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New Boss: Terry, I need you to come to my office.  Having computer troubles.
Me: On my way.
*Walks to office*
New Boss: Something’s broken, I have this meetingnotes.txt file I’m trying to open and every time I do it bring us this minimalist Office thing called “notepad”.  Should that happen?  How am I supposed to make it an outline or change the fonts?
Me: *changes file associate for .txt files to Word* Text files are popular among neckbeards and hipsters, they like it because it’s retro.  You should now be able to work with it and save it fine in Office.
New Boss: Thanks.

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There’s a new engineer at work and he’s trying to be my friend. There’s few things I care for less in a workplace than “try to be your friend” guy when not backed by actions.  For instance, I like listening to books during my lunch break.  He will tap me on the shoulder and ask what I’m listening to.  Today he tried again while I was in a bubble.

Him: Hey, what are you up to?
Me: …listening to The Economist.
Him: I make wine.
Me: That’s nice.
Him: Would you like some?
Me: Now, no.
Him: No, in general.
Me: Not really, I don’t drink.
Him: Oh, I didn’t know you were religious.
Me: I’m not.
Him: Enjoy your lunch.

He’s trying.  How do I make him stop?

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My coworkers love when I have parties, not so much because they go but because they get the leftovers.  I had a lot of s’more parts and a goodly quantity of meatballs and those went quickly.  A coworker complimented me on the spicing:

Coworker: You’ve outdone yourself.  The spicing was spectacular.
Me: Thank you?  What did you like about the spicing?
Coworker: I don’t know, it was smokey and fuller tasting and I think there were bits of cilantro.
Me: I don’t think I added any.
Coworker: Well, whatever the dark flecks were added something to it.

I had no idea what they were talking about so I poked around the sauce that was left and found a small grey needle-like fleck.  It was a pine needle and there were about 1/2 a dozen in the portion of sauce I looked at.  I think each time we added a tree to the fire, the cloud of ash that came off would deposit a few needs in the very large meatball pot.  Luckily, these bits having been on fire weren’t a germ vector but just… added to the flavor.

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The Mercer County Ice Center is a semi-outdoor (it’s in a barn-ish structure) rink that offers five hour skating windows for $10.  My lab monkey cohorts and I went there today over a long lunch break.

Joe had skated a few times prior and is generally good at things.  Everett had a lot of experience with roller hockey and was able to go quite fast but lacked a certain grace in stopping.  He’s a ginger and wore a pea coat with his brown trousers and looked like an English school boy on holiday as he’d dash at some ridiculous speed during a straight section and then arc into the rink wall.  Finally, Carl was the pro of the group having a decade of hockey experience under him.  He was wobbly at first but quickly was literally skating circles around me.

I ass-planted once, on the exact same spot I had ass-planted before and I took a moment to let the ice numb the area before rising.  My back was wet.  I returned to the benches at the end of the session and had a message from my boss.

Him: Any injuries?
Me: Yes.
Him: Will you all be back to work this afternoon?
Me: Yes.
Him: Glad it went well then.

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Suzie’s tiny hat had grown on me and I brought it into work to show people.  I did one of two things:

1) I’d walk into someone’s office with it on and see how long it took them to say something.
2) I’d leave it in the pocket of my lab coat and when talking to someone, slip it on when they turned away.

The second method seemed far more menacing as people would continue the conversation but sometimes glance at my head with the look that they were in a fugue state.  Was he always wearing the hat?  Is the hat really there?

I showed another two coworkers:
Coworker #1: You really like that tiny hat.
Me: Yes, it is a tiny hat.
Coworker #2: I say we put together a betting pool and see how much it’d cost to have Terry wear the tiny hat for a day.
Me: Look at how tiny it is!
Coworker #1: My guess, not much.

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When I make a print of a picture I’ve taken, I put it up in my office at work.  I take these down and put them up at home at the end of each year so today I took down all my pictures.  I sent out an email to my coworkers saying they were welcome to any they wished from the stack next to my desk.  No one took any pictures while I was there but when I went to get a drink or work in the lab, I’d return to find that one or two pictures had been taken.  I felt like I was being robbed by gypsies.

I asked a coworker if he wanted a print he always thought was nice and he declined.  Later in that day he came up to me with that print that he’d taken from the stack while I was at lunch and asked me to sign it.  I felt tickled.

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I’m taking Tuesday – Thursday of this week off for a trip during a holiday rush week and also needed time to finish some personal things so brought in my greatest culinary weapon, meatballs.

I plugged in the crock pot, put in 4 lbs of meatballs, 3 cans of sauce, and set it to high.  Then I realized I had forgotten to get rolls and quickly rushed out without telling anyone.  My boss called:

Boss: Uhm, Terry, where are you?  You don’t appear to be, at work.
Me: Yeah, I had to run and grab something.
Boss: I need your signature for something immediately.
Me: Ok, I’ll return now and get the meatball sandwich rolls later.
Boss: No, take your time.

When I returned, there was a line of people near my office with plates waiting for rolls.  My boss’s boss was there and looked at me while saying “we were getting hungry”.

For the rest of the day, people stopped by to thank me for bringing in meatballs and cheesecake while totally overlooking that I was filling out Christmas cards.  Several of these people were well within their power to fire me and  I couldn’t have been more obvious if I had a blinking sign.  I hope that the protective power of meatballs doesn’t slip into the hands of those that’d abuse it, like mine.

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A piece of lab instrumentation wasn’t functioning. The piece isn’t complicated, consisting of a LCD screen, four buttons, and a way of measuring reflectivity.  Still, it’s necessary for some tests, so I called the manufacturer.

Me: The device’s read out doesn’t appear to be working.
Associate: That tends to happen.  We can repair the unit for $500 or replace it for $1400.
Me: That’s ridiculous.
Associate: Yes, the repair is generally more economical.
Me: No, the prices in general.  I can literally build a supercomputer for $1400 and buy an iPad for $500.  No thank you.
Associate: But how will you do the test?
Me: With a stopwatch, like we did before we had your device.
Associate: What about the time savings of the automated test head?
Me: I’m wage not salaried.  I’ll gladly operate a stopwatch for the rate I’m paid.  Good day.

I regret not dropping in my boss’s observation of “this looks like something built from a kit for Electronics merit badge”.

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The 2011 work holiday party was at a restaurant literally a few hundred feet from our main buildings across a field.  Most people walked.  The party included workers from field offices and even housekeeping.  I wonder if the food tasted better knowing they’d not have to clean up for once.  The mingling rooms had well-stocked bars and a swarm of servers hustled things on us more aggressively than I’m used to:

Server: Would you like a bacon-wrapped scallop?
Me: No thank you.
Server: Why not?
Me: I don’t like scallops.
Server: These are good, and wrapped in bacon.
Me: No thank you.
Server: All your friends had one.  Are you saying they have bad taste?
Me: No *takes scallop*
Server: Good move.

I still don’t like scallops.  Either that or the taste of douchebag rubbed off on mine.

The crowd shifted like a flock of Arctic Terns identifying surface fish when the main dining room opened.  The line was long enough that it collapsed into a zigzag like we were waiting for a roller coaster.  The line for pasta and the line for seafood line merged despite going opposite directions confusing many vegetarians and forming a human traffic circle in which a few people got stuck.  Someone I passed on the way to the Philly wraps was still there when I returned later for fiesta tacos.  I wonder how long it took for them to realize they had right of way being on the inside of the circle.

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We had a guest in work from a partner firm who seemed very excited to work with  us.  He asked a lot of questions about our processes and what we needed and every “could you do x?” question we asked him was met with a very sure “yes”.  I asked a coworker if all adhesives engineers were like this.

Coworker: Adhesives engineer are like that when they’re young and they think they can stick anything to anything.  Then they learn.  Silicone, monomers, surface oxidation.  It’s all there, ready to shit on your dreams.