Welcome to the First Weekly Planet Indoor Summer Campout. It very well could be the last. When we started planning the Summer Guide issue, with an emphasis on avoiding the heat at all costs, we knew we wanted to go camping. But it's just no fun in Florida's 95-degree summer scorch.
So, we hatched a brilliant alternative: camping in our office's largest conference room, where the air conditioning is always a frosty 47 degrees (or at least it seems that way.)
The entire editorial department took part, from novices (editor David Warner) to experienced campers (Troop 53 Scoutmaster Wayne Garcia) and everyone in between. We also invited two job applicants for what must have been the most bizarre interview process ever. One made it through the night in a tent he brought along.
Here is our staff report on how it went:
8:15 p.m.: Time to start setting up camp. Scoutmaster Wayne arrives, fellow campers as well. Now we have to break down the tables in the conference room. Nature sounds come through the walls. Either that, or it's the board of directors meeting in the next conference room.
8:40 p.m.: Question arises: Is it OK to watch Lost on a camping trip? Better question: Is the cable fixed yet?
8:45 p.m.: Two campers already MIA. Doesn't bode well.
9:00 p.m.: Scoutmaster Wayne is setting up a tent by the mailboxes, and ops editor Party Joe Bardi, resplendent in orange camo, has already pitched his in the conference room. The womenfolk have gone a-foraging, scarfing up plates of Greek food left over from the board meeting next door. And so far, not a mosquito in sight.
9:05 p.m.: Copy editor Anne Arsenault to senior editor Eric Snider: "So Eric, you wanna do some knots?"
9:30 p.m.: The fire is roaring. Bardi brought the fire — a DVD called Ambient Fire #6, to be exact. No matches required when one is indoor camping. Instead, just pop the Ambient Fire disc that Netflix delivered on Monday into a DVD player connected to the busted-up office TV, and hit play. One piece of advice: Turn off the included music and go with the soundtrack of popping fire and chirping crickets. Trust us. We're ready to huddle close to the screen and warm our hands.
10:15 p.m.: Music critic Scott Harrell to Arsenault: "My butt will pop your mattress."
10:20 p.m.: "Oh, that's Grandma. She's just cleaning her gun."
That's the actual last line of a story told by Snider, one of several yarns spun by campers, including guests Alex ("She was covered with some kind of hair …") and Roxanne ("Do you want to kiss him?")
Note: When organizing an indoor campout, be sure someone has "Dueling Banjos" from Deliverance on their iPod. It's a brilliant accompaniment to any campfire story.
10:30 p.m.: We're actually singing "Kumbaya" now. Or trying to. Harrell can't quite get the chords right on his guitar.
10:31 p.m.: Thank God it's over. Now Harrell's on to the Beatles songbook. Or at least the one tune he knows from it. "Money." Just in time.
And you know what, believe it or not, there's something actually kind of great about sitting around in your conference room with the lights off and the campfire video going and tents pitched and your music critic leading an acoustic sing-along to Poison's "Talk Dirty to Me."
Around 11 p.m.: We begin our night hike. Scoutmaster Wayne is armed with a compass to get our bearings. We hike down to the corporate offices (actually, they are cubicles about 20 yards away from our conference-room campsite), where the folks who run the Creative Loafing empire have left us a trail of clues and goodies in what amounts to part-scavenger hunt, part-orienteering exercise.
11:20 p.m.: Party Joe and Anne have been missing for the last 20 minutes … Hmmmm.
11:30 p.m.: The dodgeball has begun. There's no telling how this will end.
11:40 p.m.: The corporate weasels will be punished! We figured out who toilet-papered our cars even before we took the hike into corporate. But thanks for the toys, anyway.
11:46 p.m.: This would make a good script for The Office. OK, at first blush the idea of indoor tent camping was hilarious. On second blush, it seemed silly. But in actuality, it rocks, and we seriously doubt that the folks over at the Buzz blog or Sticks of Fire are doing anything like this, since we're posting updates to blurbex.com all night long, all in the interest of quality journalism.
The scoutmaster says he's going to enforce lights out in 14 minutes. That oughta go over well.
Midnight: Some thoughts from events editor Leilani Polk: Give me Cheetos or give me death. I almost had a panic attack before the evening began. On the way to the camp-in, I made a special trip to Publix to pick up some provisions, most importantly, "Natural" White Cheddar Cheetos — a fundamental camping snack — and couldn't find the damn things to save my life. They're usually stocked in the natural foods aisle posing as something that could possibly be good for you. But the puffs were nowhere to be found. I jogged to the regular chip aisle. No luck — just boring old orange cheddar Cheetos and other snack foods that weren't in any way appealing. I racked my brain in desperation — oh where, oh where have my little puffs gone, oh where oh where could they be?
Then it occurred to me — End Caps! You know, the displays at the end of each aisle … anyway, I found a few bags there and my relief was so great that when the cashier asked me if I wanted to donate $1 to the March of Dimes, the only reason I said yes was because I found the White Cheddar Cheetos. Otherwise, those babies could have kissed my ass.
12:30 a.m.: S'mores 'n' cigs. What's a camping trip without S'mores, those gooey-licious sandwiches of toasted marshmallows, graham crackers and chocolate bars? We have to do S'mores, even though we can't have an open fire inside the offices. We decide against the microwave, though it might have been fun to explode marshmallows over, say, CFO Angela's car (one of our leading suspects in the toilet-papering of our cars). We doubt it'll go over well in the employee kitchen. But a nice culinary surprise: Marshmallows and graham crackers cook up real good in a toaster oven. Top with Hershey's and another cracker, and serve to the campers, who by now are doing what they do every day anyway: smoking outside.
OUTSIDE?! This is camp-IN people! Scoutmaster Garcia has given up trying to discipline. Hard to tell whether we'll ever get to the Dirtiest Boy Scout Joke Ever segment of the evening, let alone to reading employee fantasies from CLundressed.com.
But at least the disco ball and Beach Boys tunes are soothing (Note: Always bring a disco ball to a camp-in, along with the Deliverance tape).
About 1:45 a.m.: Snider and Scoutmaster Wayne switch to jazz. Snider's slumped back in an office chair. He got a variety pack of those plastic airline liquor bottles a couple of Secret Santas ago, and he's knocked down all the clear liquors (four or five bottles worth) on top of the many beers he began with. He thinks the music sounds particularly transcendent. Listening to Oliver Nelson's tenor solo from "Stolen Moments" for the 3,187th time, he's completely enthralled. So is Scoutmaster Wayne.
1:55 a.m.: Bardi just got his ass handed to him at Texas Hold 'Em by Harrell and Arsenault. Oh, the humiliation. But as he puts it, when you don't have the cards, you don't have the cards. It's bedtime.
7:22 a.m.: There's nothing like waking up to piercing, fluorescent lighting, and then realizing you're at work. We in the editorial department had no earthly idea that someone on staff actually arrives at work at 7 a.m. Thanks for so rudely waking us up, Shirley. How fast can a person break down a campsite when it is indoors?
Pretty darn fast.
For more about the campout, especially the ongoing intrigue about which corporate weasels actually T.P.ed our cars, visit the Planet's blog, www.blurbex.com.
This article appears in May 10-16, 2006.