Jonathan Field - Maker of Random Stuff

I announced to my team today that I’ll be moving on from Zappos. My last day will be February 28th.

I think it’s the right thing, but it makes me sad.

Long time readers may remember that back in April 2005 I started my livejournal with a post about the World Series of Speed Quarters. Well, after all this time the video is now online. It features yours truly prominently in the first 15 seconds, and then not at all after that. The speech I give at the beginning about table quality actually went on for a good minute or two, but they just pulled that one bit. Then they show me hammer down a beer.

There’s another event coming up in San Francisco… not sure if I’ll sign up, but I recommend anyone in the area to give it a shot.

So now that she’s doing well, Sophie and I were thinking of renting all the movies that feature someone with a massive facial scar or deformity. There’s Mask, The Man Without A Face, Darkman (we’ll skip the direct to video sequels), and Vanilla Sky (which I strangely liked better than the original). Any other classics we should include on the list?

Well, not quite good as new, but this new picture of Sophie, just six days after the incident shows amazing improvement. (traumatic day one photo for comparison). You gotta respect the human body’s ability to heal — with a little help from obsessive cleaning and modern antibiotics of course. Her new skin is still very fragile and sensitive, inflaming at moving parts like the folds of her eyelid. But at least it isn’t an oozing open wound any more. It’ll be weeks before we see if there’s any scarring, though it would have to be minor from the looks of it. It’ll be months before we see how the pigmentation works out. But after that I think she can go right back to the cover of Vogue.

Thanks to everyone for the kind words.

Sophie is coming along well; I’ll post more pictures soon. I was sick at the beginning of last week, and I was almost over it (I thought) on Tuesday when all this happened. The stress and lack of rest seemed to cause a relapse so I’ve been pretty darn sick all weekend — nasty cough and stuffiness. She made me soup and I dressed her wounds. We were quite a miserable pair, in an amusing way of course.

Despite my best efforts Sophie seems to have picked up my illness now. It’ll be extra annoying for her since she won’t be able to blow her nose.

But hey, we’ve caught up on our movie watching. Thank You For Smoking is pretty great.

So, I was planning to have posted about a wonderful day at Churchill Downs, or Sophie and my exciting time in Chile, or our adventures on Easter Island, but things have been sidetracked this week.

Tuesday night Sophie and I went to her mom’s to have dinner with the rest of the Kim family… Richard, Jinah, and Hogan had come over from LA a couple days before Thanksgiving. It had been too long since we’d had home-cooked Korean food anyways. It was a good meal, and after we ate, we were relaxing for a bit. I’ll tell you how I experienced it:

I was watching TV and suddenly I heard a quick, intense scream. I thought it might be Sophie, and my first thought was that she saw cockroach or something and got startled. Before I could even turn around it was followed by another scream and another, from different people. My next thought is that Hogan had done something to hurt himself, but as I turned I saw he was sitting on the floor and seemed okay. In the kitchen Mrs. Kim and Jinah were holding Sophie’s arms, and they were still screaming. She was facing away, and Richard was running toward the sink with a look of horror on his face. The next thought I had was that she had somehow cut herself terribly with a knife, maybe lost a finger or something. Then they turned her around and I saw her face, which I don’t know quite how to describe properly. The right side was burned, grey, and blistered. Her eyes were tightly closed and she was stiff but trembling as they, still crying out, quickly brought her to the sink and we doused her face with water.

Richard called 911 immediately, and I tried to make sense of what had just happened and to calm Sophie and everyone — Mrs.Kim brought over a towel with ice to press against her face. Apparently some kind of hot liquid had hit her face. Richard handed me the phone and I answered a series of questions… “is she still on fire?”, no, “is she breathing?”, yes. In a moment they had dispatched the paramedics.

Off the phone, I had a chance to check her out more closely. Her eyes were still closed and her nose was the glossy bright pink of raw flesh. Her right cheek and eye were covered in blisters and some kind of thick grey crust. She kept asking “I’m okay, right?” From what I could tell the burn affected only the surface, meaning it hadn’t changed the shape of her face at all. So I told her yes and tried get things calmer. We sat her down on the sofa and gave her a wet towel with ice in it. The 911 folks had said not to put anything on the burn, but she was in excruciating pain at this point and so we let her press the ice pack on her face.

Here’s what it was: a bottle of hair removal wax that Jinah had put in the microwave. Apparently she misread the instructions and put it in too long. When Sophie took the bottle out, it burst.

The paramedics came and took her to the burn center at UMC. It’s kind of a ghetto hospital, but it’s the only burn center in Las Vegas. The paramedics had doped her up good with morphine, so she wasn’t in too much pain. Richard and I stayed with her in the hallway, where she waited for four hours after a brief glance by a doctor who determined her eye was okay. Up to that point we weren’t sure because it was swollen enough that she couldn’t really open it. During those four hours waiting, an amazing assortment of crazies and drug users were carted by: people who complained of serious health trouble but would then argue with the doctor and refuse any kind of test, unconscious individuals who would come to only to say things like “I took a green pill but I don’t know what it was” or “I got high four times tonight, but that’s not why I had the seizure”. Unfortunately these folks seemed to command much more attention than Sophie, so it was pretty frustrating to wait there.

Eventually they took her upstairs where a nurse painfully rubbed off all the wax, revealing lots of raw flesh. Then they coated her face with antibiotic ointment and told us to come back tomorrow when a burn doctor would be there. They also gave us some Percocet so she could sleep. We went home.

We went to see the doctor the next day. She basically instructed us on how to clean and apply ointment to the wound so it wouldn’t get infected. We have to do that every few hours for a week or two. It was classed a second degree burn, which means that the top layer (the epidermis) is destroyed and the second layer (the dermis) is damaged but only to a partial depth. We were told there can be some scarring with this kind of burn, but it should be minimal. All we can do at this point is help it heal.

Sophie’s been doing okay. This has been extremely stressful on her, but she’s a trooper and she was joking even as she waited in the hospital. I’m going to include a picture of her now, on the first day after the burn. Be warned, it is not for the faint of heart, but it gives an idea of what she is going through: Here it is.

And here’s a picture from last week in Chile, in happier times.

I think she’ll be okay, I think she’ll heal up fine. But there’s a bit of a road to that.

I’m back from 9 days in Chile — what a great trip. Aside from a head cold I picked up on the marathon return travel day: 26 hours from Rapa Nui to Las Vegas, including transfers in Santiago and Dallas. I don’t get sick often, but when I do it’s always related to sleep deprivation.

I’ve got some posting to catch up on for sure… both the Chile trip and some good times before the trip that I want to remember. That’s what the journal is for, you know, so I can remember what I did with my life. I’ll read it over when I’m dead, I suppose. I wonder if they have decent internet access from the afterlife. They had decent internet access in Rapa Nui, much to my surprise.

In the end we did pretty much nothing on Halloween; just dinner at the Rio Steakhouse… a low-end Shepherdsville place. But that’s okay because we had that cool bonfire party in the woods a few days earlier. We did wear the same costumes around the warehouse, which was a blast. Here’s Me, Charlotte, and Melody. Here’s another, and one out on the warehouse floor with Dennis. Dennis was a bottle of beer. In case you can’t tell, the rest of us were semi-inflatable cowpokes. Hmm. That sounds a little questionable, but I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves. The costumes were like being a Macy’s Thanksgiving Float… they included a battery powered fan in the rear that kept the thing inflated. Quite clever, I thought.

This is my last weekend in KY for a while; I’m leaving for Vegas on Monday. I’ve actually been feeling very sad this week. I really poured my heart and soul into all this, made some great friends, and now it’s coming to a close. A success to be sure, but this chapter is over. Not much to do except have a few more good times this weekend and get on to the next thing.

And the next thing is: I’m going to Chile with Sophie! We’ll be there for nine days… I’m very excited about that. We’re going to hit Easter Island while we’re in the area. Yeah, it’s 2200 miles away from Chile, but that’s as close as you’re going to get. I’ve always had a fascination with Easter Island. I just love cemeteries and ruins and though it doesn’t quite fall into either of those categories, I think one can see the connection. I’ve never been further south than Hawaii, so going right past the Tropic of Capricorn, not to mention the Equator, will be neat. I’m ready to feel what it’s like standing on the bottom of the ball, watching the drain go down the other way. And Sophie and I always have a great time on trips. We make good little adventurers, I think. Or course the trip was her idea; she’s the real adventurer. I’m Sallah to her Indiana Jones.

Man, I’m feeling all over the map; in more ways than one.

I’ve been getting lazy with my journal lately, but it doesn’t mean nothing’s been happening. No, it’s been a whirlwind couple weeks here in KY. Aside from the endless warehouse progress (more that half our orders go out of the new warehouse now), Eric and Aki visited, and I’ve been keeping social as well. There was a night of pumpkin carving, and just this weekend a bonfire halloween party in the Indiana woods. It was at Pat’s friend’s house… the guy who got hit with the tazer gun several weeks back. I went with Melody and Charlotte. Our costumes were great; pictures to be posted after halloween itself. We spent the better part of the party playing catch in the dark with a glow stick. It’s a lot more fun than it sounds!

Oh, I’ve been driving a Ford F150 since I got back… I reserved an economy car as usual, but that’s all they had. Well, they had a minivan, but please, what do you take me for? Anyways, the thing gets bad enough milage that I think I’ve already undone any good I did buying a Prius almost three years ago now. The thing is a beast. I’m just getting to the point where I can park the darn thing, but it still takes a 30 point turn to do a 180 in a parking lot.

Saw Marie Antoinette. Sofia Coppola is great. She has such patience in telling a story. And who else does these days? The music was perfect, anachronistic or not.

Surprise! I went to church on Sunday. I’ll probably post more about that later.

Oh… the main reason I decided to post this morning (aside from not being able to sleep… too much going on in my head these days), is that Charlotte finally burned me a CD of pictures. Here’s Team Overalls! It’s obvious why Zappos does so well in the fashion business with people like us behind the scenes.

Ah, my own bed, my own car, my own pile of bills and junkmail…

Got back in last night and felt fairly disoriented. I couldn’t remember where I left my car… had the cabbie drive around the office lot for a minute before taking me home and finding it in my garage. Made myself a healthy dinner (grilled halibut and a salad) which was welcome after so much junk food in the past six weeks.

Wore my Kentucky-bought bib overalls to the office today, looking mighty fine if I do say so. Don’t have a picture unfortunately. They went over well. Several people commented that I looked thinner, so I guess the junk food didn’t gain me any weight. But I still feel fatter… perhaps I’m thinner but flabbier and less healthy overall? I defintely need to get back to the working-out-and-eating-right thing I had going for a while there.

I do have some candid pictures from KY, though. Here’s one of me talking with Keith near the putaway merge. I’m obviously a bit concerned about something. We’re standing at a point roughly in the middle of the warehouse. There’s as much behind the camera as there is between me and that far wall. And actually the far wall is only the halfway point, though the other side is basically just an empty room right now. And here’s a picture of me and Jen observing the putaway sorter. Behind us are several layers of conveyor. Behind that to the right is the racking, to the left is the famous carousels. Thanks to Brian K for taking pictures of me when I was unaware, at my most vulnerable.

Tonight at midnight I enable the rest of the inventory and then we’re 100% operational (right now we’re about 80%). That’s not really the end of the road, but it’s the beginning of the end. What a ride!

Then on Wednesday it’s back to KY to tie up any loose ends…