCU in the summer just didn't attract enough people to make the random meeting a reality. I remember bumping into Sarah Jennings once while she was driving around. That was the extent of the payoff for always eating around VCU. During one of my visits to the medical library at VCU, I ate lunch with Lindsay Guthrie and Jenny (something or other), since they were both doing office work there. I am sure they were making good money, but I was the one who played video games. I tried not to rub that in, as I recall. Actually, I do not remember what we talked about, nor do I remember how we organized the food. I just remember Jenny (or not, since I cannot remember her last name) talking about how someone very old was flirting with her all the time in her building. Also, I remember eating something with tomato sauce, so my only worry during the entire meal was that I would some how get it on my pants. I got to wear business casual, but I only had two pairs of khaki pants. We were eating outside on benches, so I had no table that could catch drips. It was up to me to remember to eat over the napkin, lean out over the ground, or do whatever. This is probably why I cannot remember the conversation. I was focused on eating cleanly, and everything else would just have to wait for another time. Like the next year, when I stole a soap cube. Ah, memories.

This is the break room. The Fridge was stocked with free drinks. The foosball table was also free. I would normally come in with some extra snacks in my cooler. Usually a small bag of chips. I recall always trying to arrive at 8:35, just because it felt like the best way to avoid the 9 am rush and also justify leaving by 5:30 (Video game playing gets old after 5 hours). So, with my snack, I would usually have an OJ. If OJ was gone, I would do apple, and if apple was gone, I would do grape. If all three failed, then I just wept. With lunch, I would usually have brought my own coke 20 oz (I was a growing boy), so the fridge could rest easy. I tried to do lunch at 1:30. That meant that I would get back to my desk at 2:15 and only have three hours left. There was just something tough about coming back from Lunch and having 4+ hours. But still around 3, when the food started to make me a little sleepy, I would go to the fridge and take my free soda. I think that you could assume that the soda and juice would have both cost me 40 cents a day, so that is another 10cents I was making each hour. If only I had established some kind of smuggling operation.

I had really never played foosball competitively until this summer. These guys were good. The engineers, the marketers, all of them knew how to play. It must have been bigger in the 1980s (as you could see from the movie "Longshot Kids"). Anyways, unlike them, I was starting from nothing. This made my learning curve seem gigantic. There was a pretty obvious pecking order with Tom at the top. Honestly, after eleven weeks of playing, he still could beat me 10-1, but I was somewhere in the top 3 of the 20 person staff. (Probably only 9 people played, but you have to try and expand the universe as much as possible.) Since you could normally find 4 people who wanted to play, doubles was normally the way to go. My best skill was as defense, since in foosball, the defender can sometimes have a better chance of scoring, because you get to us angles, and the goalie on the other side probably hasn't had much practice defending the long shot. So, I would play with someone who had no skill in offense, and I would probably score 5-7 of our 10 points.

My foosball skill would quickly pay off at the University. It turns out several of the people I knew either had home foosball tables, or had spend enough time playing together that they could hold their own. This is just where I would like to point out that my record against Penn was something like 14-1. She never called me back after she beat me. It was 10-8 or something. Anyways, that is how I remember it. Also, there was one time I beat her 10-0, which is the equivilent of Hiroshima. Boom.

I still had all the funny bumper stickers on my car at this point, so I must have turned a few heads. At least, I like to think so.

Having my car meant that I could go down south to Chesterfield instead of home right after work. I believe that one time I even drove out to Charlottesville for a Wash event directly from work. The sleeping bag and overnight bag were just packed Thursday night. As you can see, the one big problem was the long pants during the summer. But when there are problems, you just rise to meet the challenges. I made lemonade. (Sarah Silverman joke: Intro about how if everyone had AIDS it would be like no one had AIDS. Blah Blah. So, if God gives you AIDS, and yes, God is the one giving people AIDS, you should try and make lemon-aids.) The one skill I used from Books-a-Million was changing the pants in the car. Since I will not cover it there, I will cover it here, where the picture shows me outside.

1. Untie your shoes as you get into the car, then take them off and start driving.
2. At the first traffic light, undo your belt and the zipper and seat belt (yes, this is illegal)
3. As you drive, sit up, and get the pants down to your thighs (if they are still under you, it is basically impossible to pull them down with your butt still on the seat.
4. Then, at the next traffic light, pull your free leg out of the pants, then use that foot to press down on the brake
5. With the foot that has now been replaced, do the same thing.
6. You now need to quickly get your shorts down around your ankles.
7. As you drive, position your free (non-accelerator) at the shorts.
8. At the next light, reverse the instructions about the pants, and boom, you are ready to go.
9. (anything involving the shirt requires you to undo the shoulder harness (on my car, the seat belt and sholder harness were two seperate things)