My first post... ah, the squeaky newness of an empty blog is to me what a brand new, shiny, hard back set of encyclopedias is to a geography nerd. It's Friday, my friends, and the ActiveRain offices are quiet and still. The sun is out in Bellevue today, giving us a whopping temperature of 72 degrees, and I can only say that yes, I am grateful that summer is finally here.
"Okay," you say, "got the weather report. But why are you blogging?"
Well, the short answer is that Jon asked me to. Ha.
The longer answer requires a story from my past. As it fails to say in my bio, I am, and always have been, an avid blogger. I started blogging waaaay back when Blogger was first owned by Pyra Labs, at the ripe, early age of 16. I self-taught myself to do HTML, CSS, JS, XHTML, and other web languages. I've built my own servers and databases. All in all, I'm a big geek. Yes, it's true. I admit it!
That said, a few years ago, when I was working one of the various real estate jobs, I mentioned something very vaguely about a disagreement I had at work, not using any names, no company titles, no corporate names of any sort, and somehow, that particular blog post was tagged by my super. Now, they had no formal Internet policy at that particular business, and thus, couldn't dooce me based on me making an obscure reference to working on a personal website, but they made me feel very unwelcome from then on, until I sat down in my manager's office one day and said, "Look. You don't want me here. So let's make this simple. You write me a letter of recommendation. I'll resign."
Always having been a very straight-forward person, this garnered the usual reaction of "Ho hum, I'll think about it" from my manager, and eventually amounted into nothing. I resigned anyway; it was time to move on, and any business that wanted to restrict my free speech was not one that I would be working for at any great length.
I continued blogging. Given this, naturally, when Jon mentioned he would like to give everyone a behind-the-scenes look at AR, I jumped at the opportunity. Never have I had a job that asked me to blog for them! All in all, folks, you could say this is my dream job.
So what are the AR offices like on a Friday afternoon, forty-five minutes after the official close? Well, let's just say that even Elmer Fudd wouldn't have to tell you to be "vewwy, vewwy quiet" -- there's no one here but us chickens! To all those celebrating the belated arrival of the sunshine in the PNW: get out there and stock up on that vitamin B! To our friends across the country: be safe, and enjoy your weekends!
