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Dad Blogs Family Life in these United States

Random Story Part 1

Recently, my friend had to “let someone go” at the office. She’s a real manager see, not just someone with a manager title like myself who actually only manages him or herself. Anyway, partly because it’s just fun to do, and partly because there are legal reasons for doing so, she went through this ex-employee’s laptop to see what he’d been spending his days doing, because, quite frankly, he’d not been doing much meaningful work.

In addition to opening every piece of e-mail labeled “porn,” he spent a great deal of time searching the Internet for seemingly random things (Yeah, I do that too…does it make me weird?). The top four searches on his Internet history were:

The most obviously funny one here being “cheese” of course. Over the last week, we’ve applied the use of the single word “cheese” to many situations–most notably when we have nothing else to say in response to a question, “I don’t know…um….CHEESE!”

We also took those four search terms and created short situational stories that were just too much fun! Now, I spend all my days either writing about industry terms like, “threat,” “risk,” “mitigation,” and “viruses.” All in all, it’s pretty boring stuff, so anytime I can flex my creative writing muscle and break out of the ho-hum, I like to do so. In that vein, I thought I’d create my own four random words and start writing short tales to go along with them. Most won’t have endings because I simply don’t have that kind of time, but it should be fun.

For this exercise, I’m using the random word generator found here. Today’s four random words are:

  • reckon
  • down
  • avoid
  • caps

Hmm, shouldn’t be too difficult, let’s see…

After enjoying a few wonderful spring-like days, winter came back with a small vengence. I reckon that the elephant ears I’d planted only the day before just barely below the surface should survive, but there are no guarantees. I’d gotten up early to get the baby when his swing stopped swinging and had hoped to avoid having to change him, thus waking him up any further, but a massive poop blowout, smelling remarkebly like formaldehyde, soaked through his onesy and dripped down my arm. There was no getting out of it…I had to change him!

Trying to keep a crying baby quiet while juggling bottles, diapers, wipes and clean outfits isn’t easy. As I pawed through the drawer full of socks and caps, I tried simultaneously propping the bottle up against a stuffed animal to it would stay vertical thus keeping the baby from sucking too much air.

Ok, not much real creativity there since this did, in fact, happen this morning, but it’s fun nonetheless. I like this idea…think I’ll keep it up.

Have a great Easter weekend all!

Chris Souther's avatar

By Chris Souther

Chris joined the Air Force out of high school. After four years of supporting communications for the Department of Defense, the White House, and stations around the world, he left the military and moved to Atlanta. For the next six years, Chris continued working in the telecom field, eventually traveling around the country teaching companies like MCI, Nortel Networks, and Cabletron, how to do what he did.

When the dot.com crash happened, upon recommendation from his wife, Chris re-enrolled in school and earned his B.S. in Communications (PR & Marketing).

Since then, he was worked in network security, healthcare, banking and finance (and FinTech), general high tech (AI/ML, Cloud, IoT), and most recently, application development fields. Now, with more than 15 years of both Marketing and Communications under his belt, he helps organizations grow their business through the proper application of marketing, communications, and content.

And he blogs on the side. It keeps him sane.

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