Pokey Guy

When my niece was younger--between the ages of two and four--she would make up names for me. Some of these nicknames were ones she heard us say, some were names she heard on TV, and some she just made up. One of the most lasting names, which we don't know where it came from, was "pokey guy." She would refer to me as pokey guy often. When my mom leaves the house, she will sometimes say to me, "Be a good boy," so once as they were leaving the house, my niece said to me, "Be a good poke!"

I don't think that my niece called me pokey to mean that I am slow, but sometimes I think that is appropriate. Like at work. One thing that is new this year is that there are TV screens that show how fast we are working. I am working too slowly. I know I just started up again, but I am the second slowest person. The only person slower than me has special needs or something like that. I'm getting better about doing more boxes at a time, but on Friday, I was still slower than I was even on Thursday.

I think part of this may be because of the station I was working at. We have stations in different locations, depending on where the first item on the list is. I have been working at station 3. Unfortunately, station 3 orders call for a lot of missionary water bottles and temple slippers. Why is this bad, you ask? Well, the tickets we have determine what size of box we should use based on the size of the items. But the bottles and slippers are sized incorrectly, so most of the time when you get them on a ticket, you have to go get a bigger box. So a lot of my time is spent not filling boxes--which is what is reflected in the speed--and is actually spent walking all over the place trying to find a sufficiently big box. But maybe this isn't actually slowing me down that much, and I am simply slow. I have always had a tendency not to be very fast.

On Friday night the YSA stake had a big event thing. It was obviously intended for you to meet people, especially since they gave us little slips with random questions to have people sign. (I was valuable for being able to answer "Find someone who has never seen any of the Star Wars movies." I saw a few of them as a kid, but I don't remember anything, so I figured that counts.) But it was also kind of a dance party thing, and the music was too loud to hear anything anyone said. What's the point in having an event to meet people when you can't hear anything they say? So I left early.

Saturday morning the stake activity continued with a service project. In addition to being slow, I have a great tendency of getting lost. This was especially true on my way to the service project. I accidentally ended up getting on the freeway--twice. We were meeting at a church building before going elsewhere for the project, and I figured if I kept looking, by the time I found the church, everyone would be gone, so I just came home. And I felt guilty going to any other activities if I missed the service activity, so I just stayed home all day.

So what did I do with my unplanned free time? I threw away papers. When I was younger I kept notes and things in a filing cabinet so if I ever needed to know something, I could look at an old assignment or handout or note. But today with Wikipedia and other things at my fingertips, and being in college, I figured I didn't need to keep most of that stuff. So I went through it all, saved the few things I wanted to keep, and threw the rest in the recycling box. I had stuff in there dating to elementary school. As I tossed old chemistry and math notes, it made me kind of sad. I will probably not have any more math, chemistry or physics classes (unless I decide to take some geology classes with those as prereqs, but there are plenty of classes I can take that don't need them). And even though I took calculus winter of last year, I can hardly remember anything. So when my teenage son asks me for help on his homework, I can't help him. I'll have to say to him, as I have done so many times, "Call your Uncle David!"