Two Guys from Italy: A Reason to Tell the Truth, the Whole Truth

A tradition at my office is that we shut the office during lunch on the first day a new employee starts. We take the employee to lunch at Two Guys from Italy and intrude on the new staff member's private life, asking questions about siblings, friends, family, etc. We did not do that with our newest employee because a couple of us were out of the office when she started...and by the time we got back, she was gone, tending to family matters surrounding her grandfather's funeral in Louisiana.

We resurrected the tradition today, shutting the office doors and heading over to the restaurant, an old-style, gritty old place with plastic grapes and empty bottles of chianti hanging from the ceiling. It's an old place, been around for years, and I like grittiness, the lack of pretention, and the good food. My usual is fettucine al mare, a fabulous dish at $5.95 that includes shrimp, clams, calamari, fettucine, tomatoes, onions, etc., etc. and is spicy enough to make my nose run just a touch. They serve enough for two people in a $5.95 dish, but I never fail to finish. Today, I was proud that I limited to one the number of tomato splashes I got on my shirt.

Anyway, we inaugurated our new person today. We learned all about her family, her sister's ribbing of her, her trip to Italy on the cheap, and lots more. Her stories of her family's experiences in New Orleans during and after Katrina were heart wrenching. So far, I like her. She listens to NPR in the morning, which boosted her quite alot in my assessment. She volunteered at some point that she's not very religious and she appears to lean left politically and has a sociology degree My kind of woman. She's young and energetic, I think, so she should make some good contributions.

I had an opportunity today to tell the president of the association that is our newest client that the association's rigid "we don't refund registration fees" policy is a bad policy destined to wreck the organization's reputation among its members. She and I argued about this a bit in Austin a few weeks ago. I expressed my opinion that, if someone says they or a family member were ill, making attendance impossible or inadvisable, the best policy would be to refund the money. The association's policy is modeled on Gestapo tactics: you don't show, for any reason, and we keep your money...if we are nice, you can apply it, less a 20% administrative fee, to the conference next year. I told her I thought the policy was bullshit and deserved to be shit-canned, considering that it reflected current thinking of the 1970s. I await her reply. Fortunately, the association is a new client and we're not used to the money yet, so we can afford to lose them if it comes to that.

I am tired. I will stop this for now. If you're new to my blog, please explore it. I wonder if anyone, aside from family, really finds any merit or interest or value in this thing. It's OK that it is, in fact, primarily for me, but I do have a sense that it should open someone else's eyes. I hope so, anyway.