Today was a snow day, giving us an opportunity to sit down and get a little CommonWealth Orchestra clerical work done. I’ve been working on getting our Mailchimp account populated so we can start sending out email postcards to our fans and followers, and Dan has been doing Danstuff and helping me out with exporting addresses from Outlook. But through it all, we’ve been expecting a delivery of office supplies from Quill, including a box of paper.
I wondered if Quill would attempt delivery on a day when Winchendon hit the county jackpot of snow with 14″+. But we went out this morning and shoveled paths on both sides of the house — the main walkway out to the street from the kitchen door (we never use the front door during the winter) and another one in the back of the house, which is the required path down to the chicken coop and from thence out to the street so the gas delivery guy can get through to the tank.
But as I was puttering in the laundry room, Dan shouted “Your delivery guy is here.” I went to greet him at the kitchen door — the only sensible place to deliver anything. But then the phone rang and it was the delivery guy saying he had delivered the box to the shed, because, of course.
I mean, we have to go down a pretty good slope from the back door to the shed, so naturally you’re going to take delivery of a 40 lb. box of paper so you can kill yourself trying to get back through a blizzard up a steep, icy incline, right?
But as I began to think, I realized that something else was going on. I mean, after all, the shed is really … the chicken coop.
So began my investigation. I bundled up and went on down to see what’s what. It was quiet in the coop, maybe unnaturally so for mid-day. Of course, chickens are notoriously snow blind, so they weren’t having any of a usual day of foraging and scratching in their run. But once in the shed, I verified that the box of paper was indeed meant for orchestra business.
There it was, next to the laying box that Dan had installed this past fall so the chickens would have a little more, er, legroom in their coop. That is when the lightbulb went on: the box had indeed come to Commonwealth Orchestra Outreach Project.
Yep. COOP. The box was misdelivered! At least that was my first thought, but then I began to realize that something a bit more sinister was going on. It was awfully quiet in the coop, but I thought I heard something that sounded a bit like a cackle. So I decided to check if maybe this box had been paid for.
Nope. It it was COD, or EOD (egg on delivery), but the delivery man hadn’t picked it up. Or, maybe there were more eggs there to begin with. We usually get about 6 a day. Hmmm. I kept hearing funny sounds from the coop. Was that a typewriter I was hearing? Had one of them learned to hunt and peck? It was time to confront the issue. I wasn’t sure I really wanted chicken droppings on my orchestra correspondence. They might be confused with some modern notation.
Confirmed! In the boredom of their feather-brained existence, they had planned and executed a coup, er, coop. Or something. I looked at their guilty expressions and realized that somehow they had countermanded my original order I had placed with, uh, Quill and had planned all along to become my secretarial pool.
I gathered the eggs and went back into the house to make an omelet and check to see if the sky was falling.
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