A Press Conference About What Happened To This Morning Where I Was Going To Get So Much Done

Looks like it got away from us again

The Chatner’s lovely new logo is the work of John Leavitt, who once made a beautiful watercolor portrait of Dr. Zoidberg for a Toast piece I’m going to retroactively declare had “strong transmasculine resonance.”

Good morning. Thank you all for coming on such short notice. Let’s g— you’re right, of course. My mistake. I do apologize. [Pause for question, inaudible.] Yes, that is exactly the kind of thing that we’ve been talking about. Yes. Mm-hmm.

[Pause for question, inaudible.]

Yes, I do agree it’s representative of the larger problem. Good afternoon. It’s afternoon now. Slip of the tongue, won’t happen again.

[Pause for question, inaudible.]

Yes, this morning got away from us. That’s why we called this presser today, in the interest of full transparency and for the purpose of ensuring this sort of thing doesn’t happen again tomorrow, or whenever the next chunk of time is expected to arrive.

[Pause for question or comment, inaudible.]

I don’t know. That seems like a question for shipping or receivables. I don’t know the answer to that. What I can tell you is this: We started the day with the best of intentions and with a realistic plan for success. We were here, we were prepared, we absolutely showed up to win.

[Pause for question or comment, inaudible.]

I’d like to clarify that we did wake up on time, for whatever it’s worth. Not that we’re making excuses. There are no excuses for what happened out there this morning. But we did actually wake up on time, right when the alarm went off, and we didn’t go back to sleep or anything.

[Pause for question or comment, inaudible.]

The plan was to start at 9:00.

[Pause for question or comment, inaudible.]

Like I said, the plan was to start at 9:00. I can’t speak to all the whys or wherefores of that. What I can tell you — what I’ve already told you, but which I’m happy to repeat again because, like I said, we’re interested in complete transparency — is that somewhere in between “waking up on time,” “not going back to sleep,” and “getting started at 9:00,” something else happened.

[Pause for question or comment, inaudible.]

[Shortly] I don’t know. I must have blacked out.

[Pause for question or comment, inaudible.]

Yes, I’m sorry. That was rude. My apologies. I don’t mean to take this out on you. In bed, obviously, and it’s possible that after turning off the alarm, the phone continued to be looked at, continued to be on, and there was scrolling. Likely there was scrolling, yes. I can tell you I was out of bed at 10:10, although I don’t think that move was permanent. I think I got up and out of bed a few times before I got all the way out of bed, like, for the day, if that’s what you mean. The first cup of tea was definitely underway before 10.

[Pause for question or comment, inaudible.]

How many?

[Pause for question or comment, inaudible.]

You’d have to ask someone else on the team that question

[Pause for question or comment, inaudible.]

You mean tea and coffee both, inclusive? We keep different records for tea and coffee. You’d have to ask the coffee guy about that. I know I had one cup of tea for sure. But I usually reuse that cup for future cups of tea, so I couldn’t tell you offhand how many times it got reused that morning.

[Pause for question or comment, inaudible.]

Yes, this morning got away from us. We weren’t out of bed at 9:00. If I were to guess — I don’t like to guess, I’d rather wait until more of the numbers came in, but if we’re just talking about a back-of-the-envelope sketch, I’d say that when we realized it was 9:00 all of a sudden, even though we’d woken up on time at 8:15 and hadn’t done anything since 8:15, so how can you suddenly tell me it’s 45 minutes later when nothing has happened? If you wake up at 8:15 and then nothing happens and suddenly it’s 9:12, what are you supposed to do with that? How are you supposed to develop any sort of meaningful relationship between time and effect, between external and internal signifiers of timeliness — seasonableness — between will and action, between the body and the world the body moves through? You tell me. You tell me that, okay. You go tell those kids in the locker room who just put everything out on the line that actually no time has passed at all, because sometimes you don’t do anything and time passes, and sometimes you do as much as you can and time doesn’t pass, and you go explain that to them.

[Pause for question or comment, inaudible.]

I would have marked the period between 8:15 and 9:12 as waking up slowly, which is a value of mine, and so anything that occurred during that period would have been filed under just generally waking up. The process of waking up. Which takes time, you can’t just — you can’t just flip a switch. And then you’re trying to get your arms wrapped around the day, you’re trying to get a hold of something real, but the morning is just featureless, like a big wet rock face and you’re climbing barefoot. My best guess is that when we realized 9:00 had already come and gone that the best thing to do, the safest thing to do, in the interest of safety, was to hang tight in the same place and wait for the next round number to come around before trying to start anything new.

[Pause for question or comment, inaudible.]

You ever try to start something new at 17 minutes after the hour, son? You ever seen what that does to the human body? If you’d seen that, you wouldn’t be asking me that question. I’ve seen it.

[Pause for question or comment, inaudible.]

I think I already conceded that point.

[Pause for question or comment, inaudible.]

Listen, the morning is gone and it’s not coming back. There might have been a window of opportunity shortly before 10, but that was when we learned there was a delivery coming at 11 — that was supposed to arrive at 11 — I don’t know, we still haven’t heard, I think they don’t have my new number yet so actually I should probably go see if I can log into the client portal and try to update it, as long as there’s no two-step verification — obviously there was no chance of starting something new at 10 with that going on, so — The morning is gone. Okay? And I’m as sorry about that as anyone, but it’s just gone. But this afternoon’s not going to get away from us.

[Pause for question or comment, inaudible.]

Well, we’ve got a plan.

[Pause for question or comment, inaudible.]

Hey, hey. Hey! Settle down. Settle down, all right, one at a time — If you would just let us explain the plan, we could execute the plan —

[Pause for question or comment, inaudible.]

It’s after what?

[Pause for question or comment, inaudible.]

Well, shit. I don’t know. Seems like the safest thing to do now is just wait until evening when we can reset the clock, try getting something done then.

[Pause for question or comment, inaudible.]

I don’t know, five? Evening starts at five? That seems fair. Morning is morning, mid-morning is 9 to 10:50, late morning is a little hard to pin down, noon isn’t anything, doesn’t count, can’t be lunch because morning didn’t start until 9 but it’s when everyone else is doing lunch so it’s ghost lunch, then sometimes things can happen at 1, but then 2-3:30 is lunch on account of missing lunch earlier, which means 4 is too heavy, and then 5 is evening, I think. Yeah, five’s evening, seven’s supper, nine is for remembering things from 2, and then ten is night.

[Pause for question or comment, inaudible.]

Wait until five, I guess. What takes two hours to do?

[Pause for question or comment, inaudible.]

You’re putting me on. Seriously? We just sat down five minutes ago.

[Pause for question or comment, inaudible.]

No kidding? Okay, five more minutes of questions, then, that should eat up about two hours and then we can try kicking off the morning again at 5pm sharp. Someone set an alarm so I don’t forget, hands up where I can see ‘em — yeah, blue shirt, third row, what’s your question?

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