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So today was kind of an interesting day.

I got to sleep in a little later than usual because I wasn’t headed to the office, but to a conference a little further uptown, and I would be taking the subway from Penn Station to arrive there at 9 am. I was filling in for a colleague for about four hours, helping to sell books to psychoanalysts. Aside from the exhibit space itself, which was in a dark and cramped room well off the beaten path from the rest of the conference (or much of anything else in the hotel that would direct foot traffic our way), those four hours passed just fine. I left a little after 1 pm and walked back to the office.

Where I stayed for the better part of half an hour, mostly just to grab a bite to eat for lunch, and check in. (Also to print out my receipt for a talk I was attending later that evening, but I’m getting ahead of myself there.) I ate a chicken club sandwich, read a couple of e-mails — my favorite was easily IT’s earlier apology for the fact that we were apparently “experiencing internet and network access” — and got my name badge and team number for our company- and midtown Manhattan-wide scavenger hunt.

Yes, a scavenger hunt. It was ten bucks, to benefit the World Cancer Research Fund, the company’s charitable organization of choice, and I got a T-shirt out of it, plus a couple of drinks (again, skipping head), and an excuse to leave the office at 2:30 and run around Manhattan taking photos of bananas in unusual places.

This, in itself, is sort of a long story. The company’s charitable events, from fundraisers to races to this inter-office scavenger hunt, are for some inexplicable reason, banana-themed. So we got bright yellow shirts, a bag of bananas to each group, and instructions on the sort of pictures we had to take. There were ten in total, from “a police officer holding a banana” to “a banana in disguise” to “a banana riding a subway.” It was all silly, and a surprising amount of fun, thanks in no small part to the really lovely weather we had today. The eight or nine groups started near the UN, a few blocks from our new office, and reunited at a bar further downtown. There, a winner was picked, leading to the sort of grumbling and nitpicking — the teams showed up long before HR did to judge who arrived first — that’s likely only of mild interest to the parties involved.

The important thing is, it was a surprising amount of fun. Even if — or probably because — I was only really at work for about fifteen minutes today.

After the drinks — a beer and whiskey sour, the latter of which our HR department graciously bought, along with a round for our office — I headed uptown, near Columbia, for a talk between Neil Gaiman and Paul Levitz, hosted by the university. I had a very nice dinner right beforehand, at a Japanese/Thai place across the street from the theater, and enjoyed the heck out of the talk itself. (I also spotted Amanda Palmer briefly at the box office, so that was neat too.)

And now I’m home, a little tired but glad to have had such an interesting day. Tomorrow probably won’t be half as exciting, but it will at least be Friday.