Since Monday, my eyes have watered a bit for the first few minutes I walk into room where my desk’s located. I thought the girl that works in Metrology had a new perfume until she was out today and I still smelt it.
After several seruptitious walk-bys of my coworkers, turns out the grizzled old guy with a penchant for sweatervests is tired of Old Spice.
A coworker is looking into buying a Hummer H3 with the money he made cashing out before the recent stock downturn. I called him an idiot and told him that he’d probably get more enjoyment putting his money in a ditch. As an alternative I recommended he simply get a nice sedan for his family and he said a Hummer and a V6 Caddy get about the same mileage and then a new wind blew. Coworker 2, a man of origin about the Caucasus came descended like the Russian Winter.
Coworker 2: I have had enough of lies! A V6 Cadillac will get 18 city and 25 highway. You say lies with your 20 MPG Hummer.
Coworker 1: But look at it. It rules the road.
Coworker 2: It rules with iron fist. The Cadillac rules with grace like assassin. You have room for family in car and enemy in trunk. V8 Cadillac will drag your Hummer into ditch without receiving mud.
Me: Well, maybe he wants to pick of some hotties with his fat rims.
Coworker 2: Hummer is a hoopdie (yes, he said hoopdie) compared to Cadillac. Learn your car.
It appears both me and coworker 1 were taken to “teh skool”.
The conference room was packed today. Jammed full of at least 40 people. Why? Ladder training. Well, that was the title of the lunch seminar, the power of free pizza such that everyone for one hour is mystefied by the mist-shrouded deathtrap that is the standard ladder. When I walked by the slide was something like “Never let someone borrow your ladder” as if they were loaded weapons or someone one should horde for the coming apocalypse. When I passed again, someone was passionately asking a question. Like they had a ladder question their entire life and now, finally, the confusion could end. But again, the pull of pizza was strong as everyone was glued to the screen as ladder mishaps were played and common ladder safety statistics that had been painstakingly assembled were shown. I think we should see how far people will go for free pizza.
December: Shredder Safety Training
January: Stapler Safety Training
February: Glue Stick Safety Training
March: Chair Safety Training
Note of Clarification: In a previous post on voting, I give the impression that I was saddened by the results of the recent election. This is far from the case, my anger arose at new voters who haven’t yet learned that voting is usually a far more pedestrian affair and that proof of democracy is voting when you probably won’t change a thing. Mykie Noble compared my feelings to church folk who get angry at people that appear only at Christmas. Democracy is a dirty, messy matter where years of work culminate in a single vote that can be thwarted by misinformation, polemics, or weather.
I split my votes across 3 parties and 1 independent and I look forward to having the High Priest of Democracy that believes in the power of government. As Rachael Maddow said on the Colbert Report “Having a small government conservative as the president is like having a vegan butcher”. I look forward to having a velociraptor in power (normally, I’d have to send a metaphor abroad to have it tortured that much).
Actual Post: In talking with my largely conservative coworkers in the wake (some say aftermath) of the recent presidential election I’ve received a lot of curious questions ranging from the composition of the Supreme Court to powers normally wielded by the president. I think most people are willing to give our new president the benefit of the doubt and all the McCain-Palin bumper stickers and yard signs will be replaced with ones that simply say “We’ll see”.
Not a very funny post so I’ll steal a line from Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me. Palin was panned for not being informed on world events, history and US policy. To prepare for 2012 she’ll be moving the Governor’s Mansion so she can see a library from her house.
A large clump of cubes have recently been populated with marketing folk and they simply haven’t learned the proper rules of scavenging and post-meeting food theft etiquette. Once you’ve finished a meeting, it is not proper form to come back with a f#$%ing shopping bag to take extra sodas and bags of chips, it is not ok to have someone wait in the room between trips to ward off people from other departments from taking anything and finally it is unacceptable, no childishing, to take forks and plates. I can see hording sodas, but plates? They are literally available at all times in the cafeteria along with condiment packets and ice. Also, perishables should only be taken up to what one can consume in a day. Excess should be put in a common area. Extra ranch turkey bacon wraps in the garbage indicate carelessness, and these aren’t the kind of people that can be entrusted with maximizing shareholder value. A kind of comity exists between departments on rules for raiding and counter-raiding the spoils of meetings and these vagabonds risk initiating a war they may not be ready to win.
I’ve been folding a lot of drawings. I’ve nearly doubled my throughput in about three weeks of training and I’ve gotten really good at size E drawings which are 16 times a normal sheet of paper. The folding table isn’t big enough to hold the drawing so my first and second folds are negotiated in mid-air and the folds are done with the back of an Expo dry erase eraser.
Today while folding, a group was waiting for someone in a nearby cube to finish a phone call and they started watching. Apparently folding vellum is a lot more hypnotic than I’ve ever found it to be. Later, a coworker returned and started watching, I asked if I could help him, to which he replied “I heard you’re good”.
I’m waiting for some upstart young turk to challenge me for my seat.
Scavanging is a well tested past time of both the R&D and CAD group and having moved from one to the other I’m noting the differences in methodologies. In R&D we walked around the building a lot and saw meetings in progress, we’d pass this information on and everytime someone got a drink or used the rest room the target room would be checked until it evacuated and much like the muezzin of a medieval mosque the returning person would issue a call to the congregants to find sustenance.
The CAD group is much more ant-like with each member monitoring a specific area of the building as part of their normal duties. The smoker checks the area between the offices and the front desk, the always-on-cellphone guy monitors the bathrooms to the secret room in the stairwell, the businessy guy monitors the secretaries’ desks and the mad designer checks everything as he storms about talking to people. When one returned with the food the rest of the group knew their covered region and would keep circling until they found it. Once someone returned without food, that person would emit a pheramone that would signal the other ants that the supply was exhausted.
Today, the smoker returned with pizza and based on the plate it was from a marketing meeting which is usually held in a specific room. I went to the conference room and the kitchen manager was there reclaiming paper plates and unconsumed singles like drink cans and bags of chips, but he stopped me from taking pizza.
He told me he was going to bring it back to the kitchen to “prevent waste”. Really? Have we really be reduced to re-heating pizza? I mean, he’s the kitchen manager, if he really wanted pizza he could just have pizza, he wouldn’t have to deprive us of it to get it. How do you recycle pizza? Is he going to make pizza cream soup just like one time he made “fish” chowder followed by cream of starch soup? If he slices them up to create the delightfully ambiguous “cheesy fiesta strips” I’m going to picket.
Scavanging is a well tested past time of both the R&D and CAD group and having moved from one to the other I’m noting the differences in methodologies. In R&D we walked around the building a lot and saw meetings in progress, we’d pass this information on and everytime someone got a drink or used the rest room the target room would be checked until it evacuated and much like the muezzin of a medieval mosque the returning person would issue a call to the congregants to find sustenance.
The CAD group is much more ant-like with each member monitoring a specific area of the building as part of their normal duties. The smoker checks the area between the offices and the front desk, the always-on-cellphone guy monitors the bathrooms to the secret room in the stairwell, the businessy guy monitors the secretaries’ desks and the mad designer checks everything as he storms about talking to people. When one returned with the food the rest of the group knew their covered region and would keep circling until they found it. Once someone returned without food, that person would emit a pheramone that would signal the other ants that the supply was exhausted.
Today, the smoker returned with pizza and based on the plate it was from a marketing meeting which is usually held in a specific room. I went to the conference room and the kitchen manager was there reclaiming paper plates and unconsumed singles like drink cans and bags of chips, but he stopped me from taking pizza.
He told me he was going to bring it back to the kitchen to “prevent waste”. Really? Have we really be reduced to re-heating pizza? I mean, he’s the kitchen manager, if he really wanted pizza he could just have pizza, he wouldn’t have to deprive us of it to get it. How do you recycle pizza? Is he going to make pizza cream soup just like one time he made “fish” chowder followed by cream of starch soup? If he slices them up to create the delightfully ambiguous “cheesy fiesta strips” I’m going to picket.
The drawings I’ve been scanning have gotten successively larger and more unwieldy to the point where I think I’m scanning life size drawings of art deco skyscrapers. Put in top, start feed, get coffee, drink coffee, get more coffee, pee, answer questions about the large hadron collider and return to catch the tail end entering the scanner.
Everyone’s been really polite about how profoundly boring the job is and the person responsible for most of them asked what he could do to make this easier in the future. My reply: make nothing that can’t fit inside a pack of cigarettes.
Me: Nice handbag.
Coworker: Thanks… wait that was an insult. What’s wrong with my handbag.
Me: Well, it’s a Penthouse bag.
Coworker: Yeah, doesn’t it look nice.
Me: Do you know what Penthouse is?
Coworker: Yes…. no. *begins typing Penthouse.com into browser, SITE BLOCKED warning comes up.* Oh, no.
Me: You might now want to do that again.
Coworker: It could be something else.
Me: Maybe. *checks on iPhone, finds Penthouse Magazine. Passes to coworker* See it even has the key logo
Coworker: Where’s the key logo?
Me: Look… closer.
Coworker: Oh. Well, you’re a jerk, but a useful jerk.
Me: Thanks, I think.
The joke was on me later when a coworker asked to see my phone and Penthouse Magazine was scrawled across it.