Memory Day: November 11

Happy Veterans' Day / Kelley Corbett's Birthday. I'll be working from home today since our company contracts to the government, and the government takes their holidays very, very seriously. I'm sure there was at least one government program manager who took the day before or after this one off to give a little more time of reflection and/or golf to the enlisted men.

I've never been a big fan of the concept of floater holidays that turn successive years of holidays into musical chairs where you must stop working regardless of how retardedly they break up the week. Martin Luther King Jr. and Abraham Lincoln had the right idea claiming Monday holidays instead of this floating nonsense (this is also why I prefer table layouts to pure CSS -- the "float" attribute is a communist disruptor).

For the breadth of my career in the working world, I've worked every Veterans' Day, so I've never had any special plans to observe this blatant overuse of the number 11. Back in the tenth grade, circa 1993, I celebrated Veterans' Day by going to an Eagle Scout dinner at the Mark Radisson in Alexandria -- a hyperly-hyped event where new Eagle scouts were paired up with big names from the business world to show how we could become even bigger tools in the future.

Of course, my sponsor didn't even bother to show up, so I spent an evening listening to ridiculously bad speeches and drawing everything at my table on the program. The motto printed on the program was "There is no end to the Eagle Scout trail" which can either be ambitious or depressingly maudlin, depending on how naive you are, and the motto for the evening might have been "There is no end to this dinner".

By the time I had run out of space on the program cover, we were two and a half hours into the speeches with no conclusion in sight. This is when I walked out to wait for my ride and to preserve my sanity.

Unfortunately, I did not exercise the walk-out option later in life when Shac made us watch The Thin Red Line in the theatre.