ben.parmeter

In an ongoing effort to increase our home security, Suzy and I recently made some large purchases for our house. We picked up a massive home safe, replete with a fancy digital keypad lock. It’s not like we have a lot of things to secure in the safe, a couple passports, some critical documents, an extra set of car keys, etc. However, we wanted to have the piece of mind that those documents would be protected in a fire, flood or from a potential home invasion. And for our less critical documents, we purchased a heavy duty locking file cabinet. It is also massive and once fully loaded will be immovable.

With these two new document storage areas, this means I had some work to do to organize and store all my sensitive files. Last night I finally grabbed my milk-crate-o’files (yeah… real secure), and started to transfer them to the new hanging file folders. During this process, I discovered an old cartoon drawn by my brother Dave, depicting his artistic vision of what Ben & Dan’s life must be like at college. I found it completely hilarious, and thought it would be great to share it with the internet.

A little background, this was my first year in college. The summer before, my brother and I spent living in a big yellow school bus in Fairbanks, Alaska. It was a great experience. I should qualify that a little better. We made the best of it, but living in a bus in Fairbanks is was roughing it a bit. Anyway, that’s a story for another time. After the first term at college, my best friend Dan joined me at Oregon Tech. We were roommates in the dorm and were pretty much inseparable. At the time, we were big into climbing and had the equipment – however I think we had forgotten the climbing chalk one particular time. For those of you who may not know what climbing chalk is for, it will basically dry out your hands so that you can get a better grip on the rock. Without it, you basically have to wipe your hands on your pants. Sometimes that just doesn’t cut it though.

Enjoy.

Due to some recent downsizing, I am afraid management has decided that you just have to go. Yes, your performance was great, stellar in fact. You worked everyday with no complaints. However, it’s a new world, one that doesn’t fit with your old style. And it’s time to go. We promise to help you find a new home, so that you can start a new life. We’ve posted your resumes here, and are giving you until Monday to find a new job within the company. If that doesn’t work, we’re going to post an ad on craigslist, to get a few external leads for you. We hope you understand.

Signed, the management.

UPDATE 03/16/2008: Great news, we’ve found positions for several of our employees at other companies, however, we still have a few that we haven’t been able to place. For those of you fellow travelers that read this page, are local, and are willing to take on some great hardworking talent – let us know.