New work dare
5 Points:
Surreptitiously take digital photos of colleagues around your office. Email them the resulting photos.
Bonus points if you 'adapt' them in some way in Photoshop.
user acceptance testing = poking around
according to our favourite stakeholder today, she doesn't need to 'poke around' on her own web content to make sure all is as it should be for the public /customer facing front end of her 'webby stuff'.
Grrrrrrr
Stakeholders
*&@£¬!?!!@##@£$%*^&£@@ing %$@*&!¬+~@?!ers
That feels better.
more evidence of rubbish mondays
I
do go into Mondays with an open mind, still, but yesterday was another typical crappy Monday, which culminated in neighbour driving into boyfriends' car.
Not amused, as it'll cost about a million squid just to respray the colour-coordinated bumper.
K.
toast office part2
And yes I agree actually the tea does taste grim based on this morning's experience, but not knowing what cat wee tastes like I can't compare.
would you rather?
I learned a fab game from a 7 year old at the weekend. It's called "Would you rather..." and basically you find another player and just ask each other inane questions about stuff they'd do when given a choice.
E.g. would you rather drive an F1 racecar or a spaceship (incidentally the 7-year-old chose a racecar and a 28-year-old chose a spaceship).
So
would you rather deal with clients or put your head in a bucket of slugs?
Kat.
mmmm breakfast
rocky road and Starbucks... what more could a girl want??
Meanwhile, at the Toast Office they are convinced that their coffee rocks because some random delusional punter told them so. Dangerous. I was publicly rebuked for daring to bring said Starbucks to the counter, and I didn't have the heart to tell them it was because their hot drinks suck worse then Satan's Vending Machine.
acronym bingo
Today I counted six different but equally meaningless acronyms used several times by Milo in our earlier team meet. SIX, in a space of around 2 and a half minutes! Beat that.
And I particularly love the way that no-one stops him to ask what they mean, so he could be completely making them up, and probably is.
Kat.
my favourite picasso
http://picasso.tamu.edu/picasso/WorksInfo?CatID=OPP.02:055
did someeone pose for it?
S.
Tigger Girl...
...is assaulting my eardrums. She has sufficient volume to aurally permeate the entire first floor. Stop verbally invading my space!
Make sweet coffee...
So no - I didn't realise that was a euphemism, and I've no idea how many times that's been mentioned with me going 'oh yeah, I make coffee every morning...' innocently.
It's more a reflection of my colleagues' sullied minds than anything else.
On another note - I was surprised to hear they're planning on removing the word 'gullible' from the dictionary - wonder what that's all about? They can't just remove words like that, can they? Surely they have to remove words every now and then - have a cull of old words - otherwise the dictionary'd be huge... too big to carry... surely... ah well.
M
[Edit: If only you knew what Kat said when she read the third para above...]
lies, damn lies and statistics
I'm trying to make sense of the sprawling mess of data that comprise web analytics. And everyone knows that most of the hits derive from us anyway as we randomly click on things to try to break them before they go live.
It's quite soul-destroying really, so I'm trying not to think about it too much.
K.
what...
...was the joke you nobs?!
bloomin kitchen appliances
i think they should label the appliances in the kitchen.
i put my lunch in the freezer thinking it was a fridge and now its frozen. am eating it anyway as im starving but i may be ill tomorrow as im chewing on frozen chicken at the moment. its not that nice.
starsky.
colleagues demonstrating strange behaviour
more observations about colleagues.
Ours seem more hyper than average, just on the wrong side of acceptably wacky. In particular, Prozac Girl who is a new team member and is trying to gain our trust and assistance by leaning in close and revealing slightly too much cleavage. Nnnggg.
I'm laying down the gauntlet right now to M & S (ha!):
ONE-POINT OFFICE DARES
1) Run one lap around the office at top speed.
2) Ignore the first five people who say 'good morning' to you.
3) Phone someone in the office you barely know, leave your name and say,
"Just called to say I can't talk right now. Bye."
4) To signal the end of a conversation, clamp your hands over your ears and grimace.
5) When someone hands you a piece of paper, finger it, and whisper huskily, "Mmmmmmm, that feels soooooo good!".
6) Leave your zipper open for one hour. If anyone points it out, say, "Sorry, I just needed to take a breather".
7) Walk sideways to the photocopier.
8) While riding in an elevator, gasp dramatically every time the doors open.
THREE-POINTS DARES
1) Page yourself over the intercom (do not disguise your voice). MY LAST DAY AT PROSOUND I WANTED TO PAGE MYSELF AND SAY "LINDA - I'LL MISS YOU! DON'T FORGET TO COME TO MY DESK AND SAY GOOD-BYE BEFoRE YOU LEAVE!"
2) Babble incoherently at a fellow employee then ask, "Did you get all that, I don't want to have to repeat it".
3) Say to your boss, "I like your style" and shoot him with double-barrelled fingers.
4) Kneel in front of the water cooler and drink directly from the nozzle (there must be a 'non-player' within sight).
5) Shout random numbers while someone is counting.
FIVE POINT DARES
1) At the end of a meeting, suggest that, for once, it would be nice to conclude with the singing of the national anthem (extra points if you actually launch into it yourself).
2) Walk into a very busy person's office and while they watch you with growing irritation, turn the light switch on/off 10 times.
3) For an hour, refer to everyone you speak to as "Bob".
4) Announce to everyone in a meeting that you "really have to go do a number two".
5) After every sentence, say 'Mon' in a really bad Jamaican accent. As in "The report's on your desk, Mon". Keep this up for one hour.
6) While an office mate is out, move their chair into the elevator.
7) In a meeting or crowded situation, slap your forehead repeatedly and mutter, "Shut up, damn it, all of you just shut up!".
8) At lunchtime, get down on your knees and announce, "As God is my witness, I'll never go hungry again".
9) In a colleague's diary, write in 10am: "See how I look in tights". (Extra points if it is a male, even more if he is your boss)
10) Carry your keyboard over to your colleague and ask "You wanna trade?"
11) Repeat the following conversation 10 times to the same person: "Do you hear that?" "What?" "Never mind, it's gone now".
12) Come to work in army fatigues and when asked why, say, "I can't talk about it".
13) Posing as a maitre d', call a colleague and tell him he's won a lunch for four at a local restaurant. Let him go.
14) Speak with an accent (French, German, porky Pig, etc) during a very important conference call.
15) Find the vacuum and start vacuuming around your desk.
16) Hang a two-foot long piece of toilet roll from the back of your pants and act genuinely surprised when someone points it out.
17) Present meeting attendees with a cup of coffee and biscuit, smash each biscuit with your fist.
18) During the course of a meeting, slowly edge your chair towards the door.
19) Arrange toy figures on the table to represent each meeting attendee, move them according to the movements of their real-life counterparts.
the toast office
... is the name of our local breakfast establishment, which I think is genius. Only wandered into there for the first time this morning though despite hearing glowing reports from Starsky (AKA BobJim Surfdude).
I can report that their tea (Tetley) is pretty good. Result.
Kat.
To keep milo happy..
..here is my first feckin post. Now feck off!
Starsky
wake me up when technology catches up
Right. That's it - I've had enough of the sad state of affairs that is mass-market software/hardware/bandwidth/browsers/telephony/peripherals et al.
A disjointed soup of wired and wireless I/O failures, software "features" and random events waiting to happen unexpectedly, usually when you haven't saved that document for the last 3 hours.
I've decided to have myself frozen early - I shall contact Alcor and ask them to preserve me until technology has caught up with our expectations - that it should just WORK.
Hopefully their systems aren't Windoze - or Mr Gates will be the death of me after all.
M
random joke thread
On hold again... and random jokes keep popping into my head.
Like:
Did you hear about the dyslexic devil worshipper?
He sold his soul to Santa.
mondays are bloody rubbish
This Monday's chain of events, to date:
6.45am: Boyfriend creates carnage in my kitchen by knocking a fridge shelf out containing Pimms (3/4 bottle) and balsamic dressing. They combined to create noxious fumes and the glass shattered into millions of shards, so it was a lovely experience sorting that one out.
8.15am: My spatial awareness has disappeared. I've literally bumped into two people already and almost fell in a heap onto a row of very scared-looking passengers on the Tube.
8.30am: Satan's Vending Machine has run out of Hot Water. Yet it has coffee, tea and soup. How?!?!?!?!?!
Kat.
clients
I'm initiating this thread as an outlet to act as an alternative to telling people exactly what we think when they p*ss us off, and thus ensuring an outside chance of not being escorted out by security for gross misconduct whilst wrapping a keyboard around said person's head.
I think Milo knows what I mean.
K.
observations
While sitting on a conference call about accessibility in IT and the risk implications, it occurs to me that it's a perfect opportunity to while away the minutes by updating the blog.
Today's observation: It's also occured to me that from my vantage point across the desk, I'm witnessing Milo's steady decline (or incline, depending on your viewpoint) into relative domesticity. He has produced a neat little lunchbox furnished with perfectly geometrically aligned inserts that contain nuts and other snacks. I'm impressed, I think. And in shock.
K.
airbrushing
So the Bossman is away but everyone is still very studious today, and there are some increasingly vexed faces around.
That includes the face of Milo, who is currently airbrushing one of our Team Heads (male). Great job.
Kat.
