by ·0 Comments

While walking down the hall, I was rushed by a coworker who was very excited by my presence.

Him: Terry?
Me: Yes?
Him: You’re not fired yet?!
Me: No, not until next Friday.
Him: Ohmygodthankyou.  I was so worried when I came in Monday and you weren’t here so there was no cheesecake and there was this lady walking around giving people cake that tasted like it came out of a sarcophagus and I was like “no, this is what it’s like now that Terry’s gone” but I thought “I can deal” and then I was like “I need cheesecake” and there wasn’t around and I just sat in my cube staring at the wall until someone came in.

by ·0 Comments

I’m waiting for someone to buy my Rebel XSi so it’s been sitting on my desk at work and some people have asked to use it but decided not to when I told them it was a DSLR.  Today, someone asked to borrow it who swore up and down he was quite skilled with a DSLR.  When I got it back, the veil of his untruth was thin: The camera was set to “Auto” instead of Aperture Priority, the output format was changed to “JPG” from RAW, the on-camera flash was up and, most damning, the ISO was set to “800”; a region untread, like the area of my car’s tachometer above 4k RPM.  If this is his definition of “being skilled” I’d hate to see him “be skilled” with a nail-gun, microwave, or a manual transmission.

I passed his desk later that day and he thanked me for letting him use my camera.  It was not a chair he sat upon but a throne of lies.

by ·0 Comments

Coworker:  You look angry.
Me: It’s 2PM, which is normally the time where I bullshit with Joe in the R&D lab.
Coworker: Is he doing something?
Me: No, there’s the general managers presentation in the lab.
Coworker: Presentations don’t usually stop you from bullshitting.
Me:  Yeah, but in this case, were I to go into the lab 19 out of 20 people could fire me.
Coworker:  Yeah, my personal limit’s about 50%.
Me: Good rule.  Is that your key to having stayed here for 15 years?
Coworker: One of them.

by ·0 Comments

A coworker of mine seemed very agitated about something so I asked if something was amiss.  He said he had a colonoscopy the next day and he was worried.  Normally, I’d be fine with this response, except that this person has spent days interviewing people with questions like “so, how about your feces?” and “have you found any changes in rectal tenderness.”  He’s had his hand so far into animal colons that he nearly lost jewelry and I’m pretty sure he can identify the ilium, jejunum and duodenum by texture.  I saw him air his trepidation a few times and snapped:

Me: Really?  You know enough about the inner workings of the human colon that you could probably do the procedure yourself and probably design the tools to do it too.  It’ll be 1/10th as painful and there’s an anesthesiologist present who could probably down a bull elephant in 10 seconds.  You’ll be fine.  Man up and take it in the pooper.

“

by ·0 Comments

One of my coworkers also has the same type of coffee machine as myself and informed me that he’s a member of a group that retrofits single-use cups to be… not as single use.  Apparently by buying a certain size brass mesh and doing some creative home welding one can reuse the cups from three to the near mythic level of one gifted modder who claims to have hit 10,000 uses.  This despite the fact that 10k uses would be seven cups a day for four years.  This method also ignores the fact that grounds can be used only so many times and re-filling the grounds would be functionally identical to simply buying an air or French press.

But, as my firing approaches, this economy is appealing.  I’ve filled my own ink cartridges, performed my own dentistry, purchased near over-ripe fruit, and made my own dextrose from corn starch.  I also take pride that in each generation there are those that throw off the shackles of oppressive consumerism for a slightly different form of DIY oppressive consumerism.  I consider both the American way.

by ·0 Comments

Coworker: I have funny one today.
Me: Oh?
Coworker: I try to contact old tech who work at firm I was boss for.  I tell her I get Chinese mafia on her if she fail as a joke.  She say she have hard time at work on Facebook.  I call her and say “Chinese mafia going to kill you, ha ha ha”.  She scream and hang up.  Turns out, I have wrong number.

Hilarious…

by ·0 Comments

Our new workstations arrived today and I began setting up one of them. They are a massive improvement over our previous systems but about 75% the power of my reasonably powered home PC at about four times the cost and I am skeptical that they will last the 40 months asked of them.  This after my request has several corners shaved from it for trivial cost savings.  I did some initial benchmarking and my very excited boss asked for feedback about their speed.  I was unsure of how to respond and the revision history of the email was something like this:

While sufficient to run AutoCAD I don’t think they’d run Crysis as well as you’d like.

They’re fast enough that I no longer realize how much slower they are than my home PC.

They are sufficient, for now.  Please plan to upgrade in 18-24 months.

While an improvement over what we have, I’m glad they didn’t come out of our department’s budget.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that the monitors included displayport adapters.

by ·0 Comments

Me:  This server’s going absolutely bat-shit insane.
Boss:  What does that mean?
Me: I can remote desktop to it, but I can’t ping it, and another computer located physically on top of it can’t communicate with it either.
Boss: Contact the host, see what they can do.
Me: I did, they claim they’re doing nothing to it except that when I look in processes I can see the processes associated with being logged in like explorer.exe and freecell.exe listed in the Task Manager under their name but they insist no one’s logged in.  Also, a little icon in the corner of the screen keeps telling me a network cable is unplugged and, whenever it is, I have an Internet connection and, whenever it’s not, I don’t.
Boss: I have an idea.  You’re from the future, just a few minutes or maybe an hour and you’ve come back to warn us that something disastrous is about to happen.  But the trip through time has damaged your memory and you can’t remember what you need to avert.
Me: So what should I do?
Boss:  Go out to lunch.  There’s no way of knowing when the real Terry will return and your meeting may cause the end of the universe.
Me: Good thinking.

That, sir, is how one applies Ockham’s Razor.

by ·0 Comments

Whenever a new product is launched my firm films a promotional video to inform marketing people.  I’ve participated as a “scientician” (someone in a labcoat doing a test to make stuff look sciency) in several and today the project managers were being filmed which clogged the hallways with equipment requiring novel ways of navigating the building.  I was speaking with a coworker and he left to use the restroom.  Thirty minutes later he returned.

Me: Problem?
Him: Close bathroom is blocked, far bathroom is closed.  Using bathroom has become… how you say, non-trivial.

by ·0 Comments

Coworker: I just got an email that it’s a half-day does that mean we leave at noon?
Me: Yes.
Coworker: Do we have to, I’m a contractor?
Me: No, you don’t have to leave but if you don’t you have a delicate balance.  Staying reminds others that you’re effectively a second-class citizen or makes them feel that their work isn’t important.
Coworker: But if I leave they might think my project isn’t as important as it actually is or they’ll say “look at the contractor, taking every opportunity to leave”.
Me: Exactly, life gets tough when your firm tries to be nice.
Coworker: I got it, I’ll leave now with the rush of people, get lunch and come back so the other people who think their stuff is important will think my stuff’s important.
Me: Now you’re thinking.