What is most helpful to you when working with employees in other departments?
Really, until Karina arrived just recently, being the sole TIMSS guy, everyone was from a different department. (Or else no one was.) It took me a while to figure out what everybody else did, but once I got a pretty good sense of that, it was easy to work with everyone.
In general, though, I just think of us all as ASH employees. I go with what Bruce Springsteen once said about recording his first record at CBS in the early seventies. Something along the lines of “If they had asked me to mop the floors, I’d have mopped the floors.”
Deleted paragraph from Favorite Lunch Spot question:
To be honest, though, this year I’ve been trying to be tad adventurous, going to lunch with Helena and Joe once a week. We’ve only been to Au Bon Pain once, and that was to get sandwiches to go, to eat sitting on the grass in Dupont Circle.
Where’s the farthest you’ve traveled?
I grew up in a military family, so we moved around a lot when I was a kid. Exotic places like Fort Sill in Lawton OK, Fort Bliss in El Paso TX, Fort Ord in Monterey CA, Rock Island Arsenal in Rock Island IL. Pretty exciting, huh? I haven’t gone very far in my adult life. I drove once non-stop from St. Louis to Minneapolis by myself; it took about 18 hours. I spent a week at a resort in St. Lucia in 2000. By far the farthest I’ve ever gone was to Italy for my honeymoon in 2003. We spent eleven glorious days walking around Florence and Rome. I’d love to go back or even live in Florence some day.
What’s one of your favorite quotes (from a movie, song, poem, anything)?
I’ve always loved Harper’s last monologue from Angel’s in America, when she’s on the plane heading west. She ends with: “Nothing’s lost forever. In this world, there’s a kind of painful progress, longing for what we’ve left behind, and dreaming ahead. At least I think that’s so.” I use that quote at the top of my website and on my personal email signature. I saw the Alliance Theatre production of Angels in America in Atlanta in 1995. It was completely mind-blowing life-changing. Rhoda Griffis played Harper. Rhoda’s an amazing actor.
Full sentence regarding Chuckie:
Child’s Play had just come out on video, and we had a cardboard cutout of Chuckie, the little demon doll wielding a knife, standing up by the horror section.