A message from your always gracious hostess: Let us all pretend that I did not just vanish off the face of the earth for over a month. Best to put that behind us and just carry on as if that had not happened, complete with whatever apologies I should make and promises to not disappear again. Though, if I ever disappear for that reason again then something has gone terribly wrong. Let me put it this way: previously I had one very firm rule for picking places we could live: no tsunamis. Walls of water freak me out! Now my rule has expanded to include no tsunamis and no countries eligible to host the conference we just finished hosting. Imminently reasonable, in my always humble opinion. Now, let us resume our regular blogging schedule.
A week to ten days before the big event the whole pace of the Embassy had shifted into high gear. The building was packed with short term employees sent out from various offices in DC, so suddenly you really did not recognize every single face you saw in the halls (both disconcerting and kind of fun. Variety!). Everyone was sleeping too little, drinking to much, and mostly subsisting on various types of candy handed out at meetings to try to keep the mob under control (I usually brought tootsie roll pops, and twizzlers to my meetings, I am just that kind of girl). I would leave my desk for 10 minutes to do something crazy like go to the bathroom and refill my water bottle and come back to 15 new emails in my inbox, the majority of them requiring some sort of response or action on my part, most of those making me want to stab someone with a fork.
Of course, all of this is exactly what one should expect when a whole bunch of VIPs descend like locusts in conjunction with a big conference. The best you can hope for is controlled chaos and that everyone walks away happy with little to no inkling of the madness going on behind the scenes.
So, one of the many things going on at the Embassy was that a ton of art was finally being placed. Some sculptured, some wall hanging quilts, some big photos of animals, a whole grab bag of stuff including, obviously, Elvis. I kid you not. A wooden ceremonial mask of Elvis in a nice plexiglass display case appeared, as if by magic, one morning. We are talking end of career fat Elvis, complete with big sideburns. He was the talk of the Embassy, with many, myself included, declaring him "creepy." And then, as if having Elvis in the building wasn't awesome enough, he started to move every night!!! Everyone had thought about it, several had mentioned the idea, but someone (or several someones, I still don't know for sure) was actually executing the plan and moving Elvis around the building at night. It was one of the best things ever!
The fact that someone was being clever enough, in the midst of all that was going on, to do exactly what everyone was thinking and actually move Elvis around was priceless. It was one of the funniest things ever. It made it ok that I was coming into the office at 7am on a Saturday because Elvis greeted me at the elevator! I was less likely to kill the very very young, very very obnoxious DC folks who seemed to always be checking Facebook in the control room rather than doing, you know, work (those damn kids today!) because I had spotted Elvis lurking by the water fountain.
And then, after the conference closed, and the last VIP was wheels up and it was time to rest and drink and work on rebuilding intra-Embassy relations after everyone had been angry and snippy and grumpy for weeks, Elvis made one last spectacular appearance: at the podium oh so recently occupied by someone Very Very Important, complete with his very own conference badge:
No comments:
Post a Comment