Azure Jane Lunatic (Azz) 🌺 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
azurelunatic) wrote2014-05-21 03:04 am
azurelunatic) wrote2014-05-21 03:04 am
Desk Wars Episode IV: A New Cube
My bit of the office move happened! I got everything either boxed up or out of my cube by 4pm on Friday, and went down to help out with the rainbow table. Usually I'm able to keep my purse and all securely tucked up in my cube, but this time I brought it with me. Then when everything was done, I went off home and had a weekend. (A weekend with social, even.)
I did wander through the new building on my way out, just to see what they were doing. I saw that they were in the middle of wrangling around the desk surfaces in my destination cube, and it was kind of how I didn't want them. I decided I could live with it at least for a bit, and if I had a problem, I could ask for a switch sometime when they were a bit less busy with massive cross-campus moves.
I got in on Monday to find a thank-you note on my desk from the movers, and about a third of the candy gone. :D
There's been a lot of unpacking, and I've been shuffling things around to get them just right. One of the things I asked for in the move was to face more towards the door of the cube rather than towards the back, to see how I like it and so that there's less of a building entrance at my back.
So far the new area has been less vocally loud, and more door-loud. The unlocking sound clacks pretty substantially in the space. I imagine that there will be more buzz and chatter once more teammates arrive.
Meanwhile, the upstairs across the way has been enough of a ghost town to disturb the remaining uncle-manager over there. I looked up from my monitors to see him hanging over my wall. "Everything is all wrong! You need to fix it!"
"Everything" was the echoing emptiness of the old building, plus how my new cube was in the same general position as my old one, but arranged differently inside, so I was sitting facing another way. This disoriented him.
Someone who I didn't recognize came past, greeted me, and observed: "They moved you down to the first floor!" Then he realized something else. "And in another building!" Observant co-worker is observant.
The Stage Manager wandered past, declared, "Hey! Azure's here! Awesome!" Then he spotted my candy dish. "...That's terrible!" He took his customary serving of chocolate and wandered off.
The day was less composed of unpacking than I thought it would be, as there were things which came up. There were interns. The mentors showed the interns the candy dish, as is usual. The interns learned that no, that rack of bottles is not wine, it is coffee syrups.
One of the first boxes that I packed contained the box with the little toy catapult. I'd just received it when news came that we'd be moving, so I stuffed it into a moving box directly and never got it out in the old cube. So I set it up overlooking the candy dish. I waited for a quiet moment and tested it. The little foam ball flew gratifyingly far.
The other uncle-manager had set up camp in one of the unoccupied cubes nearby. He stopped by and wanted to know about the catapult. "How well does it throw candy?"
I hadn't tested it with candy. The instructions say that you're only supposed to use the included foam balls.
"And I suppose that you never speed in your car?"
Actually, I try not to do that particularly much either.
"You should try one of the little ones." He fished out a Jolly Rancher and fitted it across the basket.
It flew pretty well, only a few feet short of the foam ball, but then it didn't roll, either.
Later, the Stage Manager came and tried launching a blow-pop. That didn't fly very well. Quite literally -- it didn't even make it a foot. We were all disappointed, and I was a little relieved.
I mentioned the catapult-related goings-on to my Overlady, who thought that we had had the catapult discussion already. We hadn't! We had had the discussion where I'm not allowed to use siege engines against Facebook, and the discussion where we're not going to have projectile toys at the conference, but not the projectile toys in my cube discussion. Heh, heh, heh.
R has /joined the #cupcake crew, delightfully. When I expressed my delight at not being the only ladyfolks in #cupcake (it had been a while since the founding, and I was the only ladyfolk left standing in there), Purple and I had a vaguely awkward conversation (despite him having been fully on board with bringing R in, and perhaps the one who'd suggested it). The underlying concern was that maybe I might want to bring more of my ladyfriends in, and ladyfolks statistically speaking are less likely to be deeply in geek culture. And the deep geek culture is one of the things which is special and delightful about #cupcake. I gave him the Look and said something approximating "uh dude HAVE YOU MET ANY OF MY FRIENDS." That settled that discussion. And by role and background, I actually probably have the least technical chops of the entire channel. Everyone else -- R included -- is an engineer. My least technical friend at work is the leader of the QUILTBAG club, a fellow administrative assistant, to whom I had to explain the concept of "open source".
A quick digression: the concept of "open source" does not inherently mean that you can't make money by selling the software (though some open source licenses are down on that). It's not the same as nonprofit. Open source means that the source code is out there and anyone who wants to can use it to do stuff. And since it's out there like that, it's sort of like selling soup when you're giving away the cookbook for free. Anyone could snag a copy of the cookbook and make their own soup, and some people are of the opinion that only a fool would publish their recipes. But there's something to be said for having a trained professional who already has the industrial kitchen making the soup for you.
My fellow administrative assistant, who is immensely competent at mind-numbingly detailed office administration? He is a dude. He is also possibly my least technical workfriend. It is really hard to come by non-technical people in such a highly technical office, at least in the R&D divisions. I don't tend to venture out of R&D except as it overlaps with the QUILTBAG group. And even so, there are still a lot of dudes.
Apparently someone I know must have walked by the table or something, because they pinged me later and mentioned that they'd had no idea that I wasn't straight until they saw me waving the rainbow umbrella. They weren't straight either. It's sometimes really hard to connect in a large tech company.
I mentioned the fact of this conversation (stripped of possibly identifying details) to Purple later (who had been sideswiped into another conversation all the while the table was up and only showed after all the fun got packed up) and (yet again) he said something that made me realize how very much the internet has been an education in all sorts of the dynamics in being in society and not straight. He wondered whether there was a step between being Out!!! and being Closeted. And that of course made me think of You're Always Coming Out, which I didn't have on hand to link to him at the time, but I may toss him that link later. Meanwhile, of course, since I'm me, I made a crack about walk-in closets.
Orginalizationally, the team I consider "mine" is all under my grandmanager. But the larger organizational structure does exist, and my great-great grandmanager wants to know and love us all. Or so said the department picnic invitation.
The initial invitation went out a while ago. It hit while I was busy with something else, so I didn't examine it too closely.
The reschedule came around today. Reader, I have a few recommendations for a good and accessible calendar invitation to an offsite event.
1) Include the full address, not just the name of the venue.
2) Include the address in text.
3) That means not a picture of the text, but the actual text.
4) Not a picture of the link, the actual link.
5) Not a picture of the directions, the actual directions.
6) Oh, for fuck's sake, do you expect an R&D organization to open a PowerPoint attachment?
7) Oh, you don't? That's why you included the screenshots of the PowerPoint attachment, embedded in the follow-up email?
8) ... and the directions, in the PowerPoint attachment, are still a screenshot?
9) And your response to the "hey, is there a text version of this" is one sentence worth of "no"?
Perhaps you can understand why the email I sent to my manager, following this, started with "This isn't the hill I want to die on..." (not a paraphrase) and got increasingly emphatic from there.
Having written a passive-aggressive pro-tip to both #a11y and the A-Team in not!Facebook, I (finally) looked up the sender of the offending message in the company directory, and realized much to my chagrin that she was a) not a titular administrative or executive assistant as I had assumed, b) was in fact a much more intimidating job title, and c) was someone whose face I was on good terms with even though I could never place her name. Woops. (#cupcake counseled me that I should not feel bad, because, seriously, a POWERPOINT ATTACHMENT AND NO PERTINENT INFO IN THE TEXT?? I keep forgetting that Mr. Zune is a second cousin under the current org chart, and thus he was subjected to the same invite.) [Language note: I find that 'inVITE' is the verb, and 'INvite' is the noun.]
Nevertheless, I decided that I should resolve this personally, and resorted to chocolate-based diplomacy. (Purple: Dude! Too soon! My cousin died from a chocolate grenade! Azz: Mmm, chocolate pomegranate!) I dropped by her cube.
We had a great chat about the move, the new location, the benefits of the new location compared to the old, various hangups and hitches and delays, and how if there were people whose new seats had been vacated ahead of the new delayed timeline for the move, to send her that information and maybe she could get them jammed into the last 25-30 spots in the next move. I promised to survey the area and send her the list.
The discussion about the invitation did not go too horribly. She promised to send a follow-up with the textual version later. (And did.)
I toured the area with my clipboard, a map, and a set of highlighters. (Hilariously, one of the people whose destination was free was in fact the manager who had bewailed his lot in the ghost town of our old building. So in fact, quite unexpectedly, I am doing something which may result in his moving sooner rather than later.) It seems to be a theme for the Lunatic family that people think we're up to stuff when we're going about our business. Something about us looking intent on something often being a sign that bystanders should duck and cover. The Stage Manager and one of the other teammates remarked.
"You look like you're up to something. Should I be worried?" the Corgisitting Teammate asked, looking up from her conversation with the corgi's owner.
"Someone should always be worried," I said, "but this time it isn't you."
On that reassuring note, the day was mostly over but for further unboxing. I've started to make notes on the labels of the boxes which are stuff destined for the team cabinets, versus the boxes which are there because I haven't yet made the permanent home for them. There's a lot of weird stuff.
Purple is out of the office for the better part of this week, on account of construction in and around his place. He hasn't seen my new cube yet. It's gone from bare and stacked with boxes to quite homey. The coffee syrups are racked. The box of rainbow nerds and the Caution: Bees sign are hung. The rubber chicken is dangling. The calendar has started to appear. The office status chart is visible, if not in its final form (as the outer metal rail isn't there as the cube configuration is slightly different). The doorbell has been installed. My monitors have been adjusted, the extra keyboard has finally been ditched, and I've swapped out the PS/2 mouse for something a little more this century. The candy dish stands proudly by the door, and the catapult stands above it. And the large metal rooster watches over it all.
I did wander through the new building on my way out, just to see what they were doing. I saw that they were in the middle of wrangling around the desk surfaces in my destination cube, and it was kind of how I didn't want them. I decided I could live with it at least for a bit, and if I had a problem, I could ask for a switch sometime when they were a bit less busy with massive cross-campus moves.
I got in on Monday to find a thank-you note on my desk from the movers, and about a third of the candy gone. :D
There's been a lot of unpacking, and I've been shuffling things around to get them just right. One of the things I asked for in the move was to face more towards the door of the cube rather than towards the back, to see how I like it and so that there's less of a building entrance at my back.
So far the new area has been less vocally loud, and more door-loud. The unlocking sound clacks pretty substantially in the space. I imagine that there will be more buzz and chatter once more teammates arrive.
Meanwhile, the upstairs across the way has been enough of a ghost town to disturb the remaining uncle-manager over there. I looked up from my monitors to see him hanging over my wall. "Everything is all wrong! You need to fix it!"
"Everything" was the echoing emptiness of the old building, plus how my new cube was in the same general position as my old one, but arranged differently inside, so I was sitting facing another way. This disoriented him.
Someone who I didn't recognize came past, greeted me, and observed: "They moved you down to the first floor!" Then he realized something else. "And in another building!" Observant co-worker is observant.
The Stage Manager wandered past, declared, "Hey! Azure's here! Awesome!" Then he spotted my candy dish. "...That's terrible!" He took his customary serving of chocolate and wandered off.
The day was less composed of unpacking than I thought it would be, as there were things which came up. There were interns. The mentors showed the interns the candy dish, as is usual. The interns learned that no, that rack of bottles is not wine, it is coffee syrups.
One of the first boxes that I packed contained the box with the little toy catapult. I'd just received it when news came that we'd be moving, so I stuffed it into a moving box directly and never got it out in the old cube. So I set it up overlooking the candy dish. I waited for a quiet moment and tested it. The little foam ball flew gratifyingly far.
The other uncle-manager had set up camp in one of the unoccupied cubes nearby. He stopped by and wanted to know about the catapult. "How well does it throw candy?"
I hadn't tested it with candy. The instructions say that you're only supposed to use the included foam balls.
"And I suppose that you never speed in your car?"
Actually, I try not to do that particularly much either.
"You should try one of the little ones." He fished out a Jolly Rancher and fitted it across the basket.
It flew pretty well, only a few feet short of the foam ball, but then it didn't roll, either.
Later, the Stage Manager came and tried launching a blow-pop. That didn't fly very well. Quite literally -- it didn't even make it a foot. We were all disappointed, and I was a little relieved.
I mentioned the catapult-related goings-on to my Overlady, who thought that we had had the catapult discussion already. We hadn't! We had had the discussion where I'm not allowed to use siege engines against Facebook, and the discussion where we're not going to have projectile toys at the conference, but not the projectile toys in my cube discussion. Heh, heh, heh.
R has /joined the #cupcake crew, delightfully. When I expressed my delight at not being the only ladyfolks in #cupcake (it had been a while since the founding, and I was the only ladyfolk left standing in there), Purple and I had a vaguely awkward conversation (despite him having been fully on board with bringing R in, and perhaps the one who'd suggested it). The underlying concern was that maybe I might want to bring more of my ladyfriends in, and ladyfolks statistically speaking are less likely to be deeply in geek culture. And the deep geek culture is one of the things which is special and delightful about #cupcake. I gave him the Look and said something approximating "uh dude HAVE YOU MET ANY OF MY FRIENDS." That settled that discussion. And by role and background, I actually probably have the least technical chops of the entire channel. Everyone else -- R included -- is an engineer. My least technical friend at work is the leader of the QUILTBAG club, a fellow administrative assistant, to whom I had to explain the concept of "open source".
A quick digression: the concept of "open source" does not inherently mean that you can't make money by selling the software (though some open source licenses are down on that). It's not the same as nonprofit. Open source means that the source code is out there and anyone who wants to can use it to do stuff. And since it's out there like that, it's sort of like selling soup when you're giving away the cookbook for free. Anyone could snag a copy of the cookbook and make their own soup, and some people are of the opinion that only a fool would publish their recipes. But there's something to be said for having a trained professional who already has the industrial kitchen making the soup for you.
My fellow administrative assistant, who is immensely competent at mind-numbingly detailed office administration? He is a dude. He is also possibly my least technical workfriend. It is really hard to come by non-technical people in such a highly technical office, at least in the R&D divisions. I don't tend to venture out of R&D except as it overlaps with the QUILTBAG group. And even so, there are still a lot of dudes.
Apparently someone I know must have walked by the table or something, because they pinged me later and mentioned that they'd had no idea that I wasn't straight until they saw me waving the rainbow umbrella. They weren't straight either. It's sometimes really hard to connect in a large tech company.
I mentioned the fact of this conversation (stripped of possibly identifying details) to Purple later (who had been sideswiped into another conversation all the while the table was up and only showed after all the fun got packed up) and (yet again) he said something that made me realize how very much the internet has been an education in all sorts of the dynamics in being in society and not straight. He wondered whether there was a step between being Out!!! and being Closeted. And that of course made me think of You're Always Coming Out, which I didn't have on hand to link to him at the time, but I may toss him that link later. Meanwhile, of course, since I'm me, I made a crack about walk-in closets.
Orginalizationally, the team I consider "mine" is all under my grandmanager. But the larger organizational structure does exist, and my great-great grandmanager wants to know and love us all. Or so said the department picnic invitation.
The initial invitation went out a while ago. It hit while I was busy with something else, so I didn't examine it too closely.
The reschedule came around today. Reader, I have a few recommendations for a good and accessible calendar invitation to an offsite event.
1) Include the full address, not just the name of the venue.
2) Include the address in text.
3) That means not a picture of the text, but the actual text.
4) Not a picture of the link, the actual link.
5) Not a picture of the directions, the actual directions.
6) Oh, for fuck's sake, do you expect an R&D organization to open a PowerPoint attachment?
7) Oh, you don't? That's why you included the screenshots of the PowerPoint attachment, embedded in the follow-up email?
8) ... and the directions, in the PowerPoint attachment, are still a screenshot?
9) And your response to the "hey, is there a text version of this" is one sentence worth of "no"?
Perhaps you can understand why the email I sent to my manager, following this, started with "This isn't the hill I want to die on..." (not a paraphrase) and got increasingly emphatic from there.
Having written a passive-aggressive pro-tip to both #a11y and the A-Team in not!Facebook, I (finally) looked up the sender of the offending message in the company directory, and realized much to my chagrin that she was a) not a titular administrative or executive assistant as I had assumed, b) was in fact a much more intimidating job title, and c) was someone whose face I was on good terms with even though I could never place her name. Woops. (#cupcake counseled me that I should not feel bad, because, seriously, a POWERPOINT ATTACHMENT AND NO PERTINENT INFO IN THE TEXT?? I keep forgetting that Mr. Zune is a second cousin under the current org chart, and thus he was subjected to the same invite.) [Language note: I find that 'inVITE' is the verb, and 'INvite' is the noun.]
Nevertheless, I decided that I should resolve this personally, and resorted to chocolate-based diplomacy. (Purple: Dude! Too soon! My cousin died from a chocolate grenade! Azz: Mmm, chocolate pomegranate!) I dropped by her cube.
We had a great chat about the move, the new location, the benefits of the new location compared to the old, various hangups and hitches and delays, and how if there were people whose new seats had been vacated ahead of the new delayed timeline for the move, to send her that information and maybe she could get them jammed into the last 25-30 spots in the next move. I promised to survey the area and send her the list.
The discussion about the invitation did not go too horribly. She promised to send a follow-up with the textual version later. (And did.)
I toured the area with my clipboard, a map, and a set of highlighters. (Hilariously, one of the people whose destination was free was in fact the manager who had bewailed his lot in the ghost town of our old building. So in fact, quite unexpectedly, I am doing something which may result in his moving sooner rather than later.) It seems to be a theme for the Lunatic family that people think we're up to stuff when we're going about our business. Something about us looking intent on something often being a sign that bystanders should duck and cover. The Stage Manager and one of the other teammates remarked.
"You look like you're up to something. Should I be worried?" the Corgisitting Teammate asked, looking up from her conversation with the corgi's owner.
"Someone should always be worried," I said, "but this time it isn't you."
On that reassuring note, the day was mostly over but for further unboxing. I've started to make notes on the labels of the boxes which are stuff destined for the team cabinets, versus the boxes which are there because I haven't yet made the permanent home for them. There's a lot of weird stuff.
Purple is out of the office for the better part of this week, on account of construction in and around his place. He hasn't seen my new cube yet. It's gone from bare and stacked with boxes to quite homey. The coffee syrups are racked. The box of rainbow nerds and the Caution: Bees sign are hung. The rubber chicken is dangling. The calendar has started to appear. The office status chart is visible, if not in its final form (as the outer metal rail isn't there as the cube configuration is slightly different). The doorbell has been installed. My monitors have been adjusted, the extra keyboard has finally been ditched, and I've swapped out the PS/2 mouse for something a little more this century. The candy dish stands proudly by the door, and the catapult stands above it. And the large metal rooster watches over it all.
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Thanks! I really like it here, and I usually don't want to strangle my co-workers.
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Corned beef. ;)