Sarcasm with a side of optimism.

Random Updates

Today at work, my typical do-nothing workday was pleasantly interrupted by a meeting for an internal project that me and a few friend-coworkers (minus one) were assigned to. It's nothing glamorous really, we're just collecting information from other consultants about the challenges they face in doing normal everyday work due to the restriction on the tools we can use due to our super duper secret environment. I felt like I was immediately transported back to the MBA days.

Our not-friend teammate who has control issues, hates women and pretty much everything else except for white males self selects himself as the group leader. For a mental image, think of a Chipmunk (as in, "We're the Chipmunks!" crossed with a Whack-a-Mole) and make him 4'10". Here's how it went.

Chipmunk : "We're already behind schedule, we'll NEVER have a questionaire ready by the end of this week."

me: "Why not? It's only Wednesday."

Chipmunk: "We just don't have TIME, we need to start calling people right away and...just ask them questions."

The group stares, wondering if he's serious, while trying to calculate the exact date he's lost his mind.

me: "I don't feel comfortable doing that. We're going to end up making more work for ourselves if we don't come up with some kind of script to follow which helps us bucket the responses. How are we going to compile the results coherently if all the interviews are completely random? Additionally, I don't know what we need to ask these people, and I am NOT going to cold call a busy project manager without having a plan in mind. We need a standard set of leading questions."

Does he HONESTLY think he's going to get anywhere with his stupid-method? Maybe that's why he's working in CM.

Silence. Figeting from the group. Then, engineer Mike announces that he agrees with me and adds some more input counter to Chipmunk's stupid idea. In case I didn't mention it before, in addition to being a control freak, the Chipmunk is always right. This is going to be a loooooooong six weeks. Kara is coaching me on manipulative techniques. Don't get mad. Get even!

Which brings me to the next topic.

Leaving a bunch of idle engineers together cooped up in a tiny office for 40+ hours a week amounts to no good. So, during the week of the 4th, it's pretty dead in the office, and especially since the gov't people never actually work for real, the week before is also pretty dead too. As a contractor, you get the 4th off, and that's it. So we were ALL there on Monday staring at the walls. Some things happened...like, a phone conversation with Craig, then a trip to Costco to buy 1000 square feet of aluminum foil to encapsulate a coworker's entire work-area. This includes file folders, papers on the desk, pens, pen holder, sticky notes, phones, phone cords, chair, and any other posessions we could get our hands on. It took 30 minutes, with three of us working it with two rolls and one tape dispenser. The finished job was brilliant! Unfortunately, I can't take any photos, so our crowning achievement will NOT be on display here, but you can get an idea of it by checking out here.

Our target is yet another short angry man, but he's cool, and super serious about his job. Far more serious than anyone should ever be about work. It's just a job, chill!

We found out he wasn't going to be back on the 5th, so we had to wait an ENTIRE week for the reaction. It's not bad because we got to enjoy it for the entire week too. I had almost everybody stop by my office to commend me on my "good work".

Nobody stops by to commend me on my real work. Oh wait, that's because I don't have any. :)

We had planned on getting in at 7am on Monday morning to be there for the reaction, but of course, with the weekend, nobody's thinking of the foil-desk-arrival-at-7am-Monday-morning as a priority, so we all forgot, and when Mr.Angry came in, he laughed for a second (we were told) then proceeded to tear off all the foil, and dumped it on his officemate's desk, while blaming a colleague across the way.

My cohort has been dubbed the "Axis of Evil". The pranks continue. Later, we stuffed a tiny piece of tin foil over the eye of Mr.Angry's optical mouse. He retaliated by switching me and my officemate's black phone, but hell, who CARES? Nobody calls me on that thing anyway!

Unfortunately, one of our own AoE members put Mr.Angry up to the task, so we needed to retaliate ASAP. It's nothing bad; our motto is "Have fun, Do no harm!" So, there's this one truck in the parking lot owned by some chick who has a *ahem* very provocative vanity plate and surrounding license plate holder. My officemate called his wife who works across the street to call the offender with the following message: "Hi- I found your note on my car. I'm interested, I'll call you back to set up a meeting." Apparently she likes to be spanked or something, or at least, that's what we inferred from the plate. The best part, was when the offender checked his message, and immediately blamed Mr.Angry for it.

One prank that we're still deciding on is whether to saran wrap Mr.Angry's car which he LOVES more than anything. In between one of the layers as we're wrapping, we'll insert a pair of scissors :) Muhuhahaha!

posted by v @ 6:12 PM