Extreme Telecommuting -- An Office Odyssey


these weeks in the odyssey
9.6.99 -- 9.20.99
edinburgh, scotland




Mind the Invisible Hands

If there's one thing we've learned on this here Odyssey, it's that you should probably avoid mocking the dead (or, the "Life Challenged," as they prefer to be called). Oh, sure, it's okay to stretch out on an Etruscan tomb here and there, but don't just out and out make fun of the dead. Don't taunt them. For example, one thing that you might not want to do is go to the grave of, say, the famous Scottish economist, Adam Smith -- you know, the guy who wrote famously in Wealth of Nations about how a market works best when unencumbered by artificial forces, guided as if by "an invisible hand" -- and say things like, "Ooooohhh, look out for the invisible hands! I'm soooo scared Mr. Famous Dead Economist Guy...whatchya gonna do, tickle me with your invisible hands?"

Yes, sadly, experience has taught me that these are not perhaps the best kinds of things to say at Adam Smith's grave. Despite Kristanne's earnest warnings to, "pipe down, wise-ass, before the dead rise and take you for their own," I persisted in being the funny guy, the wit, the rake, and now look at me in that picture over there -- I've got no hands. So, let my folly be your salvation and learn from my mistakes -- don't make fun of the dead. While I must say that I've strangely enjoyed the slow (and somewhat sloppy) process of learning to type with my tongue, it's probably not for everybody. Don't mess with the dead.




Please don't mock the deceased.

Just another Extreme day on the Odyssey

Fortunately for my continued employment, my brush with Adam Smith came late in the week, leaving me plenty of time to type my way towards some serious work deadlines, both hands clacking. Working from afar as we do, sometimes it's easy to forget that I really do have a job and that real people somewhere in the world would probably stop depositing real money in our all-too-real checking account if I just stopped working and went out to play some really bad golf every day. Really. So, in the interest of keeping us firmly grounded in reality (in addition to clothed, sheltered, and fed), I've been doing a whole heckuva lot of exactly what you see there at left -- sitting at my little desk in our apartment window and working away at some no-fooling technical manuals.

As fun as technical writing is, Kristanne has still not seen fit to join me in this endeavor. For whatever reason, she just doesn't seem to want to sit next to me while I type away, bobbing my head in time to the Beatles' "Blackbird" and making up verses like, "IP Router in the dead of night...take this subnet's traffic and make it fly. All your life...you were only waiting for a layer three packet to arrive." Actually, now that I think about it, I can't say as I really blame her. Technical writing can be a little bit surreal sometimes.


Still, this begs the question of exactly what the heck Kristanne has been up to while I've been working. Sometimes, I would hear strange noises coming from our apartment's other room...whispered voices and the rustling of paper, as if a sign reading, "Technical Writers -- Scotland's Scourge" was being unfurled from our window. Then, too, there were the loud noises I would hear in the street, cries of "The rain falls in Glasgow tonight," or, "Kristanne, the whale swims at midnight," or, "What do you do with a drunken sailor?," things like that. What was going on? Was there a rebellion in my midst? Were the Scots secretly plotting my downfall? Was Kristanne in on the whole thing, exchanging strangely coded messages with the locals to inform them of my whereabouts? Was I to be the victim of a conspiracy so vast as to defy credulity? After all, I'm a technical writer...lives and careers have been destroyed for less. Was my demise imminent?


Well, no. Not yet, anyway. As it turned out, Kristanne, being the friendly person that she is, has merely been saluting passersby with greetings gaily called out from our third floor apartment's window. There you see her at right, calling down to the people below, spreading goodwill and cheer wherever she goes. It's good for the soul. Also, it helps her to pass the time between FreeCell games on the other computer.

Still, no matter how hectic work gets here at the Odyssey, we're never too busy to stop and smell the roses. We're also never too busy to stop and sip the coffees, to stop and drink the beers, or to stop and crack the dumb jokes at the Famous Dead Economist's gravesite. Lamentably, however, we are sometimes too busy to stop and eat the haggises ("haggi?"). That's just the way our priorities fall. So, we're afraid you'll have to wait another week for tales of Scotland's most famous culinary treat. Still, we realize that our pledge to eat haggis is a sacred one, steeped in tradition and lamb offal and wrapped in a sheep's stomach, so rest assured that we will honor it...just not yet. Instead, we've decided to present you with some piercing insights on Britain's culinary tradition. Certainly, we've all heard tales of British food -- by reputation, overcooked, unidentifiable, and flavorless -- but what's the reality of the situation? What is British food really like?

Our Kristanne is so house-proud.

Precooked, preprocessed, prepackaged, and, sometimes, prehistoric.

Actually, overcooked, unidentifiable, and flavorless pretty much gets it. Well, maybe we should add "bad mouth feel" to that list, too. It's really rather astounding that a country otherwise associated with the 20th century has yet to find a way to prepare food other than by boiling it into limp submission. Of course, it's also astounding that the whole dentistry fad so popular in the rest of the civilized world has yet to really find a foothold here, either. Basically, what you've got is an entire nation of snaggle-toothed people pouring bottle after bottle of condiments onto boiled (or microwaved) matter and then gumming it into digestibility. I mean, that's not in the national anthem, or anything, but still, you get the picture.

In addition to being rather flavorless, British cuisine also seems to have missed out on some important developments over the years. Perhaps you've heard of this recent phenomenon known as "vegetables?" They're typically green things, often grown in the earth and then transported to your table. Since they're often boiled, I would have figured that the Brits would know about them. I would have figured wrong. Now, I'm no nancified, alfalfa-chewing vegetarian -- I enjoy some meat now and again -- but I can still see the value in a good, fresh vegetable. The Brits, by contrast, live in this surreal post-apocalyptic foodscape where food doesn't really exist as food until it has been frozen and/or boiled at least once. Check out poor, confused Kristanne in that British supermarket shown at left. She's wandering about in a daze, vainly searching for something fresh to eat. She's not going to find it here. This supermarket consists solely of four long aisles of freezer cases, each case topped with a mammoth condiment display and then filled with prepackaged things that were once boiled. Now, they're waiting to be microwaved. If there's ever another famine over here, it's not going to be because they run out of potatoes -- it's going to be because the Y2K bug causes their microwave ovens to all go on the fritz and they'll be stuck with a bunch of prepackaged frozen foods that no one knows what to do with. That's why I got me a little generator, a barrel of rain water, and a cache of weapons hid up in the hills. Me and the Anti-Flirt are going to be ready when the infrastructure crashes and the U.N. finally decides to take over. Don't tread on us, baby!


Now, don't get me wrong -- it's not all boiled beef and bad teeth here in Britain. There's also a lot of warm beer and a surprisingly large amount of karaoke. Ah, and then there are the Scots themselves -- an amazingly warm people, quick with a joke, only too happy to regale you with a story or just to exchange a kind word in passing. Certainly, living in a place where English is the first language has something to do with it, but we've had an enormous amount of conversations with the locals here...far more than we ever do back home in reserved, retiring Seattle. Conversations start very easily here, flow effortlessly, and then tend to close when they've reached their natural limits...just like a conversation with a non-drunk stranger should. Conversations with drunk strangers we'll save for another day; suffice it to say that living in Scotland has brought us more than a few of those, too!

Doing this Odyssey the way we are -- two month stays in places we'd like to live -- has its benefits and its drawbacks. Living in a place as we are, you really start to feel like you know the city. You feel like you're stepping out of your tourist shoes and into your local's wellies. The downside of this is that you tend to get complacent, conveniently forgetting that two months really isn't all that much time to see a place. I'm particularly guilty of this. Kristanne will say something like, "let's go see the castle," or, "let's go see this church," or, "let's go for a hike in Holyrood Park," and I'll reply by saying, "Posh on that tourist fuffle. Let's go down to the local and take in the football match with me lads." It's at about this point that Kristanne says something like, "Don't make me get the Michelin Guide, Brit-boy," and we head off to see whatever cultural wonder we were in danger of missing out on today. So, despite my worst efforts, it hasn't quite been all work and no play here on the Office Odyssey homestead. Kristanne did manage to drag me away from the comforting glow of my laptop screen at least long enough to take a jaunt up the Royal Mile for that candid snap you see there at right. Yes, that's totally candid -- I always stand that way, regardless of whether my picture is being taken.

Sure, I look like a tourist, but I *feel* local.

Hey, where's the roof? Where's the windows? How's a guy supposed to worship around here, huh?

We also made it out long enough to take a tour of the Palace of Holyroodhouse. Back in the bloody day, this palace was notorious as the home of Mary, Queen of Scots for sixteen tumultuous years. It was there that she was married (twice) and witnessed the murder of her faithful servant, Rizzio. He was stabbed 53 times in her bedroom and then dragged to an antechamber to die. You can still see what are reputed to be the stains from Rizzio's blood on the wooden floor. Also, they have some really good shortbread for sale in the gift shop. Mmmm...shortbread.

That's the old abbey the palace was built out of pictured at left. The remains of this abbey mostly date back to about the 12th and 13th century. No word on how old the shortbread in the gift shop is, but I'm guessing late nineteenth century based on the texture. We'll let you know if we find out anything different.


Of course, when the shortbread is gone and the touring is done, I think you know what time it is. Yep -- birthday time! Kristanne turned 30 years young this past week, so we went out to one of Edinburgh's best restaurants to celebrate with a romantic, candlelit meal of champagne and boiled stuff. We ate at a restaurant called the Witchery (the entrance is shown at right), reputedly one of Edinburgh's oldest and best. The dining room was in an ancient wood-lined cellar, warmly lit with flickering candles. Romance was everywhere as we toasted Kristanne's first 30 years and looked forward to the next 30. The food was actually excellent (really, only a few of the vegetables looked to have been boiled), and we toddled off into the night, well-fed and happy.

Kristanne is 30 years old in this completely unretouched picture.

She doesn't look a day older than 26 and a half.

Well, really we only toddled off as far as our favorite neighborhood pub, the Waverley. It's right across the street from our house and boasts among its features a friendly Spanish bartender, a friendly Scottish owner, a friendly Scottish regular, and one or two surly regulars who we won't talk about here. That picture at left is of a 30 year old Kristanne at the Waverley, enjoying the newfound wisdom and sense of self that comes with 30 years here on Earth. Well, that and a big chocolate brownie for dessert. At the Waverley, we continued to toast Kristanne's first 30 years, her next 30 years, the 30 years after that, and, well, even the 30 years after that. We had a lot of toasting to do, and everybody there seemed only too happy to help us out. The Scots are a very friendly people, I tell you.


Eventually, Kristanne's birthday was over, but not before Mr. Scucherini paid a little visit. The Scooch-meister has been notable by his absence from these pages here the last several months, but he likes to pop his head in every once and a while just to let you know he's still up and about. In full effect, as it were. Here in Scotland, Mr. Scucherini actually goes by his former clan name, "Mr. McScucherini." He's even got his own tartan design, featuring little Playboy bunnies and empty beer bottles. It's actually not very attractive, so it's just as well that Mr. McScucherini wouldn't be caught dead wearing a kilt. "That don't play with the ladies," as he likes to say. So, let's see what Mr. McScucherini has for us today.


Oh, good lord. That's just ridiculous. How can any Scottish bar worth its salt offer a Scotch Whisky flavored condom without offering both a single-malt and a blended variety? How do you know whether you're getting the Macallan or just The Famous Grouse? While Mr. McScucherini applauds the concept, he has some serious doubts about the execution. Let the buyer beware!

Cask strength condoms?

And that's this week's Odyssey. Join us next week as we attempt to do something other than work...we're not sure what! See you next time on the Odyssey!



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Kristanne can hear the sound of one hand clapping.

As for that picture over there at left, no, it's not your favorite collie star of stage and screen -- this particular lassie in the grassie is actually none other than my Extreme partner in crime (and wife!), Kristanne, doing a little meditation in a Scottish park. Some of you may not know it yet, but Kristanne actually achieved enlightenment a few weeks ago back in Zurich. So, now she spends a lot of time contemplating things like the mysteries of karma, the meaning of beauty, and who put the bomp in the bomp-she-bomp. Things like that. As for me, I'm supporting Kristanne's inquiries into Zen by growing my belly to Buddhic proportions. Just doing my part to support the cause, y'know?

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