company rah-rah

Web sites to start with.

For those fortunate enough to have broadband access: toy wars on ifilm wherein Professor Evil unveils a new secret weapon at Evil-Con. Worth it if only for the Jar Jar references.

Also, the two posters that I bought from thinkgeek.com, one for myself called Adversity, and one called Ignorance. Adversity will be framed and put up in my cubicle, I think. Ignorance is going to a coworker whose birthday I've forgotten.

Two more that I want to get are listed on that web site. Heck: I want almost all of them, but I'm particularly intent on getting Incompetence and Cluelessness. Gifts for any corporate lackey, ready to hand. Who can say more?

Oh, it's been a good week. A really good week. New toys, new information, new skills -- and have I mentioned that I'm this close to finishing that dumb-ass Playstation game I've been playing for the last two months, Grandia? Excepting that this Saturday marks the last lesson I'll give at Dominican College as a faculty member, and that The Guy is leaving for England in under a week, everything is just dandy. I've started learning my Linux computer, making friends, and an insider at my ISP has promised to change my DNS entry for me so I'm no longer an arbitrarily assigned tag. I love my @Home service, and not just because I work there.

Despite the fact that I use Microsoft Outlook at work, (look, I have to. I don't have a choice. I mean, I do, but the Netscape on my computer looks funny), our mail system hasn't gone down due to yet another virus that Microsoft Outlook invites in and makes part of the family. Eight hours of slow mail, and that was it; our Operations people pounced on that sucker like feral dogs on a rabbit, shook it to shreds, and spit out the pieces. Other ISPs, -- we won't say "DSL" or "Pac Bell" because that would be gloating, though I might point out that The Guy's Pac Bell DSL service has gone down and been down for a while now, though of course that could be purely coincidental -- have bitten the big one.

I am not a good winner. I gloat. I do little dances. I am the proverbial lemon juice in the proverbial paper cut, and I rub it in but good. I don't think anybody will begrudge me. Our stock closed at under $1.50 today.

By way of morale boosting, my company hosted an ice cream social outside in the @ ball, complete with band and balloons. The Guy Next Door, remember him?, caught up to us in front of one of the Baskin' Robbins stands and merged seamlessly into our little clutch as though he'd never left.

Backing up a little bit here; at some point during the months when I was out of commission on the journal, the Guy Next Door was picked up and dropped into another engineering group. I say "another engineering group" to be kind. What really happened is that he was picked up and pushed into a group consisting of the following:

1. One manager
2. One Product Manager
3. Him.

An application that he once had two full-time people assisting on suddenly became the responsibility of him, and him alone. He fought a valorous rearguard action to try and drag College Boy and Indian Mom with him, but failed abyssmally. Now his team is bulked out by two half-time engineers. It is, he admits, an improvement. Nonetheless, he greets us with the enthusiasm of a parched castaway at an Evian convention, and in public, scorns all others.

He hugged us, grinned his gleeful grin, and sucked on a pink spoon. We had him surrounded in no time, attempting to cover his white, five-foot nine desertion with our black-haired minority, five-foot two average bodies.

Two scoops of mint chocolate chip ice cream. I'll take that in lieu of a raise.

I ran into a proxy engineer that we all like; he was greeted with delight by the whole lot of us.

"Sorry if I seem a bit dazed," he said, sheepishly. "I went and saw Planet of the Apes last night, and I'm still recovering. It was a bit of an experience."

"That good?" I asked. I'm not really keen on seeing it.

"That bad," he winced. "I think I'll need more time."

Midway into the festivities, a middle-aged man with an accent eerily reminiscent of Ah-nold "the Terminator" interrupted the band to make us play a 'getting to know you' competition.

He sorted us by building and made us gather around balloons, where we discovered straw baskets of party favors. I milled with everybody else, trying not to get involved, when the little Chinese Firecracker I work with came charging out of the crowd towards me bearing a blue felt beanie with a silver propeller in one hand.

"HERE, YUU-REEE, YOU PUT THIS ONE ON," she ordered. Everything the Firecracker says is, by definition, in caps. Like one of the Chicken Family, she lives her

life close to God: she yells, to make sure any celestial entities can hear through static. "IT MATCHES YOUR SHIRT."

It did indeed, and I put it on. Instantly, the little silver propeller started to whirl with desperate enthusiasm, catching the suggestion of a breeze from some corner of the lawn and translating it into a gale of tornado proportions. I was delighted. Some long-unsuspected hole in my heart was filled; it was a childhood need never yet fulfilled until now. I felt complete.

Still wrapped up in the misty distraction of bliss, I meekly submitted to the competition: a cheer, of all things, which we -- and our preponderence of little Indian women and equally little Chinese people -- somehow managed to win. College Boy, who half a year ago put on hiking boots over his bleeding feet because he was embarrassed to be wearing slippers, did a cartwheel on the lawn in front of the entire company and danced up and down, wearing a pair of springy heart-antennae and glittery gold gag glasses. My dignified manager, the Indian Woman, pogo-sticked up and down, yelling like a two year old denied ice-cream. Meanwhile, the Guy Next Door, who refused to join the team he really belonged to in order to cleave to us instead, donned a green wig and threw confetti.

Our stock is at 1.26, yo.

The Guy is leaving for England tomorrow, and my mother is insane.

On Saturday, I visited my sister in San Francisco and we had lunch together. Walking back to her work, she commented that mom had called her last night, and she was concerned "because you're not like we are. I mean, this is your first relationship, and you're not used to being separated from your boyfriend. 'Not like you,' she said. 'You're used to getting rid of boys, you've had so many, and she's not as cold.' And I was like, 'Thanks, mom.' So anyway, she wants to rent you a piano."

What the hell renting me a piano had to do with my sister being a Player had both of us stumped. My sister and I exchanged a look of blank incomprehension, united in our complete inability to follow my mother's train of thought.

"You realize that she's completely insane," I said.

"We could have her committed," she pointed out, hopefully. "We could have her put away--"

"--She'd drive us crazy."

"I suppose that's true." My sister sighed, wistfully. "I can already imagine the guilt trip. I guess we'd be safer just letting her run around free." Posted by yhirata at July 27, 2001 11:34 PM