It sounded like a freight train!

I’m a good little worker bee. Although those of my coworkers often are not, my work ethic is well developed, and I have not (yet) gone postal and entered the office building with some kind of weapon of mass destruction. I know my professional responsibilities, I perform them well, the big boss trusts me and all is relatively right with my working world. However…………I’m something else, too – I am prone to what can politely be described as derailed trains of thought. I’m not so far gone that bright shiny objects distract me, but I do tend to have various ruminations (be they profound, inane or simply inappropriate) that divert my attention from a task at hand. Not that I can’t multi-task with the best of ‘em. Sometimes, though, I’m so far off the rails that I have to flag down a new locomotive and beg the mental conductor to re-fire my neurons so that I can continue on down the cerebral line.

My train recently veered violently off course during the working hours. If you’re thinking ‘well, that can’t be good’, you’re right. But man, I thought it was frickin’ hilarious!!! Most outsiders will think I’ve lost my mind, but that’s precisely the point. Aha! I lost my mind – it left – down the tracks. Don’t worry, it was only gone a couple of minutes. It came back, none the worse for wear. Here’s what happened:

My baby boss (the one with no power to actually fire me, thank goodness) came to my office, stood in the doorway and proceeded to tell me about a matter on which we would be working in the coming weeks. I heard and digested the first two sentences of what he said, and then my brain exited. Obviously, my internal thoughts were more important and thus overrode the blahblahblah of instruction coming from him.

You must picture it. There I sat, poised in my chair, seemingly rapt with appropriate attention as he spoke of important legal things (I guess). Any passerby would have assumed I was intently focused on and maybe even engrossed in a very important discussion. Not. Even the baby boss thought I was paying close attention. That was, until, I snapped back to reality and my first words to him were: “I’m so sorry. I wasn’t listening and didn’t hear a word you said. You’re going to have to start all over.” I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that he looked at me agog, likely thinking WTF! He spoke no further, so I continued on with my piss-poor, but perfectly rational (to me) explanation: “Well, I’m sorry, I just started thinking of something else and completely blanked out. I stopped listening. What did you say?” At which point, I laughed. Uproariously.

Uncontrollably. You see, IIIIIIIIII knew what I had been thinking about……..and to me, that made it that much more humorous that I had blanked out during what turned out to be a one-way work conversation. Oops. Baby boss rewound and then finished his little presentation and this time I did concentrate on his spiel alone. Boring. I’m not sure, but I think I did curtail my outward giggling until he left my office. Then, I cackled some more. And some more. It’s important to be able to laugh at yourself, right? Damn, I’m goofy. As hell. Chooo! Choooooo!!

And No! – I won’t tell you what I was thinking about. You just had to be there – in my little head. And you don’t fit. It's full of Amtrak pile-ups.