random thoughts – Day 1,527 – (Friday) – temperatures and fisticuffs

I was the only person in the office-office today and it was blissfully quiet. Things were accomplished, including remembering to get outside for a walk before the high school let out and the streets were filled with students.

Nice day for a walk.

It wasn’t overly warm and a quick pace was taken. The route went along the rail line and around the canal, over by the courthouse and the health center and the empty lots where buildings were promised but not yet started, past the registry, and at Central Street, looping back towards the bank. 

The afternoon was all that separated me from a week’s vacation, and I hoped for it to be as quiet at the morning had been and then be over and done with. The plan was to finish a project status update for team members returning to the office from their own time away this week. Emails were sent asking questions and answers were plugged into the status report.

Fisticuffs.

Shortly after 2:30 when school let out, yelling and noise from the street carried up to the office. The view out the window revealed a gathering of high schoolers on the corner in front of Subway. There was yelling as a couple girls pummeled each other and pulled long hair and rolled around on the concrete sidewalk. The temperatures have risen a bit this week, and it seems tempers have grown a bit hot with them. Fisticuffs ensued.

A smaller group of kids stood on the sidewalk on the other side of Merrimack Street, watching the activity and separated from the first group by traffic and maybe also good sense.

I watched out the window for a few minutes. It wasn’t as big a brawl as the one several years ago that had about a hundred kids and resulted in arrests. 

Back at my desk, updating things and cross checking things, it was a couple minutes before I registered more noise outside. This time, it was sirens and three or four police cruisers with them. Sirens don’t always register anymore. With the police and fire stations a block away, they are a permanent part of the soundscape.

A sizeable number of students remained on the corner and weren’t disbursing very quickly even though the officers where telling them to move along. It was comical how they stood, shifting their weight and taking a few steps in place and not going anywhere, ignoring the officers and looking around and upward as if suddenly interested by the local architecture. It looked exaggerated, like stage acting. Eventually, they moved along to wherever kids go after school these days.

I was most glad to have already gone out and returned before the altercation.

Around 3:30, a couple monkey wrenches were tossed my way on a couple projects. No worries, because late on a Friday afternoon before a long weekend/week off is the perfect time for stupid stuff and delays. Right? 

The frequency and pattern with which it happens to me (basically right before every holiday weekend and vacation) feels like some sort of cruel trick of the universe. Enough, already. Now the project update for colleagues also includes a problem or two from out of left field. Sorry, folks.