The Gentle Art of Making Enemies

Chatty Kathies, Gadflies, Chatterboxes, Klingons, Stalkers.  You know what they are.  They are those people that stop by your desk everyday, IM you, call you, email you, and just won’t leave you alone and have no legitimate reason for being there other than to shoot the shit.  It doesn’t matter what you are doing, what time of the day it is, all of a sudden this person appears.  They ask you innocuous questions, “How’s your day going?”, “How’s the family?”, etc.  They start telling you about their day, their kids/pets/house plants/bed sores, and you didn’t even ask.  If you don’t know one, then you might be one.  There is nothing harmful in that, there is nothing bad about chatting with a friend.  But when it happens every day and begins to occupy the time that you have reserved for something else (like work), then it becomes an issue.  What do you do?

I have run into this situation several times in my personal and professional life.  Sometimes if you ignore the person long enough, they will go away.  But if they don’t get the hint, you have to take more extreme measures.  I did a little research on the topic when I was confronted with a particularly bad situation a few years ago.  At the time, there was a person from a different development team at work who would come over and plop right down at my desk every day and strike up a 45 minute conversation.  In the first two weeks, I learned more about his personal life than anyone who was not his spouse, doctor or clergyman should know.  I didn’t want to ruin my work relationship with this person and I didn’t want to cause any issues, so at first I just smiled and listened.  But then it started to interfere with my work and I found out later that it was also effecting this person’s performance, and it had to be dealt with. 

I can’t find the websites that I originally referred to on the subject, but I have found plenty more that say the same thing.  I found one that has some “professional” tips for resolving the problem.  Many of the experts will tell you to be direct, but gentle.  I started out by telling the person they only had 10 minutes talk and then I had to get back to work.  When 10 minutes were up, I would end the conversation and resume working.  When that was established, I moved on to “scheduling” time to talk with the person, by saying things like “I can’t talk now, but if you come back at 2, I can give you 10 minutes.”  When that sunk in, I began giving the person things to do, like “Hey while you are here, I need you to do this.”  That pretty much took care of that.  The person eventually stopped by once every few days and only stayed for a few minutes.  We were still friends.  All of these suggestions are great and I can attest that they do work.  But what is the fun in that? 

In today’s digital, work-from-home age, the interruptions are a little different, but they still have the same impact.  People can’t come and waste your time by stopping at your desk unless they physically come to your house, which has happened.  But that doesn’t mean people can’t reach out to you through instant messengers, email or even the phone.  It’s now not a problem of physical presence, but one of the ever-flashing IM window, or the cluttered inbox, or, gods forbid, the ringing of the phone. 

A friend of mine at work, we will call her “Ren” to protect her identity, told me a few weeks ago about klingon that she currently has, we will refer to the klingon as “Stimpy”.  Everyday Stimpy IM’s Ren, asks about her family, her baby, etc. and the two have never even met in person!  Worse than that, they only had a few brief conversations a few years ago while working on a project.  What one person took for a work conversation, the other took a life-long bond of friendship.  Now Stimpy won’t stop talking.  And it’s not the daily contact that is the issue, it’s that the questions are personal, referring to Ren’s baby as “her little niece”, asking about her life, and such.  It sounds like Stimpy could show up at her front door one day and ask to spend a few days with her while she is in town!  What do you do?

The first attempts at ignoring the gadfly failed miserably.  Soon Ren was greeted with replies in IM of “Why is my friend not responding, is something wrong?”  Blocking her in IM causes Stimpy to send emails of “I see you are offline, is everything ok?”  My advice – have fun with it.  Here are my suggestions.

Reversal Method:  Start asking her about her family, her husband, etc. but don’t stop there, get really personal.  Ask her what her man looks like, respond with “yum he sounds delicious.”  Ask if he is a top performer - wink wink and go from there.

Flood Gate Method: Don’t just respond, attack!  Launch a denial of service campaign against her.  Stay up late, get up early, don’t stop chatting all day long.  When you can’t be around, ask someone to log into your IM account for you and have them carry on the campaign. 

Disturbing Method: “How’s my little niece?”  “What, oh the baby, yeah, haven’t seen her all day.  I wonder if her water bowl is full.”  Or “OMG that kid is driving me NUTZ! Sometimes I could just smother her with a pillow.  haha j/k ;(”  Stop short of a criminal investigation.

Gross Method: “BRB gotta go, got the runs today.”  And then follow it up 15 minutes later with “Phew!  You better be glad you are not around here!  That smell could gag a maggot!  I mean, can I get a courtesy flush?  Boo-ya!”

Even Grosser Method:  “Stimpy, this is weird, but do you ever get that not-so-fresh feeling?”  Feel free to elaborate in detail about your least fresh day.

Captain Oveur Method: “Have you ever been in a cockpit before?  Have you ever seen a grown man naked?  Stimpy…have you ever been in a Turkish prison?”

Grosser still method: “Eeewww, there are short hairs all over my keyboard!  I wonder how they got here, they don’t taste like nose hairs.”

Henry's Chat Method:  Respond with only obscure movie quotes and music lyrics.  “How’s your day?” Response - “Is this to be an empathy test?  Capillary dilation of the so-called blush response?  Fluctuation of the pupil.  Involuntary dilation of the iris.” (Blade Runner)  Or for “How’s my little niece?”  Response - “She's like thirteen years old, and if you even look at her funny, I'm gonna stick an umbrella up your ass and open it.” (Last Boy Scout)  Or “What’s up?”  Response - “Now is the time, for me to rise to my feet, wipe your spit from my face, wipe these tears from my eyes!” (Hatebreed – I Will Be Heard)

Institutionalized Method: “Stimpy, do you hear them?  The voices?  Some people can’t hear them, but I can.  Sometimes they ask me to do things for them.  Sometimes they ask me to do bad things.  Very bad things.  Shush, shush, don’t say anything, don’t you hear them.  They are like butterflies in my head, so soft, like wisps of smoke.  They get angry when I don’t do what they say.  They make me hurt myself. DON’T YOU HEAR THEM?”

Old Spice Method: I won’t go there, I think they covered that one enough.

Flower Boy

I spent the majority of the day working outside in the blistering heat, mowing, weeding, trimming, and to top it off, spreading four cubic yards of black dyed mulch.  Not one but four different neighbors commented on my sanity for picking today to spread mulch.  I really didn’t mind it, it beat sitting behind a computer all day.  I tried imagining that it was five months ago and that I was really shoveling snow, but my mind (probably the advanced stages of heat stroke) kept wandering back to the summer of 1990.  That summer I got my first real 40 hour a week job.  I was 15 years old and I went to work on the grounds crew of a local country club.  The grounds superintendent was a golf buddy of my dad and uncle and hooked my up with the job. 

I had high hopes for my first real job.  I imagined that I would spend the summer riding lawn mowers and getting a good tan and getting paid for it.  I could see myself flying around on golf carts, driving the big tractors, and doing a “man’s work.”  Plus I would get to hang out with a bunch of college guys, who made up the rest of the summer crew.  I walked in the first day and was introduced to everyone.  No one had a real name, it was a whole jolly club with jolly pirate nicknames.  There was Baz, Zerb, Rimmer and Spike, and many others. 

But my dreams quickly collapsed into it a pile of dust.  The first thing I learned was that since I was only 15, I wasn’t allowed to operate any machines.  The second thing was that I had only two functions, take care of the clay tennis courts and flowers.  And my hopes of a cool nickname went down the toilet as my new boss introduced me as “This is Henry, The Flower Boy.”

Flower Boy wasn’t my only nickname that summer.  I was also Rookie, Rook, FNG, Cindy (due to a mole on my chest - “Nice mole, who do you think you are, Cindy Crawford?”), Rickshaw (more on that in a bit), and a few others that brought into question my sexual preferences.  This was nothing new, I was used to a bit of ridicule having been a nerd my entire life.

My boss then introduced me to the tools of my trade.  My primary job and the real reason why I was hired was to take care of the country club’s clay tennis courts.  They had to be perfect.  The tennis pro funded my job and she was willing to squeeze every penny of her investment to make her courts immaculate.  They had to be brushed, lined and watered three times a day.  The watering was the worst.  The courts had their own automated sprinkler system.  By automated, I mean, the sprinklers had to be manually turned on and off, and every five minutes, you had to run around and clear a clog out of one of the heads or adjust its pattern to avoid puddling.  So that meant I would get a stinky pond water shower three times a day.  Pond water on a golf course is wonderful mixture of fish shit, duck shit, goose shit, algae, and the runoff of thousands of gallons of chemical fertilizers, herbicides and insecticides.  On a good day is smells and tastes horrible and in the hottest part of the summer when the water level in the ponds is the lowest, it smells like raw sewage.

Every other day and every day that they had tennis tournaments, the courts had to be rolled.  Finally, I get to drive something.  Unfortunately that something was a mini steam roller like this.  Its top speed was in the neighborhood of 1 mile per hour.  You sit right behind the engine and inhale exhaust fumes and listen to deafening engine noise.  The most embarrassing part was having to drive it from the shop to the courts.  Imagine rolling two hollow steal drums over 1,000 feet of gravel, on a golf course.  I think every golfer wanted to have me drawn and quartered when I drove that thing.

My second responsibility was flowers, all 2,500 of them.  I had to plant, water, feed, mulch, weed, and prune every flower bed on the entire course.  My only means of transport was a two-wheeled garden cart, aka the Rickshaw.

I used this to haul hundreds of flats of flowers, hoses, fertilizer, and about 20 cubic yards of mulch that summer.  I didn’t mind doing the flowers around the clubhouse, it was the 18 tee boxes did me in.  My fellow grounds crew workers would conduct a series of “fly-bys” in various different golf carts and mowers, shouting epitaphs and pelting me with golf balls or water bottles as I made my way around the course.  I think it was Nietzsche who said, “That which does not kill me, only makes my urge to kill someone stronger.” 

Every once and a while, my boss or one of the crew would swing by where I was working and tell me about some new task to perform.  I got to unload a tractor trailer full of 80 lb. fertilizer bags by hand, trim hedges, pick cigarette butts out of the white gravel path by the men’s locker room, etc.  It didn’t matter what the job was, it was something different than looking at flowers all day long or choking on the dust of the clay courts.  That first summer I don’t think I ever got to work with anyone else.  I would just plod along at whatever task listening to a Walkman.  We didn’t have any fancy MP3 players in those days, it was either radio or cassette tapes.  I think I spent a large portion of every paycheck on AA and AAA batteries.  After working 8 to 10 hours a day, I could still hear voices and music in my head even after I took off the headphones.

The highlight of that summer was the grounds crew picnic.  It was on a Monday when the course was closed, my boss wheeled a grill, a couple picnic tables, and a keg out to the rough along the fifteenth fairway.  We would eat, drink and play a little tackle football.  I forgot to mention that most of the summer crew were either college football or lacrosse players, division II schools, but still guys a hell of a lot bigger than me.  They all talked about smearing my face in the turf and breaking off various limbs.  My boss joined in the smack talk too.  I replied (probably the most words I had spoken the entire summer), “I am a lot younger and faster than you, you better watch out you don’t get hurt, Old Man.”  I don’t know if subconsciously I really meant that or what, but on the opening kickoff, my boss caught the ball and I raced down the field full speed, made a clean tackle and dislocated his left shoulder.  I simultaneously became a hero for the day and an ass for really injuring the boss.

I loved every minute of that summer, regardless of the abuse or the work I had to do.  At the end of the summer, my boss asked if I wanted to stay on and work in the kitchen as a dishwasher.  That winter, while working in the kitchen, I met the girl who would later become my wife.  The following spring I went back to the grounds crew, still not a full fledged member of the crew, but I could at least drive a golf cart every now and then.  I lost the name Flower Boy too.  In the next five years of summer, winter and spring breaks from high school and college, I acquired quite a few new nicknames, learned how to suck the tits off the time clock, walk the dog and also had a few adventures.  If I get into reminiscing again, I will tell you about what not to drive into a pond, searching for severed fingers (two separate occasions), midnight course parties, the outcome of Lawn Equipment Vs. Wildlife or how not to hide a tattoo.

The Invisible Man

I began working from home in 2006.  It started out as one day a week and then progressed to coming into the office once every few months.  The need to go into the office is rare and I never decide to just go into the office for the hell of it, but sometimes I just have to.  I got an email the other day saying that my laptop had reached the end of its lifecycle and a replacement was ready for me in the office.  I scheduled a time to meet up with the technician and headed into the office for the first time in several months. 

Some funny things happen when I head into the office.  The first is that I have to wake up at the butt crack of dawn.  My sleep schedule has changed dramatically since I had to regularly commute and getting up early is not a nice thing.  I live 42 miles from my place of business and that requires me to get up and out the door before 7 AM if I want to be there by 8 AM.  Traffic was never an issue when I regularly commuted into work.  Today, of course, there was construction and at one point, it took me 30 minutes to travel 1 mile.  I would recommend not listening to Hatebreed and Soulfly while stuck in traffic, it does not lighten your mood any.  After getting past the construction site, it was smooth sailing.

When I finally get to the building, I have to wait for 15 minutes to get my security badge reactivated.  I get to stand in front of the impenetrable guard station right next to the space age badge reader and automatic sliding doors and shout that I work from home and I am just coming in to pick up a new laptop.  You can’t hear anything through the bullet proof glass and I am not good at reading lips, so I usually end up saying “what?” fifty times and pantomiming the international sign for “I can’t understand or hear you.” which is cupping your hand behind your ear and making a constipated face.  You would think that if they could afford a huge security desk surrounded by bullet-proof glass and Star Trek sliding doors, they could at least install a little microphone and speaker so that you could communicate with the guard.  Even two soup cans on a string would work better.

The best thing that happens is the reaction I get from the people I meet while I am there.  I have worked for the same company for 15 years (well, 14 years and 8 months).  I pass by people in the hallways that I know and have worked with in the past and even talked to on the phone recently.  I say “Hi” to them as we pass and I get “Oh…Hi.”  Sometimes I get an awkward smile, signifying “I am saying hello to be polite, but I really don’t know who you are.”  I am fine with that reaction, even if I have worked with that person for 15 years.

I am a “forgettable” person.  I always have been.  I am someone that you could meet at work, at a party, or wherever and we could spend hours, days and sometimes years talking.  But the next time I meet you, you would not know who I am, you would not recognize me.  I don’t mind it, but sometimes it would be nice not to have to go through introductions every time we meet.  There is a person I run into about once every couple of months, we worked together for years, our kids even attend the same school.  And every single time I run into this person, it is like we are meeting for the first time.

There are some big benefits to this.  I get to tell you all of the same lame chit-chatty stories all over again, like you have never heard them before.  But at the same time, I already know your stories.  I can be polite and just smile and nod in all of the right places.  But if I am feeling ornery, I can interject something like, “Oh yeah!  I remember that because I was at your wedding” or “Right, I sat in the cubicle next to you for two years.”  Or I can really weird them out by talking about their kids or their spouse by name.  Sometimes I even tell you your own stories and just change them slightly to make them mine.

I even get called by someone else’s name.  My boss’s boss could pick me out of a lineup and knows that I work for him, but he would still put someone else’s name on my face. I can’t count the number of times that I have been called Andrew, Brian or Hudson by the people I work with.  My name is Henry, how friggin’ hard is that to remember?  How many Henrys do you know?

I sometimes imagine that I could be an excellent spy or serial killer.  I could easily blend in with a crowd, even have conversations with different people and then slip away and no one would ever know that I was there.

I don’t plan on becoming a spy or serial killer any time soon, but the latter will depend on how often I get stuck in traffic.  I have my new laptop at home now, so all is good.  I get to spend the next several hours downloading and installing dozens of applications. Unfortunately, I have to head into the office again on Monday for a face-to-face meeting with one of my business partners.  I don’t know why face-to-face meetings are important, no one will remember I was there anyway.

For those of you that are interested in the tech stuff, here are the specs on my new machine:

• Dell Latitude 6400
• Intel Core2 Duo P8700 2.53GHz
• 4 GB RAM
• 150 GB HDD
• Windows XP SP3 (not my choice, this is what I have to run for work)

My “standard” suite of software includes:

• Microsoft Office 2010 Professional Plus
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate
• Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Developer Edition
• Log Parser 2.2
• Launchy 1.25 
• Notepad++
• LINQPad
• Baretail
• Console2
• Fiddler2
• Foxit Reader
• Paint.Net
• Sysinternals Suite
• MagicDisc

There are a lot of little apps I have installed, and I won’t list them all here.  I come up with a complete list and post it on a separate page.

Tlatho-Shaba, Tlatho-Shaba Lama Sabachthani

Tuesday, Tuesday why have you forsaken me.  I really jinxed myself by reporting that Tuesdays are good days.  The past two weeks have proven me wrong.

My Tuesday morning consisted of browsing through a pile of emails telling what is currently broken or appears to be broken.  I don't consider myself a bad developer, but I consider myself incapable of pleasing everyone all the time or some of the time, most times I just want at least one person to be happy.  Deploying applications on thousands of desktops across the country used by various users with various levels of knowledge intelligence skill to be used in thousands of different scenarios is not easy.  It is much easier in a corporate environment where conditions are somewhat controlled, I cannot imagine what it would be like to have to build something used in the outside world.

Last week was all production support and now that I am done my monthly “on-call week”, it is a little quieter, but there is still a lot to do.  Last week left me severely behind on at least six different projects and playing catch up is hell.  Everyone is looking for a piece of me, every time I start on something, someone else is knocking on my door looking for an update.  I understand that I dig my own holes, but sometimes I wish there was a reset button or a way to file workload bankruptcy, hell a pause button would be nice.  I think I am incapable of working the hours that I used to.  I burn out around 11:30 now and even the hours before that don’t seem to be as productive as they used to. 

I got to leave work behind me early today (which is not a good thing being that I am already behind), because I had a doctor's appointment.  It was my yearly visit to the dermatologist.  Right after the appointment I had robotics, so I needed to take all of my robotics gear with me.  That means I couldn't take the truck.  I pulled the Subaru out the garage right after my wife left this morning and it sat in the sun all morning long.  When I got in to head to the doctor’s, the windshield was covered with pollen, sawdust, and a mass of other crap.  So I hit the windshield washer button and POP!  The cool windshield washer fluid on the hot windshield caused a 10 inch long crack right down the middle of the windshield.  I know this is in retaliation for not driving her for a month, but at least she could have given me a warning before self-mutilating herself.

I don’t think the patients in the dermatologist’s waiting room were too pleased with me when I arrived.  I sat there for 15 minutes and must have sneezed at least 40 times.  They all looked at me like I must be in the wrong office.  I just smiled at them between sneezes and wiped away the snot.  I got to meet my new doctor, he appears to be at least 14 years old.  I then came to the realization that I am at the point in life where my doctors can actually be younger than me and that I am truly old.  He gave me the all clear sign, which is good.  He asked me if there was anything else and I began to inquire if they offer any euthanasia services, but figured our health insurance probably wouldn’t cover it, so I said “No” and went on my way.

On to robotics.  I arrived a little late and had to park about 1/4 mile away.  Everything was going smoothly until my cell phone started blowing up. 

“you didn’t load the new such and such data last night”

“i did”

“no, you didn’t”

“I know I did because it took forever, it was like 9 million rows of data”

“well it’s not working”

At this point I realized that while I might have started the job to migrate the data last night, I don’t recall checking on it before I went to bed, so it probably threw an error at some point and never finished.  I called into the “Henry F’ed up Party Line”.  It was right at clean up time for Robotics, which is the loudest point with all of my kids asking how to save their Scratch projects and complaining because they didn’t want to clean anything up and running around screaming so I don’t even recall what was said on the call or what I might have said.  I know I promised to look at the issue as soon as I got home.

As soon as I got home, I realized that I had to make dinner quick or we wouldn’t be eating until late.  I went the pasta and meatballs route to save time.  Everyone was fed and I headed down to the basement to fix what I had broken the previous night.  I was right, the job failed to complete and I caused an outage, wonderful.  The good news was that I found an easier way to run the job that went much quicker and the problem was resolved in about 30 minutes.

What a way to spend Star Wars Day.  Lost was good, but sad. Fitting.

Worse Than Pulling Teeth?

Today I got to go to the dentist.  It was a routine cleaning, nothing major.  Before we got started, the hygienist informed me that they needed updated x-rays.  The entire dental industry needs a make-over.  All of their tools and techniques need to be improved so as not to scare the shit out of people.  The whole idea of one or more people sticking sharp metal devices and mechanical equipment that emits high pitched, irritating noises into your mouth frightens most people. 
I don’t mind the high speed drills, I don’t mind the teeth polishing tool, even the high pressure water jet, Mr. Suction, and the stainless steel picks don’t bother me.  I hate when they have to take x-rays.  It’s not the fact that they are bouncing high energy radiation off my face, it is the medieval plastic and metal ring apparatus that they insert in my mouth.  And what makes it worse is the concertina wire edged piece of film that you are required to bite down on and hold for several seconds.  With all of our research in medical and material sciences, how can we not have come up with a better solution to this process?  Could they soften the edges a bit?  Could they make it less like clamping down on a razor blade with the roof of your mouth? 
After all of the teeth clenching, polishing and picking, I get to see the actual dentist for roughly 15 seconds.  He appears to count all of my teeth and then murmur, “you’re all set.”  Seriously?  Couldn’t I have just brushed really good and sent you a few digital pictures if that was all you were going to do?  I could have done that from the privacy of my basement stronghold and not have left the house today.  Damn you, preventative dentistry, you got me again.
But it’s Tuesday, it should be good, have I already broken my streak?  In the past two days I have spent over 13 hours on the phone trying to solve production issues at work, seven yesterday and six today.  I was up until 2 AM this morning.  My ears itch from wearing a telephone headset for this long.  I am now two days behind on an already overwhelming project load.  Why does stuff break on my on-call week?
Production support in a large corporation is very much like a circus, any issue effecting a significant number of users involves getting about 20 different people on a conference call because no one person has the access, the authority or knowledge to do what is necessary to fix the issue.  You get a help desk technician, production support contacts, users, server administrators, network administrators, firewall administrators, proxy team, application owners, vendor contacts, and various other dingleberries that just cling on because they think they can be useful. 
No one gets on the call at the same time, so every time someone comes online, you have to rehash the entire story and everything that has been done to that point.  Not only do you get to go through every fact, but you have to justify the reason for the call.  It’s like they don’t believe you that there is indeed an issue.  The best part is after having spent three hours going over every possible cause and discussing every possible resolution, the issue resolves itself mysteriously without anything changing at all, or at least nothing that anyone will admit to.  Sometimes you hear that “Ooohhh… um… nothing” on the conference call and then 20 minutes later the issue disappears.  I am still hopeful that someone will develop a way to deliver a throat punch through a VOIP line.
Everything can’t be all bad today, it’s Tuesday, Lost is on tonight.  Huh?  You’re shitting me, a rerun?  I quit.

Beef, It’s What’s For Dinner

Gluttony.  It’s one of the Seven Deadly Sins.  It was deadly even before people knew about high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and clogged arteries.  It is probably the one sin that, in the past, I most guilty of.  I have been known, on occasion, to eat large amounts of food in one sitting (or standing, depending on the event). 

I eat fast and had an extremely fast metabolism (had – it is catching up with me now).  By eating fast, I trick my stomach into believing it is not full before the rest of the food hits it.  Having a fast metabolism has kept me hovering around 180 pounds since I was a junior in high school.  I realized at an early age that I could consume a lot in a short period of time.  It first started when I was 9 or 10 when we went to New Jersey to see my grandfather.  We were at some beef and beer type event.  They were serving hot dogs for the kids.  I ended up eating 11 hot dogs in about two hours.

From there I graduated to bigger things, like the “Big Irish" burger at Bennigans (I don’t think it is on the menu anymore), the “Pounder” at Cheeburger Cheeburger.  I thought the 5 Regular Roast Beefs for $5 was Arby’s version of an extra value meal. Things got… worse after that.

We had instituted “Fat Kid Friday” when we worked in the office to release our eating inhibitions and reward ourselves for slaving all week long.  We would all gather in our private conference room, throw a movie on the projector and have a leisurely lunch.  For the true “Fat Kids”, we would order pizza by the pie (one per person), 18” inch cheese steaks, Jake’s triple cheeseburgers.  It was never a contest, it was just releasing your pent up frustrations on a large amount of food.

We had to move to having “Wide Load Wednesdays” when we began working from home four days a week and only coming in on Wednesdays.  Same concept, different day of the week.  We stopped celebrating our gluttonous habits after we began working from home full time and the “Fat Kids” resumed eating like normal humans seven days a week.

Tonight was an exception.  Tonight a few of my buddies from work met for dinner.  We met at a restaurant featuring an interesting dinner special on Thursday nights, a 40 ounce steak for only $17.  Forty ounces of beef, gristle, fat and bone.  Forty ounces of gluttony on a plate.  I was up for a challenge.  I had never attempted this much food in one sitting before, but I figured I would give it a try.  I was ravenous waiting for the food to arrive.  I kept telling myself, when you see the steak, remember to take a picture, a picture.

I forgot.

By the time I did remember, there was little left to photograph except for a nearly empty plate and a bone.  I polished off a forty ounce porterhouse, a plate of fries and a bowl of applesauce in a matter of minutes.  The saddest thing was, I didn’t feel full at all and could have probably eaten more.

For your revulsion….

From Random

Reunited

I know some of you maybe expecting a Lost post, but I had to talk about something else first.  Did you have one of those days that you don’t expect to be anything special, but that keeps on getting better as it goes along?  Today was one of those days.

Tuesday are always busy days, today was nothing different.  Just after getting back from a cold bus stop, I saw some interesting news on the inter-webs.  On Monday, Faith No More played their first concert on American soil in almost 12 years.  Faith No More is a band that I have been a fan of for the past 20+ years.  I wasn’t able to get out to San Francisco to see their concert.  And I won’t be able to get to New York to see their show there either.  But someone posted a picture of t-shirt that gave me some hope.  Should I put any hope in a t-shirt?  I guess it doesn’t hurt anything.

I had a lunch scheduled with a bunch of people from work.  We meet once a month just so we can prove to each that we really exist and that we are really something more than voices on endless conference calls. 

Most of us live/work in the NJ-PA-DE-MD area and we pick somewhere close enough for us all to get there.  Today’s lunch was special because a friend and associate from Atlanta would be in Baltimore for the week and was able to come.  Most of us haven’t seen him in several years, the last time I had gotten to see him was nine months ago.  We are a close knit team, some of having worked together for over 11 years now, so it is great when we can get together and relax, shoot some shit and have a good time.  We had a great lunch with great food and great conversation.  We also got to plan a dinner for Thursday night which had been cancelled but is now going to happen.  The day was working out pretty well.

I headed over to Robotics Club after lunch for our first meeting after spring break and I had a great time with the kids.  I got to spend much of the two hours instructing the kids on the Scratch programming software and watched them take the simple instructions and make some very cool games and interactive animation.  My own two boys are part of the club and I got to spend a lot of time with them, watching them build different things using Scratch.  Even my 5 YO was able to work on his own after a little introduction on how it works.  I finally felt like today, after all of the previous weeks, the kids were actually learning something.  It felt good.

After dinner, homework and showers were completed, the kids and I resumed watching Tin Man.  They were curled up next to me on the sofa, almost ready to fall asleep.  Life is good.

After the kids were in bed, I laid down with them for a couple minutes.  I pulled up Seesmic on my Droid and saw something amazing.

I have been a fan of Faith No More since I heard Epic for the first time.  My sister took a friend and I to their first show in Philly for my 15th birthday.  They opened for Billy Idol on his Charmed Life tour.  I will never forget the effect that FNM’s music had on me.  Every song was something different, from the rap-like Epic to the crooning of Edge of the World, and any band that can deliver an awesome cover of Sabbath’s War Pigs is a band for me.

Over the years I have sought out anything I could find of theirs until they finally broke up in 1998.  I was overwhelmed when I heard they were getting back together and touring again.  I was a little dejected when I heard that they were only playing a few dates in California and a show in New York.  It is difficult to rationalize stealing away to California or New York for a few days and leaving my wife and three kids alone.  But if they come to Philly, well, that’s a different story.

If anyone is interested in going with me, tickets go on sale on 04/20.  I have a reminder already scheduled and I am already following Roddy and Billy on Twitter so I can get the scoop on the pre-sale.  I haven’t been to the Mann in years, but every show I have seen there has been excellent.

So today turned out to be a great day for reunions.

To get the latest on FNM, you can go here and here.

I will end with some of my favorites of FNM.

Easy:

Midlife Crisis:

Caffeine:

And my favorite FNM song:

Are you a fool?

April Fools Day.  Today is one of my favorite days of the year.  I get to be a jerk (this is nothing new) and have some some justification for being that way.  Long ago, when I worked in a office with other people, not in the basement like I do today, we pulled some very elaborate pranks on each other.  Working in a cube farm made these pranks very easy to perpetrate.  Since I work from home and most of my peers or “marks” work from home as well, I had to get a little bit more imaginative.

I was hard pressed for ideas this year and couldn’t come up with anything worthy of trying.  With only a few hours before April 1st, an idea came to me.  My idea was to have one of our business partners email  another one of my peers and tell him that they have decided to go with another product. 

Here is the scenario (the names have been changed to protect the innocent/gullible/guilty):

The Mark: “Pat”

The Conspirators: Me, “PJ” – Pat’s customer, and “Jason” – Pat’s manager

The History:  “Pat” created a brilliant application several years ago, there was nothing like it in the industry and there is still nothing like it today.  This application has always been Pat’s baby and he has vigorously designed and developed it for the past 4 years, even spending 2 weeks of 20 hour days (that’s roughly 320 hours in 16 days to you mere mortals) last year to make upgrades and enhancements to it.  In total, he has probably spent over 6 months of development time, writing code for this application.  I am the “application owner” for this app and get to make all of the final decisions on what gets done to it.  I am constantly telling him what a POS it is and that I don’t want to spend any more time or effort on it, just to give him a hard time (me being a jerk when it is not April 1st).  He typically gets very defensive, threatens my life, various parts of my anatomy and my property, especially my car tires.

The Prank: PJ sent an email to Pat, copying PJ’s boss and peers and me, telling Pat that his business has decided to scrap Pat’s application in 2 months and go with a product produced by an outside vendor.  This alone would be enough to push Pat to the edge, but the kicker was:  This new application the vendor created was an exact replica of Pat’s application with a bunch of new features that Pat has been dying to add, and PJ thinks they got the idea for it after having seen Pat’s application.

How it played out: Pat immediately instant messaged me.  This is a transcript of the conversation.

“Pat” [8:58 AM]: I guess we don’t have to support “THE APP” anymore

Me [8:58 AM]: I just read that. I was going to text you. Did you talk to him?

“Pat” [8:58 AM]: Not yet

Me [8:58 AM]: Did he tell you about this before? Is this new?

“Pat” [8:59 AM]: Nope. Must be

Me [8:59 AM]: This sucks, how many months of development have we spent on this?

“Pat” [8:59 AM]: It does, like 6 months easy

Me [9:00 AM]: I wonder if the other areas will use it too

“Pat” [9:00 AM]: good question

Me [9:01 AM]: I tried emailing PJ but he is out of the office.  let me ask around

“Pat” [9:04 AM]: ok. if it is a major cost then maybe we can talk them out of it LOL.

Me [9:04 AM]: what sucks is it looks like “the vendor” stole our (your) idea and built it themselves

“Pat” [9:04 AM]: yea

Me [9:07 AM]: I talked to a project manager in the business and they said it is a corporate initiative, some deal with “the vendor”

“Pat” [9:07 AM]: then this must be something they had before us

Me [9:08 AM]: she said it will be made available to operations first, and then rolling out to line managers by end of year

“Pat” [9:08 AM]: I wonder how long this has been going on for

Me [9:09 AM]: she said the deal has been out there for a while, but this is something new they just released. she is saying we are the first to get it

“Pat” [9:10 AM]: I bet they saw ”THE APP” and figured it would be a good sale to the company

Me [9:11 AM]: I wonder if they saw the our old version and went from there.  Email PJ and see if he can get some screen prints or something

“Pat” [9:14 AM]: gonna call him

Me [9:14 AM]: Let me know if you get a hold of him. Conference me in.

“Pat” [9:14 AM]: will do. we can grill him together. bitch him out. calling now.

Me [9:16 AM]: trying to get the docs from the PM now. she said she has something on it

“Pat” [9:16 AM]: ok

Me [9:28 AM]: oh wow, this sucks. she just sent them

“Pat” [9:28 AM]: let me see!

Me [9:29 AM]: this looks just like “THE APP” almost exactly

The Reveal:  The email I sent to “Pat” which he thought contained screen prints of the new application was actually all of the conversations I had with the various co-conspirators of the prank.

The Mark’s Reaction:

“Pat” [9:32 AM]: you fuckers

“Pat” [9:33 AM]: I will beat you to death

“Pat” [9:33 AM]: good one

Me [9:33 AM]: thanks, this was a late night idea

“Pat” [9:33 AM]: you got me. I was pissed

Me [9:33 AM]: last minute, I couldn't come up with anything else

“Pat” [9:33 AM]: my heart dropped when I read this email

Happy April Fool’s Day.  I will try to post some of our previous pranks in future posts.  If you have any pranks of your own or any ideas, let me know.