A Case in High Point

You want to know how fast a starter Mike Alessi is? Today we said we would have an open house at 3 p.m., but Mike and Tony and Dani showed up here at 11 a.m. That's four hours ahead of everyone else! And of course, that was the worst-case scenario, because High Point weekend is the time to clean and organize everything and make people think you're clean and organized all year.

Of course the Alessi early entry meant they saw my office as it really is: a complete mess. I moved to a new room in February, and I hadn't unpacked most of my boxes of stuff. You know, just in case I got fired or something. The rest of the place looked horrible, too. So when Tony said to me "Yeah we saw you're new office, very nice," I knew I was done for.

A few hours later and now my office looks good. That's odd. Everything is weird today. Steve Cox and Steve Matthes are working in our office, which makes no sense. David "A Year in MX.com" Bullmer is back, just like it was 2007. The Solitaire rig is in the parking lot. The Rockstar Makita Suzuki truck is parked up the road. The Dominion Post (Morgantown's paper) is covered in High Point stuff. Although this is the weekend where you get to stay home, it's the weekend that's strangest of all.

And the strangest part, by far, is the fact that we've brought in a bunch of cases of beer for our open house. As crazy as we are around here, drinking in the office is prohibited. Except for today. Once we get into that, we'll probably go and trash my office.