Nuts to you

Support calls at the Empire often involve lots of sitting around, holding a user’s hand virtually through long troubleshooting and reinstallation sessions.  There’s not much else I can do; I’m tethered to the phone by the cord of my headset, so pacing is limited by the length of the wire.  And reading during calls is HEAVily frowned upon.  Heavily, as in “if we see you doing that, feel lucky if we don’t fire you on the spot.”

Which is all very well and fine, but I always feel as though I OUGHT to be doing something else while I’m talking.  I can’t split-process well enough to write while I’m concentrating on a customer’s problem.  However, I have found one thing I can do while I’m taking calls:  shell pecans.

You see, until three weeks ago I had four big grocery sacks of cracked pecans that I hadn’t got shelled from last fall’s crop, and I badly need to get them done before they all either go rancid or mold in the shell.  (Some, I’ve found, have already molded in the shell.  Those get donated to the trashcan’s welfare.)  A couple of weeks ago I decided to try carrying in a small bag of nuts, to see how well it would work to shell them as I talked.

Turned out that it works fine.  I’ve gotten through two sacks of Burketts and Comanches, and I’m halfway through the last sack of Burketts.  It’s just like knitting while you listen to the radio, really.  I pull out a double handful of nuts on my desktop, shell them, drop the nutmeats into a small handled shopping bag and sweep the shells into a grocery sack to come home and be dumped in the compost pen.  On a good day I can produce nearly two pounds of shelled nuts.

And it doesn’t seem to bother the customers, either.  I don’t think any of them have figured out that I’m not bringing every atom of my brain to bear on their problems.  Actually, I am bringing almost every atom to bear (except for the calls that are no-brainers), because shelling nuts doesn’t take very much attention, nor cause very much commotion.  If I need to type notes, I stop and type, then begin cracking again.  The guy in the cube across the aisle from me thinks it’s funny as a crutch that I’m doing this, but if I give him a pound or two (out of the 2002 crop, which I still haven’t completely got rid of; no point wasting new stuff on scoffers) he may change his tune a bit.