Today at work a guy brought in some vegetables from his garden but by the time I noticed there were only two things left: a very small cucumber and a very large cucumber. This is okay, because I adore cucumbers, and if I get a big one the guinea pigs can have some too which they FREAK out about. If there's anyone in the office more excited about a free huge cucumber I'd be shocked.

The issue is that I felt a little weirded out just going up to him, in an office of all men, who are engineers therefore not terribly mature, and saying "I want your huge cucumber."

Oh, and then there'd be the actual taking it and walking around with it back to my desk which also sounded like a weird phallic disaster.

So I just avoided the whole situation all day until the very end, when nobody was around, and somehow he was still there and so were the cucumbers. I got mine. And walked out to the parking lot with it, because it wouldn't fit in my bag. It's gonna be awesome. I feel guilty for thinking like a 13-year-old but better safe than sorry.

Here's a game you can play with your coworkers that's both fun and educational.

The goal: get someone to look something up on Wikipedia.

How you do it: by being sneaky. Talk about some obscure topic, or figure out how to drag a conversation in such a way that somebody WILL end up on wikipedia. Like, if you're all talking about lunch, you can say "Didn't McDonald's used to have a hamburger that came in a two-sided Styrofoam package, so the cold stuff stay cold? Man I bet there's a whole list of discontinued McDonald's foods somewhere." Then just stare off, continue to work at your desk for best results as if you're NOT EVEN THINKING ABOUT IT.

This works best in a group. It's still fun with people who know about the game, because then the real challenge comes up... if you can think of something that will get a guy to wikipedia even when he knows it's a disgrace to his game record, you're a real winner.

When you do catch someone on wikipedia, you criticize them for not being productive and gloat about how focused you are. Which is another reason why now's a great time to play this game, I don't know about you but where I work we're horribly understaffed because we can't afford to hire people, so we're all trying to get work done... which makes distracting someone feel like more of an accomplishment.

Also... bonus points are awarded for just how non-work-related you can get to. Get someone on wikipedia reading about how to set up a new ms outlook folder and that's not very impressive. Get someone on there reading Britney news, go you. If they're at a not-work-safe article, I think that's the top prize... but we have yet to see this.

I have decided that all RSS feeds shall flow towards my twitter, not away from it. I know a lot of my friends here have loudtwitter or whatever to make sure their tweets make it to lj, but the more I thought about it, I decided to be against that. My livejournal will be for interesting, thought-provoking things. Some tweets may be good ideas, but they should be expanded into livejournal posts. From what I've seen, people don't comment too often on loudtwitter posts. They just feel to me like calling it in.

I mean have you thought about the fact that you can loudtwitter your tweets to livejournal, then twitterfeed your livejournal into your twitter, and get the whole internet caught in an endless loop? I can't be the first person to be afraid of this. The web can get too linked up, and someone will get hurt, I'm almost sure of it.

I could almost talk some today, but I still sound like ass, it's sad. I'm the kind of person who tries to talk regardless of how it feels. It's just not like a switch I can turn off. The sad thing is that I still have no one sitting by me at work to talk too. That's right... due to craziness, I've been sitting alone in a long row of desk for nearly a year. There's been moving around a lot lately but I'm in a strange little area that a group won't fit well into. I'm afraid that if someone does get assigned a desk by me now, I'll be all weird about it, like, "I haven't been by PEOPLE in a long time! we can be friends! we can have lunch! play cards! throw paper airplanes!"

new years resolution: get better at tagging lj entries.

so about coffee... i have basically stopped drinking the office swill! and i feel pretty good about it. i'd always felt bad before because it's not fair trade, not organic, kinda taste like dirt, but it was there and hot and effortless. but lately they've been weirder about charging us for it. it used to be 5 or 10 cents a cup, and nobody really made a big deal about it, you just threw money into the jar when you had it. i'd put in a dollar and call myself good for two weeks, because i only really drink a cup a day (a small cup, at that). But then it went up to 25 cents AND they started hanging up signs reminding us to pay for coffee because apparently the jar was short when they upped the price. I think it's insane for a company to charge its engineers for coffee. it's like charging your car for oil.

incidentally... for like two years, this was not an issue for my career at all because i had a boss who made a pot of coffee each morning and invited us to all just drink his. it was lovely. he listened to npr in the mornings, i'd go in and say hi. he kept m&ms on his desk so sometimes i'd snag some of those. my group was friendly and enthusiastic, we even had a friday donut rotation. there were squirrels and they were merry. but life isn't so rosy anymore, i work in a cold lonely place far from any group, it's kind of a weird complicated situation but there are lots of empty desks around me. that guy is sorta still my boss, but people have been promoted so there are some levels between us now, and he's in another building anyway.

but anyway i have learned that i do have time to make coffee at home! it's very tasty. sometimes i have a cup while checking e-mail in the morning, other times i package it up. when it's warm, I like iced coffee. that's really what started this trend... i make coffee ice cubes, and have a coffee nalgene in the fridge so if i don't have time to make hot coffee in the morning i mix the cold coffee with a little milk and hazelnut syrup and i'm off, my own little luxury from the kitchen. and I have to admit... it was kind of a problem when i used to wait until i got to work to have coffee. i'd be there at 7:45, just settling in, and a coworker would try to talk to me... and it wasn't good. now that i start on it at home i'm perkier when i show up. There are lots of guys on alternate schedules in my office, so my 7:45 a lot of them have been there for an hour or two and they've just been WAITING for me to get in. not cool.

I've decided to be completely negative this week. And not just because a professor who JUST wrote his exit exam e-mailed me to say he'd left chapters 6-11 off the thing, even after I've wasted all sorts of scary time trying to study it. And not just because my boss called me into a "quick ten minute teleconference" and I couldn't find a good time to escape as it droned on for an hour, ruining my chances of going to lunch with my coworkers. Nope, I'm being negative just because I can. Next week I might have a poll to see if anyone actually prefers super-mega-hateful-bitchfem, or if i should go back to my old only halfway bitchy self.

Last friday I was angry because I knew I had a weekend of studying ahead of me, so I really didn't appreciate everyone in my office doing that happy "It's Friday!" sing-songy thing that office people do. But I lived through the day. Then I made it to this week. I'm washing my hands in the ladies room yesterday and a woman at the next sink asked me how I was doing. I said, "Fine, how are you?" She said, "It's Monday!"

YES I KNOW! IT'S SO SPECIAL!

So today someone asked me how I was, and I said, "It's Tuesday!" all perky like that, and they did that fake corporate giggle and said, "Yup!" WHAT DOES THIS EVEN MEAN, PEOPLE? they're all days! STOP!

It's November 13th!

If I'm ever your boss, and you TELL me it's friday or wednesday or whatever, I'm making you work weekends until you don't know the difference.

something tells me this is a fairly petty trite overdone complaint... sort of like people complaining about hot dog buns in 8-packs and hot dogs in 10-packs, but I'm not caring right now.

nothing's worse than going into the breakroom at work and finding the *remnants* of treats somebody brought in... a cake plate with crumbs, you know, or a tupperware thing with three chocolate chips and cookie crumbs in it, it's just tough. I told a friend of mine about this, she's an interior designer, and she just shrugged it off... "It seems like every other day there's a birthday in our office, with more treats, so I can miss a few."

revelation! apparently other departments acknowledge birthdays, no not just birthdays, every birthday, and there's sugary food involved. so that's what I let go of when I decided to be an engineer! sonuva... treats in our office are only provided when one of the admin assistants has a boring weekend. I figured that's how it was everywhere. not so, I see.

Every year around this time, my company announces what next year's health insurance premiums will be, and it's basically torture. Is it like this where you work?

Here's the backstory... in 2002, after three months of struggling almost to the point of giving up on my dream of being an engineer, I got this job. I couldn't believe it, I was thrilled. And as soon as I started, people started telling me I shouldn't be so happy, because of the terrible, selfish, evil things our company was doing with health insurance. Oh yes. We were going consumer-driven, which means you actually have to pay attention to what you spend, and if you spend a lot you have to start pitching in.

Then the next year they announced PREMIUMS!!! oh the nerve! it was like, $30 a month. the average american pays several hundred and had huge deductables and copays, and we had to pay $30 a month, and people were talking about looking for other jobs. I basically told them not to let the door knock them on the ass on the way out. Time went on and (surprise) none of them got new jobs, they stuck around to bitch about health insurance. I worked with all these guys whose wives had babies, and they complained about the $1200 out of pocket costs. These are good republican Bush voters who don't believe in socialism or welfare, but for some reason they thought a big company should even out everybody's health care to be free. I pointed out this discrepency more than once and it just sort of floated above everybody's head.

So now premiums for a family of four will be like $100 a month. About what I pay to insure MY CAR (and my car has a deductable... a per accident one!) and people are flipping the fuck out, because our company has "done" this to them.

It just pisses me off how sheltered we all are! I mean, health care isn't something that our company is doing to us, it's a HUGE global issue, I almost think it's morally wrong for us to feel like we should be kept out of it. why, because we're cushy engineers?

I have lots of friends with absolutely no health insurance. It's out of the question, it's impossible, and they walk through life in denial about the fact that something really horrible could happen, because denial is the only thing you can really go with. you don't have a choice, when the cost of private insurance is twice your rent or half your salary, that's the reality for them.

Everybody wants a war but we don't want to buy bonds like they did in WWII. Everybody wants the best health care but doesn't see it as something they should pay for. Everybody wants cheaper power but we don't want to look at power plants. I don't get how everyone I work with is so educated, but so incapable of making these tiny leaps of logic to understand what it all takes, you know?

I was in another building at my company when I noticed this poster of the great wall of china, with the word TEAMWORK printed underneath in big serif letters (it's also here: http://www.keysan.com/big/pichavt0154.html ).

when I think of the great wall of china, I think about slave labor and the death of a million people, but I guess to my company that means TEAMWORK. rock on. I think they should order one showing Cherokee people walking to oklahoma or an 1840s southern cotton plantation or Jewish people digging mass graves outside a nazi concentration camp... hey, teamwork!

Guess what? I went to the DMV today with a load of work papers to do, all ready to bunker in and spend the DAY as everyone warned me, but there was no wait! I went to this tucked away office at 21st and Woodlawn and there were three people and five workers and I went right up, wrote my check, and was out of there.

whoh.

I even had time to go to my bank, so I went. Deposited my monthly google check (the one that was supposed to cover my dedicated server costs... heh heh) and a rebate from the cell phone I bought in December (surprise... money!) into savings and went back to the office.

Did normal office stuff. Got shakey because the guys across the wall were talking about the marriage amendment again... they're really annoyingly extreme about it and have really, um, interesting discussions sometimes. Today's, for example, was about how if we can't discriminate against people for their lifestyle, why discriminate against drunk drivers, serial killers, or child molesters? Because you know they're all the same... one minute I'll be making out with a chick, the next I'll be running people down in the street, no difference.

I wanted to scream. But I didn't. I just left. I spent the entire afternoon in the lab, running tests, because I was seriously about the throw shit at these jerks. Or just yell out, "WE DON'T LET PEOPLE HURT EACH OTHER. WE DO LET PEOPLE BE FREE! WHO'S NEXT ON YOUR 'ICKY' LIST TO THROW IN JAIL, ASSHOLES?!"

But I did none of these things. Instead I worked. Then I went back to the campaign trail, canvassing. It was beautiful outside, and I relished all the flowers and spring things happening. Got home late, again.

Six days left until the election, and then I promise, I am not going to give a shit about politics at all. Ever. This is so not good for me.

If you're ever in an engineering department (as I am, 60 hours a week) and need to judge people quickly, I've decided the best way to do so is with the prefix-factor conversion test. You just look up from your desk and say, "Pico... that's ten to the minus ninth, right?"

It seems to me that of all the dumb little things that are on that first test of our freshman year, those prefixes are the most forgotten, which is why this is fun. We manage to remember our resistor color codes. the obvious formulas like P=VI stick in our heads. But not everything can make it past that first weekend of hard drinking, so scientific prefixes are the first to go since they're in the appendix of every single textbook we own anyway.

So here's what engineers say to the question:

"Shit, I have no clue."
Explination of response: None needed.
Personality: This person is not an engineer. This person is an intruder who should be taken down.
Reason for being an engineer: opens door to future in management or marketing.

"Yeah, ten to the minus ninth sounds right."
Explination of response: Engineers love to act like they know what they're doing all the time. They also avoid taking risks at all cost. So since this is the confident, no-risk way out, it's a sadly typical response.
Personality: Either too stupid to know the difference, too chicken to call you out, or too lazy to think about it. Either way, this is not a good engineer.
Reason for being an engineer: the paycheck.

"I can't be sure, but I can tell you it's in my pocket reference, thirty feet away."
Explination of response: There's a lot we need to know in life, so eventually most of us get over the idea of knowing it all and just learn when to look it up.
Personality: Confident, established engineer with nothing to prove or hide.
Reason for being an engineer: Just kept embracing practicality until they fell into it and got it all over them.

"I can't be sure, but I can tell you it's in my pocket reference ON PAGE 8, thirty feet away."
Explination of response: Not only smart, but has a sense of humor and pride in supplying any knowledge, even if it's not exactly what you're looking for.
Personality: Same as above, confident, established engineer with nothing to prove or hide, but the geek factor in this case is about ten times that of the normal, non-numbered answer.
Reason for being an engineer: Born that way.

"It's on Google."
Explination of response; Same as above except younger and cooler.
Personality: Closet computer nerd who shuns old-fashioned book things in favor of much more expensive methods.
Reason for being an engineer: Wants to take over the world.

"No, pico is ten to the minus 12. Nano is ten to the minus 9."
Explination of response: Paid too much attention in school.
Personality: Might come off as an asshole to some, but we fellow engineers know that they're smart as hell and call it like they see it. Go them.
Reason for being an engineer: It's either this or living under a bridge.

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Alright, so go brush up on your prefixes and look smart :)