Thank you all for the cake, and the kind words. But actually, yes, I can believe that it's been five years. Five days a week, 52 weeks a year, 2,080 hours, 37 million excruciating seconds. It's not exactly believing in Santa Claus, just some simple math. Thank you, Pam, I know that I haven't aged a day since I first walked in the door. That's very sweet of you to say. But on the inside, a good fifteen years have been whittled off my life - fifteen years chipped away like ice from my windshield on exactly 243 frigid winter mornings. I can, without any trouble, believe that it's already been 334 wasted summer days, 20 working holidays, and 260 Sunday nights spent crying myself to sleep. In fact, I keep a tally right here in my calendar, see?
No, Bob, time really didn't fly by. Monday coughed up Tuesday, Tuesday farted out the horror that is Wednesday, Wednesday vomited up a big mess of Thursday, and so on. Over and over again each day came on more nightmarishly boring than the last, creeping slowly toward a whopping three weeks vacation and one extra personal day. Huh? There's no extra personal day? Oh you son of a - What's that, Mike? It seems like just yesterday that I was learning the ropes? Actually yesterday, the day that I spent my lunch hour photocopying status reports, feels a lot more like yesterday. Five years ago feels like fifty years ago. I mean, my God, I can't even remember a time when I didn't know every single one of your faces and disgusting personal habits. The engraved clock is lovely, by the way. Thank you. I will put it in my living room.
So really, I just want to say that you have all been so helpful in making each and every minute of the past five years last twice as long as it needed to. Barbara, the day that I showed you four times how to email a simple Word document, turned an ordinary Tuesday into a sheer time warp to Hell. And Carl, without your constant personal phone calls I would never have appreciated the beauty of sitting silently in traffic, staring straight ahead, and wishing that a meteor would blast my car to smithereens. Thank you all. Each and every soul-killing one of you.
Who wants cake?
