I'd rather have my teeth pulled

My Italy post will have to wait because Ralf hasn't downloaded the pictures yet.

If only I had my own dedicated creative services team.

But he has a good excuse - he had four wisdom teeth removed yesterday.

Our dentist is great at gory dental surgery but has a couple of odd scheduling quirks. For one thing, the person responsible for scheduling surgery is never there so calls back at totally inconvenient times when you don't have your calendar available to schedule you.

And they have this trick where they call you on some random day before your appointment to invite you to come in THAT DAY to take advantage of a cancellation.

This happened when Ralf and I were in California recently. His iPHone rang at 3AM and it was The Scheduler. She was so excited I could her her voice from under my pillow. 'I have excellent news. There's been a cancellation so if you like, you could have your wisdom teeth operated today!'

Isn't that awesome?? If we hadn't been in California we would have totally jumped at it.

Anyway, I drove him there yesterday morning at 9AM. The plan was that I would drink coffee and jot down some design notes in a cafe while he was under the knife, then pick him up at 10:30. However, perhaps as punishment for not flying back from California to extract the wisdom teeth earlier when that golden opportunity fell into our ungrateful laps, it turned out that we were an hour early.

Which meant I had the undivided attention of the guy who makes technical decisions at our company at a very timely moment. He usually fends off such attacks with a strategic mix of conference calls and children.

Me: Darling, as long as I've got you here. . . I have a prototype I'd like to show you. I was just working through my notes and we have a couple of UI requirements to make this work. We're meeting with the UI folks but you might as well be in the loop.

Ralf (groaning): On any other day, I'd say, 'I'd rather get my teeth pulled.' But that seems beside the point today.

Ladies and gentlemen, it is for THIS moment that I perfected the raised eyebrow.

Me: Well, that's funny, because on any other day I wouldn't be able to ask you if you'd prefer to discuss this before or after you get your teeth pulled?'

Mwa ha ha ha ha!