Timing Is... Everything

In business, as in joke telling, timing is..., wait for it, ... everything.  The first guy to say, "what if we sliced the bread before we sold it."  Genius!  The second guy to say, "what if there was a social network where people could communicate with friends while online in addition to Facebook?" not so much.  I am hoping that I have chosen the correct time to write my book.  I know there is a need for a book like mine, I am just wondering if people will read it.  And nearly as important, will people pay to own it.  And last, but not least, what will I wear on the Dr. Phil show when my book gets picked as his newest book that everyone must read?  (but, because timing is important, I will not pick out that outfit until the show calls...next week.  It shouldn't take me any longer than that to write and then publish it, right?)

I haven't decided if I want to talk about the title or the subject matter of the book in my blog just yet.  Remember?  Timing.  I would hate for people to try to talk me out of it, tell me it won't work, or try to steal my idea.  I will tell you that I have a week off from teaching for Easter break.  I would have said spring break but I didn't want to bring up images of me packing up the Studebaker and driving to Ft. Lauderdale to drink copious amounts of...white zinfandel.  (I can't drink beer anymore due to a medical condition).  No!  Not that dusting off my old Beach Boys 8 tracks for a road trip wouldn't have been exciting, I decided to stay here and write for you...and then start the book.  In that order.  My goal is to have several blog posts written and a good chunk of a chapter written for the book by the end of the week.  We'll see how I do.  Just remember, I wrote two chapters of my masters thesis in one night. (and received high honors...but I don't want to brag)  I can do this.  I just need to work on timing, and get up at 5 A.M. even in the middle of my vacation so I don't become the guy the kids used to know as dad.  Timing.

And that brings me to what I wanted to write about in today's post.  It was all about a perfectly timed incident that happened when I was in college.  I was the only witness even though there were about thirty five people in the room.  I could have tried to describe it to the people I was with but I kept it all to myself, until now.  I hope I can do it justice because it has all the makings of a geographical joke...you just had to be there.  

It was a summer session and I was sitting in one of lecture classrooms in one of the twin buildings at Cal State Hayward.  I'm pretty sure nobody else called them that.  They just seemed like two similar buildings and that was how my brain made sense of where my class was.  The other building was made up of labs and it seemed that they used these classrooms mainly for the sciences.  It was here that I met super-excitable-highly-stressed-pre-med-girl. But that is a blog for another day.  Today I want to talk about Unfortunate Girl.

Back to the buildings.  From an airplane I am sure they looked like an enormous equal sign.  They were long and narrow, there were two floors, a door at each end of each building, and a door in the middle so people didn't have to walk all the way to the ends to go from building to building.  The interesting feature about these two buildings was a glass covered walkway from the second floor of building A over to building B smack dab in the middle of the two.  It was nice when the professor said, today we are going to go over to the labs to finish the day.  What could have been a hike was just a stroll through the walkway.  It was used quite a bit, by everyone, all the time.  Since the walkway was a way to go out of the building it had these glass doors with a long handle that you push down to unlatch the door and swing it open.  That detail is important. 

This particularly nice summer day I was sitting at the counter, on a lab stool, staring out the window, and trying to concentrate on whatever the professor was lecturing about.  If I was a movie director, this would have been the perfect place to set up the cameras.  I could see everything that was going on.  I could see the sky.  I could see the green zone between the buildings.  I could see that there was a work crew using a welder in the other building.  And, important to my story, I could see the entire glass walkway in between the two buildings.  My ADHD addled mind was ping-ponging around from notes, to lecture, to welders, to walkway, to sky, back to welders, to walkway...etc.  (if I haven't mentioned my clinically diagnosed condition before, I am sure you have guessed by now...now do you see why I say, 'but I digress' so much?)  

Since it was a weekend in the summer there were very few people walking across the crossover walkway and I am sure that was why the welders were there filling the other hallway with bursts of bright light and puffs of smoke.  Fewer people to disturb on a Saturday.  And then I saw Unfortunate Girl.  At the time she was just Girl but in a few seconds her name would be changed, forever.  She walked from our building toward the door to the walkway.  She had not a care in the world as she skipped along, wearing a red hooded cape, carrying a basket of goodies to Grandma's house...ok that part may not be true (ADHD remember?).  I was looking and soaking it all in.  Girl, welders, professor, walkway, flash, door, notes, smoke...and then she reached the door.  At the precise moment she pushed down on the latch to open the door, the welders set off the fire alarm!  And 'Girl' earned her new title.

You have to remember that we are in a set of connected gigantic government funded buildings.  When the fire alarm goes off in one, it goes off in the connected building too.  There are two long stark hallways and probably a hundred classrooms.  The buildings were obviously new enough and government funded enough to have at least two alarms in each room (in case you couldn't hear the eardrum rattling siren at the front of the room while you sat at the back).  There were also alarms about every fifty feet in each of the four hallways so I would say that, conservatively, there were about three hundred ear piercing sirens all going off in unison.  And there in the geographical center of all of this cacophony was Unfortunate Girl trying frantically to pull the door shut so the four horsemen of the Apocalypse didn't hear the call and begin their descent to the Earth.  Her head was swivelling from side to side anxiously looking to see if anyone had seen that she had unwittingly caused the beginning of Armageddon by going through a door.  A door she had no doubt used dozens of times before without so much as a whisper.  Newly named Unfortunate Girl pulled the door shut, pushed on it to make sure it was latched, and then ran back the way she had come and I am not sure but she probably ran toward the psychology wing...or to a store that sold clean underwear. 

I considered trying to catch her to let her know that there were welders who were responsible for the alarms and she did nothing wrong but she was long gone...and in true professor style...we were told to just stay where we were until the alarms went off.  It wasn't a real fire and class was going to continue.  I have to let you know, that flew in the face of every elementary teacher I ever had who said that if we didn't walk outside in an orderly fashion when the fire alarms went off, we would cause the end of civilization as we know it.  Not to mention that it was probably illegal for him to tell us to stay there.  And I just came up with a new get rich scheme.  I need to go look through my college transcripts to find out what class that was...and call a lawyer.