Wednesday night.

Damn, this feels good. My roadtrip took a bit longer than expected due to some logistical issues, so it took me 15.5 hours to cover the 653 miles to Ottawa and back. Without breaking any confidentiality rules… A treadmill didn’t get delivered to a customer. It got sent back to our hub hundreds of miles away. There were no other sellable treadmills of that model that we could ship to the customer.

This had all the signs of a surefire disaster right until I looked into this, found the original treadmill at our hub (it showed up as a returned item, not a brand new one), and volunteered to make the trip.

I left at 7am, delivered the thing at 9:30pm, and got home at 10:30pm. Had to eat like a garbage raccoon along the way and skipped my daily exercise, but this was so worth it. (I also had to rent a small U-Haul trailer along the way because the treadmill was just 1″ too high to slide into my Kia Rio’s trunk.) The work I do on my computer matters, and it’s impactful – but this, right here, actually made a difference for one of our customers, and the warm fuzzy feeling of satisfaction from a job well done is one hell of a drug.

The world is still on fire (literally: Colorado’s wildfire has been burning for two straight months now), there’s a raging pandemic for which we don’t have a vaccine yet, and days are getting shorter, darker, and colder. And yet this, here, today, was indescribably great and rewarding. Here is to more days like this one.