For the past couple of weeks I've been putting together a collection of the monthly essays that I used to do for the front page of the journal. Bob had been encouraging me to do that--and to do a compilation of blog posts--for a long time, but I just hadn't done it yet. Formatting for ebooks is a lot of work, and I've been spending my evenings doing that. But I finally finished last night. Now I'll start thinking about another one.
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Randomness
How hard it is to change someone's impression of you -- in our office we don't have vending machines, but we have an "honor" snack box that a company brings in periodically. You choose what you want, and put your money in a slot in the box. A couple of months ago one of the guys got something from the box, and noticed that it (a candy bar, I think) looked like it had been nibbled on. He pulled stuff out of the box to look inside, and said it was full of mouse droppings.
He sent an email out to the whole company about what he had found, and he had the office manager call the vending company. A few days later they came in with a replacement box and taped a note to the top of it apologizing, and saying that the "situation" had been resolved. But that's been a few weeks, and as far as I can tell, no one has taken anything out of the box. No one is going to take a chance on eating something that may have been contaminated by mice.
It's sort of like hearing something about a person that makes you think about them differently. I always believe that people deserve second (or third) chances, and that everyone is capable of redemption. But it's hard. You have to be careful about the impressions that you leave with people, because sometimes it's impossible to change them once they're ingrained.