valentine surprise

for xmas my brother gave me a subscription to sam phillips' private website, the long play. it's a cool present because we both like her music and as part of the membership we get free downloads of new songs, access to her blog, photos, podcasty thingies, videos... it's neat.

a few weeks ago she announced a valentine's day contest: write about your worst valentine memory and post it; three winners will be chosen to receive a homemade valentine from sam phillips herself.

i wrote about something that happened to me:

Well, all those early school Valentine’s Day experiences were pretty terrible, there’s no denying that; but my most memorable Valentine activity happened in 2002, when i was 33 and working in the one-hour photo lab of a large chain drugstore in northern California.
The photo lab was a sectioned-off area in the corner of the store with walls that went only waist-high, so that customers could look in and ostensibly see their photos being developed. On the evening before Valentine’s Day, I was feeling particularly unattractive, cheeky, and single, and I was sick of the incessant marketing, the pink cardboard ruffle hearts, the flowers, the schmaltz– so I took down the dry-erase board in the photo lab and I wrote the following message on it: Happy Corporate Scam Day!, with little hearts with arrows through them all around it.
In my mind it was a perfectly harmless little piece of cynicism, something I thought might give a smirk to my co-workers in the midst of all that lovey-dovey chocolatey nonsense.
But when I arrived to work on Valentine’s afternoon, I was immediately told to go see Jeff, one of the store managers. My little pink heart skipped a beat. I went up to Jeff’s office.
”Andy,” he said, pulling the board up off his desk and facing it at me, ”What were you thinking?!” My writing suddenly looked so insolent, so mean, so bitter. ”Happy Corporate Scam Day?? People shopping at our store can SEE this dry-erase board in the photo lab. How do you think this message makes them feel? How do you think it makes us look?”
Though I was 33, at that moment it was as if I was 13 again, sitting in the principal’s office after spraying shook-up Cokes in the stairwell. I felt so suddenly, childishly guilty.
”Sorry, Jeff,” I said. ”I thought it would be funny.”
”Well it’s not,” he said, wiping his hand across the message and handing the board to me. ”Now go get to work.”

...and i found out the day before yesterday that i was chosen as one of the winners. sam talked about my corporate scam day on her audio "phone booth" podcast, and apparently a homemade (not store-bought) valentine is on its way to me. the lesson i'm gleaning: bad and annoying experiences can, if put into proper context, resonate with others and pay off someday! yay.