Gone Wrong

Thursday was Greek Day in the cafeteria.
You may remember that this is something of an event around here.
The issue arose when I decided that I just wasn't "feeling it" this week.
It seems like we just had Greek Day a couple of weeks ago. There is only so much I can take, really.
So I said that I'd be going along, but that I'd probably just have a turkey wrap.
At this point, my co-worker Dave flipped out.

"If you don't want to be a Team Player, you can just eat somewhere else."

"Hey! I'm a Team Player! I'm going!"

"It doesn't count if you don't eat the Greek food on Greek Day!"

"Opa?"

"Don't 'Opa' me, you Greek Day traitor!"

"I just don't want a chicken feta wrap today."

"Fine! But don't expect us to care!"

And, as a result of last-minute guilt while in line, I got the chicken feta whole wheat wrap. You'd think this would count for something, but you'd be wrong.

"Look! I got Greek food! Opa!"

"I told you to get whatever you wanted."

"I'm a Team Player!"

"Whatever."

The hostility continued to simmer like artichoke casserole under a heat lamp for most of the afternoon. It was ignited again, unfortunately.

"The current application issues can be completely explained by a total lack of team synergy on Greek Day."

"What?!"

"She's right. You crapped all over Greek Day."

"I had a chicken feta wrap!"

"How was it?"

"Dry as hell, like always!"

"Good!"

"I had no idea Greek Day was such a freaking issue! I just didn't want a heavy, sauce-laden chicken thing in the middle of the day!"

"No one said you had to participate in team activities, Garrick."

"But I did participate!"

"We know when you don't mean it."

"I'm just trying to heal this apparently chicken-based rift in our relationship. Do I need to march back upstairs and buy some freaking chicken?"

"Just forget I mentioned it."

"No! Obviously it is an issue!"

"You don't like the chicken. Don't eat the chicken. And stop yelling."

"I'm fine with the freaking chicken!"

"You sound perfectly reasonable about it, yeah."

"Reasonable? I'll give you reasonable! O-freaking-Pa!"

"Opa, yourself!"

Today is Build-Your-Own Nachos Day.
Someone is going to lose an eye.

Giving Thanks

We had some pretty major application issues yesterday.
There was a script mapping three network drives and then accessing a program stored on one of them.
Initially, it would work.
The second attempt was almost always a failure. The "almost" is important since if a computer or program is broken, it is almost always broken every time.
I tried mapping the drives a different way. It still failed.
I thought maybe the drives weren't mapping completely before the application started and there were files not found. This was also not it.
Finally, I determined that the initial drive mappings were staying resident and then showing up on subsequent attempts in a disconnected state.
Changing the script to un-map the drives before mapping them solved that particular issue.
I bring all this up to tell you that in the middle of it we discussed Thanksgiving.
Our Project Coordinator mentioned that her family has two separate meals on that day and that the one at her husband's family's house is not as good.
When pressed, she said that the menu was different.
I attempted further clarification, "What are they? Communists?"
She responded,"There are regional menu variations. Like the addition of rice and gravy and mashed potatoes."
I felt the topic had shifted dramatically, so I pursued my original line of inquiry,"But I noticed you don't deny that your husband's family may be Communists."
This issue was never, to me, satisfactorily resolved.
On the bright side, EBGames has apparently managed to deliver my Wrath of the Lich King World of Warcraft expansion pack to my house, on release day, before noon.
Of course, it's there and I'm here, so I still have to install it when I get home.
I'll tell you exactly what I told my family:
I'll see you guys in Mid-December, prolly.

I'm A Little Distracted

The new expansion pack for World of Warcraft is released this week.
As part of the giant player immersion (marketing) push, there have been a lot of in-game events added recently.
This pre-release build-up has included a full-on zombie invasion, random attacks by the twisted minions of the Lich King all over the game world and, most recently, an attack on the beloved but poorly-designed capitol city of the Horde, Orgrimmar.
It was pretty awful, since Frost Wyrms and massive undead creatures were completely destroying the lovely architectural elements of the Valley of Honor and killing the poor noobs trying to skill up their fishing in the pond there.
Of course, Webinara felt compelled to rush over and assist in the defense.
She also got to see Thrall, Warchief of the Horde, get completely beaten down fighting an enemy in the arena.
It was over pretty quickly, but the event seems to restart every twenty minutes.
This schedule makes this epic event seems somehow less . . . epic . . . but it gives everyone a better chance of seeing it if they haven't logged in.
And logging in has been a pretty big problem lately. The regular Tuesday morning maintenance stretched past the normal 11am Pacific time until well after midnight.
The servers are down again today to correct some of the things broken yesterday.
With the expansion coming out at midnight, I honestly don't care how long the servers are down today. An update like this one is virtually guaranteed to come with a large amount of bugs, server downtime, game instability and rolling restarts.
Still.
It would have been nice to see some more Frost Wyrms pwning the noobs at the fishing pond.
That never fails to warm the heart.

This Isn't Right

Long ago, there was a time when the "cool" thing to do with a beverage was to make it clear. The idea was that it made even semi-toxic cola seem somehow more pure and therefore more healthy.
This is not a trend which should ever be repeated. Especially with coffee.
This morning my normal conference room desk was usurped by some other team for testing or hanging out or something.
As a result, I'm spending today in my "normal" cubicle. "Normal" is in quotes since, while my name is posted on the outside, I'd spent about ten minutes here total prior to today.
I'm in a totally different building listening to totally different office sounds.
There is a totally different cafeteria downstairs which does not offer whole wheat pancakes. Further, the Splenda is next to the cash register where I did not see it until after I'd dosed my disgustingly weak coffee with something out of a blue packet.
If it weren't for the fact that the tiny amount of caffeine in that semi-transparent (like I can see the bottom of the cup through the hole in the lid, semi-transparent) coffee is probably keeping my liver working, I'd manually purge in the completely unfamiliar restroom.
How do people get anything done in this building?
Any why are the keyboards so freaking loud?
I heard a rumor that there is no one in the conference room in the other building this morning. I moved out all my stuff to keep them from messing it up and it looks like they didn't bother to use the room after all.
If I'd been paying attention when I was told who needed the room, I'd spend a little time this morning deleting accounts. Unfortunately, I wasn't, so I have no one to blame but . . . The Application Support Team.
They haven't specifically done anything and, to be honest, I have very little interaction with them. But in my time in Corporate America I've learned that the first step in troubleshooting any problem is the Assigning Of Blame.
With the AOB out of the way, I can continue on with my day.
Select > Group > Application Support > Delete > Force Update

Where Has It Been?

Almuric.
First published over the course of three months in 1939 in the magazine Weird Tales, this story then vanished for almost 70 years.
As I've mentioned before, I absolutely love the adventure stories from this time period.
Most of them are undeniably bad, like literary placeholders between books that became "the classics". But pulp, named for the low-quality paper it was printed on, is an almost inherently American style of writing.
I just finished Swordsman of Mars by Otis Adelbert Kline, courtesy of Paizo Publishing's Planet Stories line.
Kline was is more famous as Robert E. Howard's literary agent than as a writer on his own, but back in the day there seems to have been quite a rivalry between Edgar Rice Burroughs and Otis Adelbert Kline in the fledgling field of what I lovingly refer to as "crap fiction".
In the twenties and thirties, their stories were wildly popular. This was possibly due to the cheapness of the books in conjunction with the Great Depression and a total lack of a Home and Garden Television Network.
It may also have been due to America's need for an escape from the day-to-day abject poverty and unemployment rate.
Pulp provides that. The stories are straightforward action in fantastic locations. The characters are cookie-cutter archetypes. Burroughs' Tarzan and Howard's Conan were always the leads, but sometimes the names were changed. There is absolutely no learning curve in these books.
The characters reject modern culture and return time and again to a more primitive lifestyle fighting giant monsters for survival. Society is portrayed as corrupt and a weakening agent on the human spirit. The aristocracy is uniformly evil and foppish.
I think that was the key to the success of pulp, and when people began to make money again they lost interest in stories about turning away from it.
Swordsman of Mars was not, by any definition, a good book. Kline telegraphs every twist and every plot point seems completely stolen from Burrough's John Carter series. But sometimes not being a good book and not being a good read are not the same thing.
It was fun.
Almuric, on the other hand, is well-written. And fun.
The protagonist is dropped on an alien planet where he must survive without the benefits of the modern world in both books, but Howard just does it better.
With the current state of the economy I'm hoping to see a resurgence in pulp, possibly even in online serialized format.
Escapist entertainment is a time-honored American tradition.

Post-Election News

Where is it?
Obama is getting a dog when he moves into the White House?
This is only really news if he names it "Maverick". However, if he does, I may actually die from laughter.
More importantly, our Consultants-Only Super Party Spectacular Ass-Off '08 was called off early.
Shana broke her finger during a bad rugby hand-off and needed to see a doctor. She's all splinted and mildly drugged, but the wait at the doctor's office meant I needed to leave early (pre-Ass-Off) to meet Gwynyth at the bus.
I was happy to do it, but today there is the suggestion that I chose to leave early for fear of losing.
This is completely not the case.
We had it pretty well organized, really, and the vote would have been as fair as possible.
Instead of parading in front of a group of voters, we were using Xerox copies of the . . . entries.
That way, votes could be placed with no preference to gender - a vital part of any guy getting voted "Best Butt" in a room full of other guys.
There were comments, which I would assume to be complimentary, such as "Did this one fall off a frog?" and "The back pockets on this one actually appear concave." That's good, right?
Anyway, the final vote was never tallied and the question is now hanging over the room like a dark cloud of ass-uncertainty.
I mean, I'm not uncertain.
No way.
I can't wait for all the Full Time Employees to head off to their next elitist off-site gathering so we can settle this.

EDIT: I've gotten a lot of email asking for details about Shana's rugby accident. I can no longer keep up the fictionalization. The real story is that, due to a bizarre convergence of events, while walking Gwynyth to the bus stop yesterday it became necessary for Shana to punch a rabid bear in the face. Since she was holding Gwynyth's lunch box, her fist was insufficiently formed and her finger was broken.
But you should see the bear!

My Liver Hurts

I learned an important thing about the electoral process yesterday.
In South Carolina, liquor stores are closed on election day. What the hell is that about?
I was pretty irate about it, and expressed my feelings to my co-workers.
I was told that the law about closing liquor stores on election day was to prevent people from voting drunk (a law which did not prevent Strom Thurmond from keeping his Senate seat for like a billion years, by the way).
"That's stupid!" I told the room, "I was completely trashed when I voted absentee. I could hardly even make it to the mailbox and it's just right over by the cafeteria."
"Are you implying that you were drunk at work, Garrick?"
"I'm not implying anything. Your liquor laws are puritanical. Now give me back my coffee mug before someone gets hurt."
Shana made two pitchers last night, one with blue Kool-Aid and vodka and the other with cranberry juice and vodka. Mixed together, these became a delightful Bi-Partisan Punch.
Oddly, the blue parts did not mix well with the red parts, so it ended up kind of splotchy looking.
Then, there was beer.
And vanilla vodka with Diet Coke.
Oh, I participated in the political process like crazy.
Today, I have my traditional post-election headache. And I may die.
This afternoon there is a special off-site meeting for all the I.T. people. It is catered and there are supposed to be special speakers and all kind of awesomeness.
Well, it isn't actually for all of the I.T. people, since all the hourly consultants are specifically not invited.
This exclusion kind of angered me. And when I say "kind of" I mean "really".
So I decided to organize a consultants-only on-site meeting this afternoon.
We will have skits and interpretive dance. There may also be pie.
But everyone there will be able to bill for their time.
In fact, there were a couple of full-time people talking about calling in sick this morning and coming in just for our on-site meeting of awesomeness. This would still not mean they are invited, though.
Finally, the challenge was issued.
Apparently, the project lead who sits in front of me had become tired of hearing me talk about the awesomeness of my butt -- the stories of how you can bounce a quarter off it apparently got to her.
This afternoon, by consultant-only vote, we are settling this matter in an event we've named "Ass-Off '08".
We've already started the pre-game trash talk ritual.
I think we'll be just fine without door prizes and motivational speakers.