The day after election day was a bit duller at work that I imagined but somehow I because a generic everyman. When ever someone discussed election results with me I was part of the “we” regardless of their position. I was told that “we did what we could” to get McCain elected and that “we helped turn the tide” by electing Obama. I didn’t observe this with any other colleagues. I’m not sure what to make of this.
Tag: work
Descriptive Names
I’ve come to end of my scanning work with a drawer full of drawings marked “various”. I was told to name the drawings based on there content. Easy enough for drawings like demolition plans, planting plans, process outlines and primitive dies, but what about the drawing of smoke stacks, exhaust towers, and cooling pipes coming out of the top of a reactor that I found after having named stuff for 10 hours? “Tall things”. I pray nightly that no one ever needs to find the a drawing for that vertical heating column.
Amateur Scavengers
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.
Uncreative Origami Master
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.
Recycled Pizza
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.
Recycled Pizza
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.
Ketchup Bomb
I dropped a ketchup packet, and then stepped on it. This wouldn’t be unremarkeable except for that this was the first time I’ve ever taken a ketchup packet from the cafeteria and for its aftermath. I stepped on it perfectly such that it didn’t just break but that each side blew completely, it sounded like a gun shot. The guy down the hall from me ducked. It splashed off the wall. I assumed ketchup was too viscous to richochet off both the floor and wall to land on my pants; I was wrong. I assumed that a single ketchup packet could not create a ring of tomato paste and vinegar that could be perfectly mapped out four feet from the blast site; I was wrong. I thought no one had heard it and would immediately couple a bang and clumsy fat man with a horrible condiment accident; I was wrong.
Come to think of it, I don’t know what happened to the packet itself. Hm….
Ketchup Bomb
I dropped a ketchup packet, and then stepped on it. This wouldn’t be unremarkeable except for that this was the first time I’ve ever taken a ketchup packet from the cafeteria and for its aftermath. I stepped on it perfectly such that it didn’t just break but that each side blew completely, it sounded like a gun shot. The guy down the hall from me ducked. It splashed off the wall. I assumed ketchup was too viscous to richochet off both the floor and wall to land on my pants; I was wrong. I assumed that a single ketchup packet could not create a ring of tomato paste and vinegar that could be perfectly mapped out four feet from the blast site; I was wrong. I thought no one had heard it and would immediately couple a bang and clumsy fat man with a horrible condiment accident; I was wrong.
Come to think of it, I don’t know what happened to the packet itself. Hm….
Clear Glass Privacy Door-Level Security
Until I get a computer account at work the scanner that’s my current partner must be accessed by a co-worker. The computer automatically logs after 15 minutes of use. I tried right-clicking and going to the Screensavers tab to adjust the time and couldn’t, so I called tech support and asked if there was an alternative. For security reasons, they apparently tightly control the log-in period. But there’s a back-door. Despite spending millions on setting up a Group Policy and having IT bees buzz around and secure it, I have somehow have unmitigated access to the registry. I promptly set the key ScreenSaverActive to “0” to disengage it and started looking around. Every major security feature can be manually disabled through the registry.
I told my manager about this problem and he began looking around in confusion until his eyes lit up after seeing the key that sets the screen saver.
Manager: So I can finally change the screen saver I’ve been forced to stare at for 5 years with a picture of [a pretty lady].
Me: Yes, yes you can have [a sequence of nice ladies] as your screen saver. But I’ve been told it’ll reset each night as the magical computer gnomes reset the group policy.
Manager: It’s worth it.
Drawing Accords
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.