I'm adding Stephen Manes to the list. His book,Chicken Trek, added to the stew of my imagination and really knocked me off kilter in a good way.

Thank you very little, John!! You caught me completely unprepared for that hilarious digression and helped to confirm my already-leery coworkers' suspicions that I may not be all there. My office mates rushed to my doorway following an explosive and uncontrollable guffaw, and found me gasping for sweet oxygen, my monitor spattered with coffee and a suspicious damp spot expanding from the crotch of my best slacks. I did my best "nothing more to see here" wave off, as speech was still impaired by my desperate gasps. For the most part the crowd has now dispersed. If there are consequences beyond me wearing sweat pants around the office for the rest of the day, I'll be looking to you for a job recommendation.

Thanks for the episoded guide, Stefan! I'll be letting the memories flood back all day.

I found it wierd that for 41 hours he held it. I think that's impressive.

This gives me hope of finding copies of a serial film strip I used to watch in school from the mid seventies called "Uncle Smiley" about a kind-hearted and bumbling, bearded oaf, who would teach kids about how not to do things . There would be a moral or educational tidbit tied in to each strip--- but mostly it was just this large, bearded fellow falling down repeatedly with a laugh track playing each time he tumbled. I remember one about converting an empty lot into a fun playground/garden that used old tires and industrial materials, and one about the seasons. Man, I miss Uncle Smiley.

While these interruptions (IMs, phone calls) are often irksome, they pale in comparison to the duress caused by the latter-day Puritan coworkers who shun IMs and phone calls and opt, in stead for more invasive interruption tactics like; the "casual swing by" or worse yet the "urgent favor request". They likely views their abstinence from more convenient methods of communication as "refreshing" and "outside the box", while most of us struggle to resist using the wooden mallet in the top desk drawer. The glorious thing about phone calls is you can not answer them and im's can be ignored. It takes more tact and discipline to ignore an in-your-space individual who thinks they should be at the top of your queue.