Me: *fart* Excuse me.
Coworker: You have been a bit gassy recently, but then I realized it was because of the weight loss. Â So every time you pass wind I consider it a sign of progress. Â Keep up the good work.
Me: Thank you? *fart*
Tag: work
Hazmat Training
Hazmat training combines things I enjoy like being on the clock while watching powerpoint presentations, a free lunch, and learning how I could die. Â As the new guy, I got to be the one that did the sample suit up consisting of boot covers, Tyvek suit, inner gloves, outer gloves, googles, and face shield. Â After the health and safety person took a picture of me suited up riding a slide projector like a pony I was told to change back. Â I did quickly and when she looked back to where I was standing and saw me back in my normal cloths she did a double take. Â “That was the quietest hazmat desuiting I’ve ever heard”. Â Everyone else in the room started nodding in agreement and someone said “I didn’t even hear you walk around in the Tyvek suit”. Â Maybe I’ve found my calling, hazmat ninja.
Not Bad Baklava
I approach request to make ethnic food with trepidation. Â Not only may the food not match the palette of the others in my office with traditional preferences but a failed dish can become an affront to another culture or a modification I make can be seen as a sign of American cultural imperialism. Â This concern went out the window when a pretty lady said she wished someone would make baklava. Â I can be that someone.
So, I set to combining nuts, honey, and filo dough in alternating layers whose arrangement can induce a form of trance and threw it in the oven for 25 minutes.  What came out looked like baklava based on a Google image search and Max and I both found it palatable.  Pieces disappeared at a reasonable rate at work and I was pulled aside by a coworker.
Her: Terry, that’s pretty good baklava. Â I’ve traveled around the middle east, and yours isn’t far off.
Me: Thank you.
Her: Well, it’s not as good as [other coworkers] but you know what they say about Egyptian bakers. *Winks at me*
Me: Yeah…
Looks like my concerns about subtle stereotyping were blown away by the actual kind.
Defending the Printer
Someone from Marketing asked me to print out a large number of Powerpoint slides at 30″ x 40″ scale.
Her: So, do you think you can have this done today?
Me: No, that’s almost physically impossible.
Her: What do you mean?
Me: You’ve asked for 24 slides each of which is 30″ x 40″ for total of 720 inches that need to be printed and at a little over an inch a minute that’ll take 10 hours. It’s 5 PM now and I doubt you’ll be here until 3 AM.
Her: Don’t you have anything better than that crappy printer?
Me: It’s not exactly crappy. The print head works by electrically charging a few hundred picoliters of ink, a few hundred trillionths of a gallon of ink, and then launching it from a moving target onto a paper surface with an accuracy of more than 1/500th of an inch. Then it does it repeatedly in every color, all at the same time, continuously for hours at a time.
Her: But it’s so slow.
Me:Â How about this, when you both gain the ability to submit work requests with a reasonable heads up time AND gain the ability to take a bullet train from New York to Los Angeles and hit a standard ISAAC bullseye located every 5 feet for the entire journey you can trash talk my printer.
I never thought I’d have to defend that shitty printer.
Skating With Coworkers
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.
Cut Backs
A decree came down from on high that all employees at my firm needed to be present between 9 AM and 3 PM Monday through Thursday. This destroyed my normal schedule of working “whenever I arrive to whenever I leave as long as it adds up to 40 hours in week”. I dutifully arrived at 8:58 AM and put out the cheesecake I had made. It had a homemade graham cracker crust, was fruit-topped, and had a twin. Normally, such a treat would be gone shortly after lunch, but today I had 1.5 cheesecakes left at the end of the work day.
Screw you, New Years Resolutions.
Photo Theft
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.
Late Penalty
Few people were in on the Friday before Christmas. The only person besides myself in my area was my CAD boss who took this chance to play music through his computer speakers, loudly. I can normally deal with music in a work area as I’ll either play my own or deal with it but the combination of bad sythesizer and the tinny sound of computer speakers cut through the sound coming out of my own headphones. His play list seemed to be bad Emerson, Lake & Palmer covers and movie soundtrack pieces. I didn’t know that people actually owned CDs with “Chariots of Fire” encoded on their smooth silver surfaces.
Later, my boss passed my desk.
Him *visibly bopping his head*: Hey, Terry.
Me: Hello. Happy Friday.
Him: It’s nice to be here when the place is empty. You have privacy and can crank the tunes.
Me: Yeah, that you can do. How late are you staying?
Him: Me? Probably late, I love this stuff *points back at cubicle*
After a quarter hour of what sounded like Italian technotronica being blasted through a victrola I snapped and went to the lab to do legit work. The price I pay for my mid-week holidays.
Becoming Invincible
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.
Replacement Parts
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. Â 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. Â 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. Â I can literally build a supercomputer for $1400 and buy an iPad for $500. Â 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. Â I’ll gladly operate a stopwatch for the rate I’m paid. Â Good day.
I regret not dropping in my boss’s observation of “this looks like something built from a kit for Electronics merit badge”.