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I’ve just reached a level of competency at work where my coworkers can make the move of expecting things from me. Today, I was asked to do some loss triangles but the requester had some questions and so my boss and my boss’s boss sat in my cube and watched me do it. So, two people who combined probably make eight times as much as me watched me decide if I wanted to use Match + Index or Vlookup to spit out a value. I think I would have been more comfortable had I been asked to do burlesque in Love Park.

I overcame this tension and had a six cheese lunch at DiBruno’s. I’ve concluded that cheddars and Stiltons seem to be my things. I guess dairy is the one case where I’ve embraced the British.

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I found out that I share the train with Yet Another Coworker and we talked about the a recent weight loss competition held at work.

Me: I heard you won.
Him: Yeah, I looked at the participant pool and built a stochastic model guessing how much each could lose taking their travel schedules and past performance into consideration. I figured I had a 90% chance of winning so it wasn’t a life improvement thing so much as easy money.
Me: Wow, hey we just missed our train.
Him: Not quite, follow me. *jumps onto about to leave train going to next station*
Me: This isn’t the right line.
Him: But it stops at Market East station next too. The trains are variable enough that we probably have a 50% chance of our train losing 10-15 seconds vs. this one allowing us to pick up the train we missed.

I work with people that are smart, people that are wise, people that are clever, and people that are cunning. I’m glad for that spread.

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Actuaries are everywhere.  Unlock the fishmonger or the literary criticism instructor there are no obvious tells that someone’s an actuary except for maybe them having the warmth of lead shot.  Today, we had visitors from our UK group in and I was simply not prepared for the combination of actuarial terminology like “aggregate small loss protection policies” and Cockney rhyme slang.

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One of the benefits of baking is that it enjoys economies of scale. I can prepare a cookie in about 20 minutes using a toaster oven and a small bowl but 72 in an hour. I can produce about 160 in two if I can get two sets of sheet pans going. Today I made peanut butter cookies and made the 160 cookie double batch. Every time I do this the contents of the stand mixer nearly spill out and I need to integrate the flour with the care of a surgeon. I have no kitchen container that will hold this many cookies short of my 5 gallon igloo cooler and put about 120 in a Rubbermaid tub for work. Some were barely done, some were a bit toasted and not until after I finished did I realize that this was probably caused by the batter warming up as the kitchen heated up.

At work, I put out the tub, and over the course of the day people stopped by to thank me which is relatively rare. About half these people also said something like “you brought in a lot of cookies” and then looked at me accusingly. I guess my coworkers now view my baked goods as a standing challenge.

By the end of the day, about 20 cookies remained and the 30 people on my floor had consumed about 100 of them. That’s not even four per person and frankly I’m not impressed.

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I brought in a fruit-topped angel food cake and for the third week in a row noticed the same theme: The baked good would go largely untouched until lunch and then be devoured in a frenzy. This is in stark contrast to my previous workplace where the item would be consumed at a more-or-less constant rate over the day with a slight bump around lunch. This curve was irrespective of the item brought. For instance, I once brought in meatballs which were entirely eaten before 10:30am.

I wonder what causes this difference. The “now” orientation of engineers? The future discounting abilities of actuaries? Differences in professional courtesy? Just the quirks of the constituent people?

I’m not sure.

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Me: So, I’ve worked for here for two weeks now and I feel like I have a handle on who you are.
Coworker: That’s good, right?
Me: It’s a false sense. I have no idea who any of you are. I barely know one guy here just because we went to school together.
Coworker: I’ve worked with him for a while and he hasn’t even Facebook friended me.
Me: I guess he doesn’t want you to see the keg stand pictures.
Coworker: Really? I knew he was hiding something. Are you being serious?
Me: No not in the least. The most interesting part of his Facebook profile is a picture of him with various fake beards.
Coworker: I can see why you wouldn’t want that to get out.

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The banana muffins were well received and I received three inquiries regarding whether it was me or my wife that had made them.

There is a large gap between the programming abilities of my coworkers between those who are Excel, VBA, or r ninjas and those that kind of plod their way through. I’m somewhere between the two and was very glad that, instead of defining a custom function in Excel, I was able to come up with a way of calculating weighted averages in cases where the weights weren’t always present. At my previous employer, I would have yelled “ACTION DINOSAUR WITH HAT” or “hot cha!” but I was new here and didn’t want to look odd.

The following happened over IM:
Me: Does anyone in the office every yell “woooh”?
Coworker: No, but do you want to be that person?
Me: Can I?
Coworker: Proceed.
*I yell “woooh”*
Coworker: Nicely done.

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Joe, Carl, Everett and I got together for dinner this evening. I cooked and the food cost was covered by everyone else, an arrangement I enjoy. We had pork tenderloin, a reduced spinach side, and some golden cake and caught up on what we each had done since the diaspora. Carl continued on at my previous firm and spoke of his work load. Joe mentioned how easy his job was. Everett and I told tales of unemployment. At one point we were bullshitting about dogs and Everett said “Yeah this is kind of like being in the lab again, except we were paid there”.

He’s right, we were paid there, somehow. We were paid to advance the frontier of knowledge in our particular domain and enjoy each other’s company. I hope I can’t believe I’m getting paid at my next job.

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With so many people having been removed from my previous work place there was a strange freedom to everything I did.  If I needed a stapler I could just grab it from the cube of someone who had been dismissed.  If I had a question or a concern, most of the people I could ask were too busy to reasonably answer it so I simply went with my gut and checked back when I had an answer even if I had wasted a chemical or material.

I haven’t had that kind of freedom since I was an intern.  I missed it.  That was back when science as a career was still in the cards.  After eight hours or so cowboy science I had to fill out a lab report to describe what I had done.  Immediately I remembered why science as a career was no longer in the cards.

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Secretary: I’m sorry that you’re being let go.
Me: Thank you.
Secretary: But really your lucky.
Me: In what way am I lucky?
Secretary: You know that you’re losing your job. The rest of us just have to sit around and wait. You’ll be at home looking for work and we’ll be here in a haze of terror.
Me: Then why don’t you quit and alleviate that fear?
Secretary: *silence*