Off to Effingham

I’m off to Effingham, Illinois for a couple of days. More work-related travel ensues.

Normally, I’m not required to travel this much for work. It’s just that we’ve got this project going on and most of my staff is involved in it some way or another, so I have to be there.

Back to Effingham. . . .

Yes that is a funny name for a town now that “effing” has come to mean something completely different in modern vernacular.

Case in point.

When I first moved to Chicago from Toronto back in 2001, I got a temp job while I was looking for a Real Job. I ended up working in an accounting department at a non-profit agency and my supervisor was this likeable-enough young woman with whom I shared an office.

Every so often, she’d get a phone call from someone else in the company trying to account for some donation or something, and after listening a bit, she would suddenly exclaim, “It’s an effin' mess!”

This went on for about three times that day. “It’s an effin' mess!” seemed to be her answer for everything. I thought it was kind of strange, and frankly, not very professional.

Finally, she came to me and said, “Okay, I need to train you on our accounting system called FMS.”

Right then it dawned on me. All this time she was saying,
“It’s in FMS,”
rather than
“It’s an effin' mess.”

Oh.

By the way, that woman was none other than Miss Healthypants. That’s how we met. She was actually my supervisor for those three months when I worked in her accounting department over eight years ago. (I subsequently got a Real Job with the same company and our friendship ensued now that she wasn’t my supervisor.)

For the next three years, she would come up to my department, laugh, and say, “Dude, I am still finding mistakes you made while you were a temp!”

It was an effing mess.