Startle

I've been doing this thing at work for a while where I go for a short walk every thirty minutes to keep myself active and healthy. I was watching a show on YouTube, and a doctor said that they'd done a study on it, and they found that you got more out of a walk if it was broken up throughout the day than you did if you did it all at once. I guess, remaining sedentary for long periods of time is bad for the body.

So, I set a timer on my phone to go off every half hour, and when it would ring, I'd get up and walk around for a couple of minutes. Usually, I'd go outside and take a lap of the parking lot...but there's only certain times of year that such a practice is feasible in Houston. I actually went a few months without doing my walks at all, because it got so hot when summer came along that I couldn't handle it. I would get so sweaty, and I didn't want to be smelling like a locker room at work or something.

Then I realized that I could just walk indoors. Our building is pretty big, I could just take loops around the hallways inside the building. I've been doing a lot of that for the last few months. Sometimes, I'll head outside and do the parking lot still if it's an exceptionally nice day (which is rare) or maybe after dark when the heat retreats a little (though the humidity keeps those rare too), but mostly I stay indoors.

One of my favorite spots to go indoors is the office where the sales folks are. It's one giant room with a bunch of cubicle-like desks in the middle. I can go there and cruise the perimeter of it at a pretty high rate of speed and get in a lot of steps. I don't like going there when there's people there, though. I don't know anybody in sales. Their job and mine do not co-mingle. I work to make the product that they work to sell, but we don't work together in any way, so we are not even acquaintances much less friends. I always wait until all of them have gone home for the night...which happens pretty early most days...and then I'll cruise their empty office.

Recently, however, I've been caught off guard by a few of them a couple of times. I thought the room was empty, but there was one straggler left, and their head was hidden behind their monitor, so I didn't see them there. I went in, started walking, then found someone still at their desk, and felt like a creep for walking through their office uninvited while they were still around. I hurried back out of the office and waited until it was fully empty to come back again.

I check better now. Now that I've been caught more than once by a straggler, I make sure that there is no one left before I go in there, and if anybody still remains, I casually walk through the office and down the hall to the other office that is connected to it like I always meant to go there in the first place.

Just the other day, though, they decorated the office for Halloween. These guys went all out. There's several fake severed limbs in places, ghoulish heads hanging from windows, and so on. There's not a single group of desks that doesn't have some kind of decorations. Two of them in particular keep giving me problems, though. First, there's this guy:

He's a cute little skeleton that looks like he died at his desk or something. It's kind of funny, and I don't have any problems with it. It's not like it scares me...but it does give me a start sometimes. They've put him in a chair that is a good place for me to miss as I come in the office. I walk in, see that nobody is there and think, "Okay, I'm safe to walk in here without seeming like a weirdo," and then I go around the corner of desks, look up, and there the guy is. Pretty much every time, I've been fooled into thinking that there was someone that I missed and I get a quick shot of nervousness and embarrassment before I realize that it's just the skeleton decoration.

Then there's this guy:

He's hanging from a coat rack in the corner by the printer. It's the same deal with him. I think I'm safe, I walk around the office in a half circle, and when I turn back toward the side I came in on, I catch a glimpse of this humanoid thing standing in the corner, and I think, "Oh, crap, there was one more person that I didn't see, and now they're wondering what this weirdo is up to walking around their office when he doesn't belong here." Again, it's just a momentary shock before I figure out what is actually going on, but it happens again and again.

The rest of the Halloween season is going to be a bit of a pain. I bet they'll just replace them with Santa Clauses or something, and it'll be the rest of the year even!