not that you asked...

We are more of a Luvs family, but the good news is that Luvs are just low-rent Pampers.

A couple of months ago, an email arrived in my inbox from Pampers, inviting me to a Blogger Day event at Proctor & Gamble headquarters in Cincinnati. I had never been to a corporate blogging event, and I didn't know who else had been invited or whether I would know anyone else going, and I didn't own a single pair of pants that would qualify as Business Casual. But I accepted immediately, because it sounded interesting and also because there was the promise of a king-sized Westin Heavenly bed with my name on it, and as far as I knew, there would be no crying babies in Ohio who needed me to get up with them seven times a night.

In other words, a whole night of uninterrupted sleep? In a king-sized bed? WITH SHEETS THAT I DID NOT PERSONALLY WASH AND REPLACE? Where do I sign? And can I do it in Sharpie? With all capital letters?

Unfortunately for me, I screwed that up because I went and made FRIENDS in Ohio, and stayed up until 1am talking and laughing with them and pretending I was cool enough to be there even though I'm the only person left in America without an iPhone.

It was so nice to see Susan again, even though she has more style in her little finger than I do in my whole entire body and standing next to her makes me rethink everything I'm wearing a million times over and then sweat through it. I would like to go ahead and say right now that Susan's kids have the absolute WORST LUCK EVER when it comes to getting sick or getting their teeth knocked out, so when you hear Swine Flu has hit Oklahoma, you can bet it's in Susan's house. Which is totally unfair, because Susan is just about the nicest person on the entire planet. (And she looks adorable in a hairnet.) (Here's Susan's post about the trip, and a very non-adorable photo of me in a hairnet.) (Susan's post is what I wish I had written; she's way better at wrapping things up into a nice little readable package than I am.)

I had loads of fun with Melissa, too. I've read Melissa's blog for years and I just knew if I could meet her ONCE that I could make her fall in love with me. And you know what? IT HAPPENED SO NATURALLY. I expected Melissa to be more of an eye-roller, but it turns out she's sweet and charming and very witty and spent an entire hour at dinner making jokes about Salma Hayek being tiny enough to fit into a pair of Underjams. And I know, that doesn't sound funny to you, but it was SO UNBELIEVABLY FUNNY at the time, like, funny enough that I suspect we may have been becoming a bit of a spectacle, and I swear, I'd only had two glasses of wine at that point. (Here's Melissa's post about the trip.)

I cannot say enough nice things about Asha, who you know by reading her site is unbelievably smart. What you can't know by reading is that she is the most well-spoken, thoughtful, contemplative person. She is patient and she thinks through what she's going to say and she LISTENS to what you say and then she replies with this incredible insight. And she does it every single time she opens her mouth. I don't have a People I Admire and Want To Be When I Grow Up list, but if I started one, Asha would be at the top, and also tied for second and third place. When I talk in public, it's just words blobbing out and the spewage of stupid phrases and half the time I don't make any sense, which is why I WRITE IT DOWN HERE. Asha, though, she just ROLLS WITH IT. Whatever she says sounds eloquent. Also, she's beautiful and even when she is forced to roll out of bed and directly into a cab to the airport, she takes the time to brush her teeth. In contrast, I would totally just cheat with mint gum. Because I believe in shortcuts and Asha clearly believes in doing things the right way. She deserves every accolade she's ever garnered.

And the only dude there was Matt. You know who Matt is, right? Matt was recently in the presence of Oprah, and he still smelled like hundred-dollar bills and cocker spaniels. Oh, ok, ok, so it turns out that Matt is a really nice guy, and totally grounded and humble and he actually got invited to LUNCH with Salma Hayek and by Salma Hayek HER VERY SELF, and after I found that out I felt a little bit of remorse for thinking of her in Underjams because obviously she's a celebrity who is Just! Like! Us! At one point in our tour of the Pampers facility, they showed us a giant diaper prototype they'd made for some reason that I can't remember anymore (that part of my brain is still dumbfounded by how enormous that diaper was, and there is no room for remembering the details of why it even exists) and do you know how badly I wanted to see Matt try on that diaper? You know, to bring him back down to our level from his current status as Internet God With Handfuls of Female Suitors. (Just kidding Matt.) (Well, kind of.) Matt shared a few opportunities that might be coming his way soon, and I've never met anyone who was less impressed by the idea of fame. Whatever decisions he makes, he considers his daughter's needs first. That much was obvious.

Now, because this was my very first Corporate Blogging Function, I had no idea what to expect or whether it would feel pushy and contrived or pointless and annoying. It turns out, I had a GREAT time with the people of Pampers, and not just because I met other fun bloggers, but because the people who work at Pampers are really great people. I know some of you are probably rolling your eyes and muttering about agendas and corporate brainwashing, but it was so not like that. I don't always have the best sense of character (case in point: COLLEGE BOYFRIEND), but I really felt like these people were genuinely committed to their product and to their company, even if you happen to feel that disposable diapers are Satan's garbage. (Which? I DON'T. I'll just go ahead and say it. I USE DISPOSABLE DIAPERS. And I LIKE them.) Many MANY of the people we met had been at the company for more than 10 years; several had been there for more than 20. Twenty years! Who stays at a company for twenty years anymore? I never stayed anywhere for more than TWO. I was really impressed by that and really astounded at the dedication these people had to their company. Something is going right at P&G.

My favorite part of the two days was the tour of the Pampers Baby Care facility. I was FASCINATED. They showed us their testing rooms for new products, where they invite moms and their babies in to try out prototypes and new designs. They showed us some of the tests they run on diapers, using the infamous Blue Liquid they use in commercials (I wanted to pose with it but was not allowed to take pictures in the room). They showed us where they HAND-MAKE prototype diapers (takes about 15 minutes to make one start to finish) and we were able to have an interactive Q&A with several VPs and executives; we were allowed to ask them whatever we wanted, and the discussion ranged from heated opinions on cloth diapers to Twitter accounts to biodegradability and landfill usage and composting. They were candid and informative and when they didn't know an answer off the tops of their heads, they admitted it. The day FLEW by, and not just because I was sitting next to Melissa who was playing with the mStache app on her phone.

My only regret about the trip was that I didn't speak up more. In my defense, I didn't know what to expect before I arrived, and I'm much more of a thinker and writer than I am verbal, so it was hard for me to pipe up and convey my thoughts without sounding like a complete idiot. If I could have TWITTERED IT and had someone read it aloud? Well, that might have worked. It's just the way I'm wired. I feel like I was a bit of a disappointment in that respect; that I was too quiet and too reserved during discussion periods. But that's why I chose to blog in the first place; the written word suits me best.

Also regrettable: Had to use Charmin in their bathrooms. *shakes fist* Stupid butt-wiping bears!

What a way to make a living

This popped into my head after reading Linda's post last week.

Unless you count babysitting (and I don't, since I stopped doing it when I was 14), I didn't get an actual paying job until I was 20 years old.

Yes, TWENTY. Yes, YEARS.

Most of that was my dad's doing. In his opinion, I was going to have to graduate from college and work nine to five for the rest of my sad, fruitless life, so he wanted my brother and I to have nothing to do after school but concentrate on homework, and nothing to do during the summers but concentrate on having fun. I know I was a lucky kid in that regard; I was given spending money and gas money and my parents paid for my car and for my insurance and before you start rolling your eyes and mumbling about how I must be some kind of AWFUL SPOILED BRAT, let me assure you that I was nothing but responsible with that money and that privilege and continue to be to this day. I was the kind of kid who didn't need to hold a part-time job to understand how money works; I didn't need to spend my afternoons bagging groceries to understand that I shouldn't try to live beyond my means. I was BORN responsible.

You know what was ACTUALLY hard? Deciding I wanted a job and then getting a job and then not dying of anxiety while waiting for that job to actually begin three or four weeks later. I was SO NERVOUS; so worried that I was going to find out that I wasn't good at working or that I wasn't smart enough to handle the cash register or that I wasn't going to remember how to deposit my paycheck at the bank. (Yes. Seriously.) And then the funniest part ended up being that my first job? Was a total joke in many, many respects.

I worked at a camp for a summer after my sophomore year of college. It was like a retreat center that churches could rent out for a week or two; we provided their lodging and meeting areas. I was hired to help run the facilities, which included the snack bar, the kitchen and dining hall, and some of the recreational activities. I won't even tell you about the religious politics that made the place a nightmare (I am a Christian, and I am all kinds of ashamed about the way the Christians who owned this place chose to treat people, HELLO, DO UNTO OTHERS AND ALL THAT, also try KINDNESS) but it does continue to amuse me TO THIS DAY what kinds of tasks I performed while I was earning less than minimum wage. (Is that even legal?)

My favorite job was chaperoning kids at the pool. Oh, you noticed I didn't say “lifeguarding”? Yes, well, that's because I wasn't certified as a lifeguard, but apparently that didn't mean I couldn't be responsible for saving lives! Instead, I was shown a plastic chair where I was to sit and observe swimmers, as well as a giant pole with a hook on the end, which, in the event of an emergency, I was to use to fish victims out of the water. A POLE. With a HOOK on the end. Also I was told I had to be very vigilant about making sure no one got their intestines sucked out by sitting on the drain at the bottom of the pool. And in the event this actually DID happen, I had very direct and specific instructions to run out of the pool area and across a field to the pool house, where I would have to unlock the door and walk carefully across floorbeams (NO ACTUAL FLOOR, just a bridge made out of shoddy two-by-fours) avoiding enormous spiderwebs and roaches the size of Vancouver over to the other side of the building where I would flip a switch to turn off the suction. So that I could return to the pool and fish the dead body out with the hook because ARE YOU KIDDING ME? It would have taken about two entire minutes to complete that task. Two minutes is kind of a lot of time when you're at the bottom of a pool, not breathing, you know? The idea of this happening was too horrifying to imagine, so I spent the majority of my pool-chaperoning time forbidding children to even THINK about going underwater. I learned to distract them from having any kind of fun by performing elaborate, sometimes very painful bellyflops. I wish I was making that up.

I also worked at the snack bar. I scooped ice cream and sold drinks and this was okay most of the time, because I could snack at will and because that's where people hung out and played foosball and pool and it turned out the cash register was from 1972 and had approximately 10 buttons and I was perfectly capable of using it correctly, although I did have to wear an extra-large, neon orange WWJD? t-shirt while I did it. The only minor incident that occurred in the snack bar involved a milkshake that I made for a 12-year-old boy, who drank it and then returned to the counter with something in his hand. “I found this in my drink,” he told me and held out his hand. Oh, yes, no biggie, little dude, those are just the metal blades from the milkshake machine! That fell into your cup! That you SUCKED THROUGH A STRAW INTO YOUR MOUTH, hello VERY PROBABLE LAWSUIT. Fortunately, he was 12. He thought it was funny, not a reason to sue the pants off of me.

Working in the kitchen preparing meals was the worst part. It was hot and sweaty, and the dumpster wasn't big enough for all of our trash so at least once a day we had to hoist someone up into it so they could stomp the pile down and make room for more, and something about washing strangers' gloppy dishes (all that hot water and soggy food mingling to go down a drain, GAH) still makes me nauseous, but perhaps the worst part was the quality of food we were serving to our campers. Breakfast was usually decent – eggs (REAL eggs, not the kind a lot of places boil in a bag), hash browns, biscuits; stuff you can't really screw up. Lunch was usually sandwiches and salads. Dinner, though, dinner was... well, at best, dinner was interesting. Dinner involved a great deal of creativity on the part of our cook, who was under a lot of pressure from the management to be frugal and create very little waste, which meant we served a lot of leftovers. Normally, I wouldn't think serving leftovers would be a very big deal, but that was before I saw how we were going to use the leftovers we had. We did BAD THINGS with our leftovers. We VIOLATED them.

The dish that stands out in my mind was Tamale Pie. In theory, Tamale Pie would have been delicious, had it been made with actual, palatable ingredients. It's a Mexican casserole -- think lasagna, but substitute flour tortillas for the noodles, and beans and ground beef and cheese and enchilada sauce for the filling. DELICIOUS. Well. Not exactly, if, for instance, you're going to be forced to substitute leftover BREAKFAST PANCAKES in place of the tortillas (and then slices of white bread when you ran out of pancakes, GAG) and plain old tomato sauce in place of the enchilada sauce, and leftover pot roast instead of ground beef. Pot roast! Pot roast is STRINGY! And FATTY! PEOPLE. It was so unbelievably nasty and also completely unethical. And it looked so icky, in fact, that I was asked to stand by the buffet line and PUSH IT ON PEOPLE so that we could get rid of it all.

“Mmmmmm! Tamale Pie!” I would say. “Would you like a big, steaming heap?” And the person I was trying to scam would undoubtedly say, “What's in it?” And I would just ignore them and say, “It's MEXICAN!” because like I am going to tell you it is SOGGY PANCAKES with TOMATO SAUCE and FATTY, STRINGY, LEFTOVER POT ROAST. Because I am not usually keen on mopping vomit off the floors.

What makes you laugh when you think of YOUR old jobs?

Photographic evidence

So. The economy, huh? It's tanking or floundering or something, and dragging the housing market along with it, and robbing me of any possibility of moving our growing family out of our townhouse and into something bigger until the year 2099. It is entirely possible that I am going to have to move out of this three-bedroom townhouse and straight into assisted living or something similar. “Something similar” also possibly being A GRAVEYARD.

Anyway, I've been moving junk around the house to make it feel like I'm doing something about this depressing turn of events (decluttering one room only to clutter up another, I KNOW) but unlike years before, I now have two small children. Two small children always need SOMETHING (more juice, help finding a puzzle piece, poop wiped off their shoulders) so I have four-minute increments during the day to do this useless shuffling I feel compelled to do. That means I leave a lot of piles around the house, piles that I can't do anything with for DAYS ON END. Which is all kinds of annoying when the pile contains old shower curtains or donations for Goodwill or table runners for rectangular tables that we NO LONGER OWN, but is actually kind of fun when the pile contains photos from many years past that I haven't looked at in ages.

Like this one!

So here I am, in the summer of 2000, manning the punch fountain at a friend's wedding. It's nice, isn't it? The idea of a punch fountain? My job was to fill up cups and hand them to guests to prevent a punch fountain line from forming and clogging up the dance floor (I think). I don't know why I'm holding a Bud Light in a can, or wearing a less-than-supportive bra. Anyway, the job was super easy. No one had to explain to me what I had to do. I didn't even SPILL anything! And then maybe two hours into the reception, this woman comes over to me and says, “Excuse me, is this the alcoholic or non-alcoholic punch?” And I had NO IDEA, because wasn't all the punch THE SAME? “Um, I can go check? I guess?” I said. And the lady says, “Would you mind? Because my seven-year-old has had seven cups already.”

And you know where this is going. It turns out I was happily serving champagne punch to minors. EXTREMELY MINOR minors. Perhaps I was saving that Bud Light for an 11-year-old!

And this one!

This is what we found underneath our refrigerator the day we moved into our house. 

A few hours before this photo was taken, we'd walked into the house for the final walk through and found the soon-to-be previous homeowner scraping puddles of dried food goo out of the refrigerator with a putty knife. (YES THEY WERE DIRTY PEOPLE.) (They also reportedly had a baby on the stairs when they couldn't get to the hospital in time, but that's a different story.) Right after closing we came back and started disinfecting (not cleaning; DISINFECTING) and that involved pulling the dirty refrigerator off the dirty wall so we could clean the dirty floor underneath it. But first we had to remove ALL THIS CRAP. I mean, honestly, that is a lot of dirt/magnets/papers/pens/coffee cup lids/small toys to find underneath a refrigerator, is it not?

And then there's this:

Here I am at my office Christmas party in 2003. Try to tell me you wouldn't want me working for you. I KNOW HOW TO PARTY, PEOPLE. Especially at corporate functions. In front of 400 people. Even without an open bar. (I KNOW.)

In August, 2001, I got in my Very First Car Accident. The results of the car ($8000 in damage is not considered totaled!):

The results of ME:

Notice most of the burns are on the left side of my face. This is because I was turning left across traffic, so my face was turned that way when someone plowed into me. And then I got out of the car, and it was dark, and it was kind of rainy, and I remember that I was crying because I was so scared, and I could feel wetness on my face and I kept asking the cop if that was water or blood that I felt, and he gave me some Wendy's napkins from his cruiser to blot my forehead (it was water). And it happened in Atlanta, and I was only in Atlanta to pick up a friend from the airport. And she and I were supposed to drive an hour and a half back to Auburn for me to take my ONE LAST FINAL EXAM before I graduated from college and then we were driving six hours to New Orleans for a cuh-raaazy weekend.

But what REALLY happened was that I had to send another friend to the airport to pick her up and they'd NEVER EVEN SEEN EACH OTHER BEFORE (I gave helpful details: “She's blonde! And short!”) and then my mom had to fly down the next day and rent a van to move all my stuff home from college and I missed the exam altogether and my poor friend spent her weekend driving 12 hours in a rented Astrovan with me and my mom instead of hanging out on Bourbon Street and shopping in the French Quarter AND MEETING BOYS. Dear Katie, I AM STILL SO SORRY THIS HAPPENED.

And I should shut up about this picture but can I tell you that when my mom arrived the next morning from the airport in a cab, I was outside a friend's apartment waiting for her and when the cab stopped, the cab driver looked at me and my scabby bloody face AND GOT OUT AND HUGGED ME. It was beyond weird. The End.

OK, and here's the last one for today:

So it's the year 2002 and that's my friend Angie, and that's a hotel room in Destin, Florida that was RIGHT ON THE BEACH and also only $100 a night or something. (It has since been torn down.) We checked out of the hotel on a Sunday morning at 11, and the people who ran it were so nice and said that we could hang out on the beachside deck in front of our room for as long as we liked. And just as we got settled into our chairs, the cleaning service went into our room and not ten minutes later, some cleaning dude comes out and stands in front of us, dangling a pair of PANTIES from his hand and says, “Are these yours?”

I mean HONESTLY. And he wasn't trying to touch as little of the underwear as he could, either. He was literally CLENCHING IT IN HIS SWEATY FIST.

That's when we decided it was time to leave.