I really really needed a "white flowers and MURDER" perfume for work today. The J-Horror BPAL from synecdochic worked wonders today.

I woke up substantially before my alarm, and decided to say fuck it and get out of bed around 8:30 (only a half-hour early). Then I took a leisurely drive to work, chatting with Nora the whole way (well, post-coffee).

My Overlady popped over to see what was the matter, that I was in at the normal beginning of the engineering day. I explained. Her 12:00 was with someone I have dearly missed; I suggested some choice snippets to mention. Basically no sooner did she pop off to her own office than lb and the angry man with all the tattoos showed up. My cube was a distracting cave of wonders, but we went over the sortable chart of grouses (the wiki page with the timeline of the helldesk software, the sortable wikitable with requested improvements, the R&D end-user profile, and the picture of the ruffed grouse) and made a few edits and priority confirmations before marching off to the meeting itself. Beldorion was not in the office today, and Gramp had a conflicting meeting.

The meeting was on the ass-end of campus, in perhaps literally the furthest building from where lb sits: definitely the horizontally furthest, although there is a diagonal building which may have a little greater actual distance. Some people were at no pains to be friendly to engineering-land. We got there a minute after by my watch, while the people already in the room were giving it a few more minutes to see who else would be there and get the webex started.

I was correct in yesterday's assertion that today's meeting was unmissable. I believe I am recalling my manager verbatim when I relate that her instructions to me were: "Give 'em hell."

In the room: the aforementioned incomprehensible twerp, the highly placed dev running the demo, someone sitting quietly and shutting up, Too Much Eyeliner Lady (somewhere highly placed in local ownership of the helldesk software, but a consummate buck-passer), someone from IT, and then the engineering-land contingent. We were, in order: the Desert Islander, very chill; the Angry Tattooed Man, angry; lb, stern; Azz, by turns stern and earnestly, specifically, functionally constructive. Engineering-land contingent got printouts of the wiki page for reference. lb and I took notes (him every now and then on his phone, me with pen and paper).

The engineering contingent post-mortem lasted the twenty minutes back to engineering-land, with further follow-up to follow at some point I am sure.

Lunch was with Purple, and pleasant. He has an ambitious project to spearhead with the knowledge and blessing of his manager.

Wednesday is the day when the cafeteria does their hump day takeout program: place your order before early afternoon, and you too can take home a corporate cafeteria quality meal at takeout prices. It looked decent, so I ordered.

My Overlady came back from her 12:00 with many bits of information. She perched on my couch and shared the intelligence from this meeting. Oh, my.

My computer's been in need of a reboot for a bit, so I was chipping away at getting the things done that I needed to get done before that point. Eventually it hit mid-evening. I pinged Purple and (after flailing at sithjawa a bit) mentioned the concept of dinner, and did he want any. Which he did. We opted for my cube this time. I have a guest couch! He said he'd be over in a bit, and to feel free to start without him (always a dangerous statement from an engineer). I was just separating the plates when he arrived. It's nice to have guests in my cube! I began to tell him some of the highlight from my Overlady's 12:00.

I heard Designer Sparkles coming out of an office. "There's nobody here at this hour!" she said. "No," my Overlady agreed, "except maybe Azure." Designer Sparkles wandered out of the office in search of places more like home. And as my Overlady came around the corner, there I was! With a Purple in my cube.

Then followed a delightful conversation wherein my Overlady shared intelligence from her 12:00 with Purple, we compared some experiences raising hell in school, and all in all a great time was had. My Overlady headed off in search of her own dinner, and we finished ours. Then Purple went back to his desk, and I had the joy of a very crashed computer in need of some Windows updates. My next task: install Notepad++, because I do much better about autosaving in that than in Windows Notepad. (Which I just typed as Nopetad.)

Parking lot conversation was largely fishbrick. Also puddinghandle, toiletjello, blenderpoop, shortsheet, notebolt, and other mostly theoretical forms of mayhem. To be clear: very few of these are actually good ideas to do! Puddinghandle: mix up some very, very chocolatey chocolate pudding. Put a roll of toilet paper on top of someone's car, to catch their attention. Spread the pudding under the door handle. Toiletjello: this is a Shawn stunt. Mix clear gelatin with the boiling water. Pour into the cold water of the toilet bowls at school. (This works best in a cold climate.) Allow enough time to set before the students come in. Shawn was disappointed in the janitors in that they did not think of the hot water (add more hot water, perhaps from the coffee pot, to dissolve the jello safely) and instead removed it by hand. (Purple: "That would be an unforgettable parfait.") Blenderpoop: targeting the Insufferable Smoothie person, either by actually doing it (ideally with multiple DNA sources) or just leaving a note with a crude depiction of a stick figure pooping in their blender. Shortsheet: this is the classic prank. Notebolt: leave a few spare bolts on somebody's desk with a note saying something like "I think you'll need these." The bolts are not actually from anything they own, but they spend some time looking fruitlessly. (Sort of like releasing the five pigs, numbered 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, into a sufficiently large building.)

Beardwatch 2014: still on.

At the end of the day, I still smell faintly of white flowers, although less like murder.

Rev. Not-So-Nice Supervisor blames me for the coffee he had to get last Sunday morning.
He tells it roughly like so:

So there I was getting off the bus and I'm about to cross the street but I see this THING! It's PINK! And it's GLOWING! It's sort of sending up these little sparkles! I look away, I'm imagining things. I look back. Still there. There's this drunk guy lying on the sidewalk. I ask him if he can see it. He's all, 'man, I'm drunk.' And I'm, 'I'm not.' So no way am I crossing the street! It's scary!

So in order to clear his mind of this hallucinatory pink sparkling thing, he hits the Circle K for some coffee, because sometimes when way back in your past you have done some substances, sometimes they come back to visit you again. And the reality that it's just his damn strange co-worker in a pink velvet cloak does nothing to change his mind that the thing is in fact a magic cloak.


Today, Rev. Not-So-Nice Super had, for some obscure reason, organic dog biscuits. And (it seems) he swore up and down in the break room that the first pretty girl he saw after he came out, he'd offer her one to see if she'd eat it.

My opposite was the first one tagged. She tasted it, but figured out something was up. She grumbled at everyone who'd been in the know, wanting know why they hadn't warned her. Obso1337 Super would have, but that he'd been looking the wrong direction when Rev. Not-So-Nice Super handed it to her, and by the time he turned around, it was too late. "What are you eating that for? It's a dog biscuit!" he'd said as she was wiping at her tongue with a paper towel.

Rev. Not-So-Nice Super kept up this thing for most of the second half of the shift. We suggested some deserving targets. He refused to offer one to the One-Man Bald Nudity Crusade, on the very reasonable grounds that the dude would probably rat him out.

The other day he had a pack of shocking gum. He offered some to me. I declined, saying that another supervisor (Shocking Gum Super, in fact) had already given me some. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice ... won't get fooled again.


As an aside, Rev. Not-So-Nice Super's practical jokes and teasing could really easily cross the line from extreme and funny to really extreme and not at all funny, but for the fact that the guy knows when to back off (for the most part). If someone is genuinely getting upset/pissed off/not amused, he backs off and generally doesn't involve them in future pranks. He knows how to take it and how to dish it out, and he does not dish it out to anyone unless they have dished it out to him first. He counts chiming in and agreeing when someone else is serving it up as 'dishing it out' as well. He knows that his idea of funny skirts the wrong side of 'appropriate for work', so if there's any question, he plays it safe.

Intentionally or unintentionally, bullying jokers don't take what their target thinks of it as a message to stop. And they keep on picking on someone. And they use "can't you take a joke?" to pretend that what they're doing is OK.