Rainey Blogs on Some Days

O ne of the questions I don't really like to answer comes on most Mondays at work. “How was your weekend?” The question might come from a co-worker or a former coworker or maybe even a complete stranger. This past week, I called our tech support hotline on Monday about a situation I’ve been having where people inside my company cannot call me from a work number. I let it go for as long as I could because it was really great for a while, but I finally needed to get it resolved. The tech had to get some other departments involved, and while we were waiting for them to get on the call, this otherwise total stranger I’ve never talked to before in my entire life popped the big question: “So how was your weekend?” I gave a vague answer and then pivoted out of it back to the support issue I was having. (I’ve watched far too many politicians answer questions for the past two years on Face the Nation , so now, like they always do, I use the pivot in my conversations.) This resistance to ...

My Grandma Rainey always used a couple of anachronisms that now make sense to me as I've gotten older. She'd say my dad was born on “Armistice Day,” referring to Veterans Day when they disputed about his birth date because she insisted that his birth certificate actually listed the wrong date for his birth. (She ultimately went and had the birth certificate legally corrected to win the argument. He was born on Armistice Day!) And on this Memorial Day weekend, I now remember that she always used the term “Decoration Day,” which was the name for Memorial Day until she was 50 years old. That’s actually not a crazy thing to say, but I remember thinking it was at the time. Growing up in my house, we had an icebox to keep the food cold, but it actually wasn’t an icebox. It was a refrigerator, but the old names for things sometimes take a while to be discontinued from use. Somewhere along the way, I stopped using “icebox” but I do not remember when. All I know is that I think we o...