Thank you for your email, I will get back to you if I return to the office. I shouldn’t say if, but I’m going to say if, because really we could be hit by a bus tomorrow, right? So, yeah, if I get back to the office I’ll get back to you. But really what I mean is, I have no idea how long I’ll be out of the office, because my PTO is only for two weeks, but if I’m going to fly all the way to Europe then you better believe I’m going to get my jetlag’s worth.

Plus, I’m really hoping I’m gonna meet someone, it happens in books and films all the time, so why not me? And sure a little fling, a little ex-pat romance would be fantastic, but I’d be happy with a little somethin’-somethin’ at a hostel, because I will most definitely be staying in hostels. Did you know they have those there? It’s like a giant dorm room for a quarter of the cost of a hotel, for like a few dollars a day. Sign me up! And really, what better way to have a little fling far far from home than to hook up with someone else in the hostel? But how would that even work, really, cause it’s a bunch of people in one room with a bunch of bunks…how would you, you know, without waking everybody up? So I haven’t quite got that part figured out yet, but it could happen.

And really, what I’d love more than anything, is to find someone who’s from there, Europe I mean, who wants to stay there and who wants to get married and then I could just stay there too. I wouldn’t ever have to come back to this job with lousy PTO accumulation and an office mate that snort-cough-hacks all day and that one person, I think it’s Sabrina but she won’t admit it, that keeps bringing fish for lunch and then the whole office, not just the lunch room which would be bad enough but the whole freaking office, reeks of fish for the rest of the day. And then I’d never get your email and I’d never reply to it, although I’m sure there’s some kind of SOP in place for that sort of thing.

There’s gotta be, right? They wouldn’t just leave you hanging? Someone’s gotta be getting cc’ed on my incoming emails while I’m gone, right? I mean, it’s two weeks, which isn’t much in going-to-Europe terms but in where-is-the-person-I-need-to-help-me terms, those are your terms, in those terms two weeks is a long time. I wonder if I should check on that before I leave? I probably should, but you know what, everyone’s gone for the day, or at least the three people I can think to ask are gone, and I’m trying to get out of here too, lotta packing to do and only a few hours before I gotta catch that flight, so, how bout this, when you get this email, if I haven’t gotten back to you in two weeks and one day, please contact one of my many bosses, or hell, just call the main line and tell the receptionist what’s up, and I’m sure someone will take care of you.

Also though, before you wait the two weeks and one day and bug the receptionist, it is almost certain, like 99% likely, that your problem can be solved by logging out and logging back in. Don’t ask me why, I couldn’t tell you, I don’t work in IT, but those d-bags always ask me if I’ve asked the customer to log out and log back in, and damned if it doesn’t fix the issue nine times out of ten.

So anyway, that was all a very long way of saying, I’m out of the office. Catch you on the flip-flop. Maybe.

This #writethirtyminutes session was prompted very loosely from “A Year of Writing Prompts” by Writer’s Digest, available here