Actual Celebrity Sightings

Today was a big day for me.  But you won't appreciate it fully without some context.  It will make the good part of the story so much sweeter if I bore you first.


I really like my workplace.  You'd hardly know it to speak to me.  Thinking back on most of my conversations about work, it's bitch, bitch, whine, bitch.


But that's not because of my work, specifically, it's because I have to work, period.  Take a bird's eye look at my career and you see a woman, under thirty, employed as the director of print production and graphics at an educational company.  I received on-the-job training from an exceptionally talented graphic artist and now spend a good part of my time drawing for a living.  I also get to lay out books so they are easy to read.  My team is small, but excellent.  My management is intelligent and compassionate.  Basically, I have it made in the shade.  A bird's eye look at my work indicates that I should really stop bitching.


There is one real problem, though.  We don't have a receptionist at the moment, so several of us have been taking half-day shifts at the front desk.  I was supposed to be up there Friday morning, but someone needed this afternoon off so I took a switch.


Now for the good part.


I arrived at reception at noon, looked through the glass doors into the conference room, and promptly had a stroke.


Not really.  What actually happened is I thought "What is our tech guy doing in a conference oh wait that isn't our tech guy wait I KNOW THAT HAIR!"  But it felt like I might be having a stroke.  I said to the person whom I was replacing at reception, "IS THAT DAMON ALLEN?  Oh my god that's DAMON ALLEN!" in a ridiculously loud whisper.


She said, "Yes, he was telling me he played football for the Eskimos for about six years."


I took my spot at reception and sat there, mentally freaking out.  Also managing to think, because it's my duty, Eskimos Schmeskimos.


You may not know this about me.  But I love football.  I am a BC Lions fan like my father before me, and his father before him.  Football is amazing, and there, in the conference room, was the further-to-that-also-amazing DAMON ALLEN.


Okay, let's pretend you're a new immigrant to Canada, or for whatever reason you don't follow football but have some other redeeming feature that will make me like you in spite of your sports ignorance*.  You may not know who Damon Allen is.


Damon Allen is one of the great quarterbacks.  "Who is the best quarterback ever?"  Is a matter for debate; there are many different ways to determine something as qualitative as best.  For me, there is greatness, a category few players attain, a category you earn not just with talent, but with time.  Then, there's personal preference.  


For example, my Mum can't get enough of Geroy Simon (I suspect part of it is the way he looks in his uniform pants).  My Dad is unable to choose a favourite football player.  Maybe it used to be Joe Kapp, until he tackled Angelo Mosca at the 2011 CFL Alumni Legends Awards, "because that was a stupid thing to do".  There's Willie Fleming, there's Dirty 30, there's Brent Johnson, I could have been on the phone all night with Dad discussing which football players we admire and why.  I almost was; we got as far as comparing Damon Allen's throwing motion with Travis Lulay's.  My Dad and I are intense.  Don't believe?  Here's a family portrait from 2009.

There are two Flemings because the shop left the number off the front of the first one.  The corrected one was free.

I personally choose Lui Passaglia as my favourite because his winning field goal in the '94 Grey Cup is what got me permanently hooked on football.  And because he is the best.


Oh hey, look what I found on Wikipedia.  It's the star of this story (Damon Allen on the right) with the star of my childhood (Lui Passaglia, the CFL's all-time leading scorer on the left) with the 2000 Grey Cup!

Credit here because this is not my photograph.

Wow.  I got all distracted there thinking about Geroy's butt the Lions winning Grey Cups.  Where was I?

Oh yes.  Damon Allen is great, I was sitting at reception failing at working, answering the occasional phone call, trying not to stare through the glass doors at the genuine celebrity roughly ... 20 metres away from me.

Okay this is how great Damon Allen is.  He is 83% efficient.  In school, that is an A.  In cars, that is impossible.

He has 72,381 total yards.

THAT IS A BIG NUMBER PEOPLE!

He is a quarterback.  He is supposed to throw the ball.  But he has 11,920 rushing yards.

THAT IS A REALLY BIG NUMBER PEOPLE!  He is third in the league behind people whose only job is rushing.

He played in the CFL for 23 years.  That's almost as long as I've been alive.

So.  Me.  Reception desk.  20 metres away, greatness.

Guys, there's something else you might not know about me.  I'm totally not cool.  I'm like, totally, like, uncool.  I think the funniest thing I ever did was wear home-made Star Trek communicator badges to a Star Wars themed party.

So the very last thing I was going to do was walk into that conference room and say something suave like "Mr Allen, may I get you a coffee, tea, or water?" which would have been the really cool way to say "OH MY GOD I KNOW WHO YOU AAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRREEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

No, instead of that, the second the CEO of the company walked past reception, I said, "Hey so what's Damon Allen doing here?"  Apparently they go 'way back and CEO is so impressed that I love football (note:  he was also impressed when he discovered I knew who Gregory Peck is.  Football and old movies are two good ways to impress CEOs.  Remember this, friends) that next thing I know I am grabbing my phone and heading into the conference room for an introduction and photograph.

I tried to protest that I didn't want to interrupt, that I could wait until they were done, but when CEO gets an idea in his head, and for once isn't seeing me stuffing dripping tacos into my face like I think they're going to run away*, there is no resisting.

Damon Allen is approximately the nicest person I have ever met in my entire life.  He said I must be happy the Lions won the Grey Cup this year (OVER THE MOON BUDDY) but I played it as cool as I could manage, which wasn't particularly difficult, because I could barely speak.

I think I managed to be fairly coherent because I got this out of it.

GREATNESS IS TOUCHING MY BACK!!!!!!!

Then when he was done he asked me to call him a cab and he had kickass aviators.  He was so cool I forgot to dial the area code the first time.

Damon Allen thinks I am an idiot.

BUT DAMON ALLEN KNOWS WHO I AM.

*This is obviously a hyperbole.  A bit.  I'm not like, a hockey fan.
*This is not a hyperbole.  7/10 times he walks past my office, I am either doing a stupid dance or shoving messy food, like tacos, into my face.
Football statistics from the CFL website.