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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.

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I have a relative dealing with some health issues and I’ve taken to sending them a periodic baked goods care package which in this case consisted of cookies, truffles, and cracker jacks.  I brought the extras into work and when I did a check-up on them saw that all the raspberry truffles were gone.  I asked my boss what happened to them:

Me: Do you know what happened to the truffles?
Boss:  Yes, I didn’t want the staff exposed to them, so I have them now for safe keeping.
Me: So you took them all?
Boss: No, I didn’t take them.  I impounded them.
Me: Impounded them?
Boss: Yes, I want them to be inspected by a raspberry expert before I let anyone else have them.
Me: You know one?
Boss: My wife.

Ah, executive privilege.

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Yesterday was the first day for a new secretary that had caught wind of the bounty I had provided who approached me today:

Her: Terry, the snack room’s empty.  When does it get restocked?
Me: Snack room?
Her: Yes, where all the food was yesterday.
Me: That’s not a snack room, that’s a storage room in the R&D lab.
Her:  And the food?
Me: I brought that in.
Her: Oh… Well, thank you, I guess.

I wonder how many people have a terribly skewed perception of my firm’s work environment based on her retelling of the awesome snack room she encountered on her first day.

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I warned my coworkers that any extra food from my party would be brought into work today.  After five trips from my car, these leftovers made it to our break room.  People seemed happy at the choice offered between cake, cookies, truffles, crackers and cheeses, and chips but the biggest star were the meatballs.  I brought in about four and a half pounds of meatballs and the first meatball sandwich was consumed at around 7:30 AM with the crock pot still cold.  The last meatball was consumed a little bit after 10.  I never considered a meatball sandwich a breakfast food but obviously other more avant garde stomachs had.  I brought this up to boss who had an idea on reflection:

Boss: Meatballs are essentially tiny meatloaves.  Meatloaf is one of the kings of comfort food.  Mondays are stressful and people want release from that and latch to things that most seem like comfort food.

I like that explanation even though I’m pretty sure it’s utter malarkey.

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I volunteered to participate in a clinical study at work where I was paid $50 to read a set of instructions and then attempt to administer a new product on a dummy.  I had never seen the product before or used one of its type but the instructions were clear and, unlike ASTM and ISO methods, there were nice pictures.  Having spent the previous 8 years as a lab monkey, the clinical was a breeze and I finished the whole thing in about 30 minutes.   Some of the other participants seemed to have more trouble and I was glad I could make R&D look good but then I got to thinking.  If one compounded the difficulty of my other testing work with the amount of time I spend on it and normalized it to the rate I was paid for this clinical which included snacks, I should be a mere $200,00 a year.  That check should come any day now.

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I asked a coworker to email me a picture and he used Gmail’s drag-and-drop feature to send it.  I received it to my gmail account (our work has a file size limit) but received the following instead:


Gmail asked me “do you want to open this in a separate page?” I clicked yes thinking I could then save the text as a file and rename it but got the following:


Stupid Soviet Bloc png files.

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As the end of the year approaches, there’s been a notable uptick in internal email at my company about promotions, free seminars, facilities options and the like and all are marked “Important” or “Urgent” in Outlook.  I consider this tagging almost an insult and after reviewing all the mail I’ve received over the past year and seeing that no one else uses these labels, I have set up a mail filter that automatically marks as junk anything I receive marked as “Important”.  Congratulations, they’ve broken email again.  Should I ever get fired for missing a legit email which was marked as important I will gather my things and say “you may blame me, but the real culprits are the cafeteria lady, the blood drive captain, and person that arranged the Halloween party”.  My head will be held high.

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This morning was again spent installing patches on client computers, and at the last stop of the morning the user told me I could have the candy the firm had provided for Halloween.  I declined politely, but as the install dragged on I started picking at it until all that was left was a Twizzler.  Later that day, I was in my office while a meeting went on nearby.

Coworker #1: What did you think of the candy they gave us?
Client from Earlier: I wouldn’t know. Someone ate all my candy.
Coworker #1: All of it?
Client from Earlier: Except my Twizzler.
Coworker #1: Who took it?
Client From Earlier: I don’t feel comfortable saying.
Coworker #1: What were their initials?
Client From Earlier: Terry Robinson.

And with that a name was dropped from my “I brought in a baked good” mailing list.

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After the clarity gained earlier this week, the rest of my time working with the device specialist proved enjoyable.  I learned a lot about device operations and found out he liked photography.  So after lunch on the last day of his visit, I showed him my office where I have some 15 large prints up on the wall.

Him: Did you take these yourself?
Me: Yeah.
Him: And it looks like you don’t much like 8 x 10s.
Me: Nope.  8x10s are nice for something to put on a desk, but 11×14 is where you start showing you give a damn.
Him: Larger than 8×10, I guess I had never thought of getting anything bigger than could be done at Walgreens.
Me: I mostly do super B 13 x 19s.
Him: I have pictures that I could print.  Then I could put them on the wall of my office. *pause* Terry, you have inspired me.
Me:  Thank you.
*handshake*

The Texas accent is what sold his last line.