Cubicle redecoration
Where I work, there's this real stiff Brit... let's call him "Richard". Recently Richard got married to a woman he's been living with for the last 10 years or so. Way to go Richard - your sense of commitment and your impulsiveness has inspired me to get a job and start working for a living. Oh, wait...
Of course, following an incredibly huge and complex wedding, requiring months of excruciating planning, tears and, of course, scads of money, one must go on a large and ridiculous honeymoon. So that's where he's been for the last two weeks.
Now, what's the most appropriate thing you can do for (to) a person after all of this? Well, wrap every single personal belonging and cover the entire cubicle in Chinese newspaper, of course. Why Chinese newspaper? It's colourful, cheap, and completely incomprehensible to Richard, and myself. There are other people out there that can't read it either, but naming them all here would be tedious. So, armed with three rolls of transparent tape, four Chinese newspapers and about 6+ hours of time distributed over two days, I had an odd bit of fun... It remains to be seen if he kills me or not.
Here's How it happened...
Wednesday, November 9th 2005 16:07:11
I see this guy's cube almost every day, but until I embarked on this little adventure I didn't realize that deep down in the core of his soul, Richard is a disgusting pig. This picture just doesn't do the situation justice... use your imagination.
So the process of cleaning began. The piles, mounds, heaps, and forests worth of paper were removed and put, temporarily into recycling bins.
I started with wrapping the binders and his CD's. It wasn't exactly the most exciting thing I've ever seen, but the mental image I had was still working for me. I knew it would be exquisite! Patience grasshopper... the journey has just begun.
I went home at this point. He won't be back till monday so I've still got tons of time, and one doesn't want to burn out... I've already been working for two hours and that makes for an eleven hour day. I'm hungry.
Thursday, November 10th 2005 08:27:33
A new day dawns, and with it brings DISASTER! What started out as a simple prank has turned into a nightmare so horrid that I could actually try to cheer myself up by picturing Rosanne Barr naked. Normally, this sort of image would cause my internal organs to liquify in under 30 seconds. Here, 30 seconds may just give me enough time to save my life...
Remember those temporary recycling boxes I used earlier? Well, it turns out that if you put a lot of paper into a recycling bin, then the cleaning staff just may consider it something to be recycled! At this point all I have are three recycling containers that are really quite empty. Believe me, I looked really thoroughly at them and sure enough, they were empty.
At this point, two things have happened:
- I have started considering new names for myself and my wife as I'm sure we will be starting new lives somewhere deep in the heart of mexico.
- I have crapped in my pants.
My friend, and let's call her "Joanne", quickly asks why all of the blood seems to have completely left my head. I tell her that the blood has been replaced entirely by morbid fear due to the fact that I've just thrown out at least seventeen years of Richard's papers. To the best of my knowledge, Richard has only worked here for five years and change, but you should have seen his desk. There's no way he could have created that much mess in that short amount of time. He obviously brought a good portion of it with him from whatever waste-paper basket he used to work in.
Thursday, November 10th 2005 08:32:19
I have now chosen Juan Miguel Sanchez for myself and Jacqueline Lobos for my wife. I hope she likes it
Thursday, November 10th 2005 08:32:47
At this point, my pants are really starting to give off an offensive odour and my shirt is getting rather damp. So it's off to the facilities group for help. I'm sure they'll love to see me in my current condition and the return of these papers will be assured.
Facilities tells me that the man who is in charge of the cleaning staff is called "Mano" and that she's going to give him a call. Mano will be known as "Khan" from here on out. The woman I talked to in facilities, whom we'll call "Lucy" offered to jump in the dumpster with me. I'm pretty sure that she was offering her help to find the lost papers and that it wasn't one of those, "jump into the coat room" kinda things that can happen in offices from time to time. She's sweet :) I didn't take her up on it because she's new here and I don't think that your first week should be marked by a good hefty swim through the waste of 100 or so programmers and other people that necessarily have to work in software companies. In a couple of weeks I'll try to find another reason why she should throw caution to the wind and dive head first into a big pile of banana peels and coffee grounds.
But let's not get ahead of ourselves here. Currently it still looks like I'm going to be living in a Mexican slum sometime before Monday morning.
Thursday, November 10th 2005 08:46:55
Ok, it's time to go dumpster diving. Surely Khan and his group have taken the recycling material, placed it in clear plastic bags and put it in the recycling dumpster, right? Well, let's see how that's going:
Oh, that's me by the way. Do I look happy? That's not happiness - that's me realizing that, apparently, I wasn't finished when I crapped my pants the first time. I don't remember what I had for dinner last night, but whatever it was, I ate a lot of it.
Thursday, November 10th 2005 08:53:26
Joanne!!! Joanne has decided that, of course, the cleaners didn't recycle the material afterall. They decided that four trees worth of paper must not be recycled. One piece here, a couple of pieces there, sure! But let's not let things get out of hand here... if you start recycling paper in huge gobs then who benefits from that?! The environment? Recycling workers? Pansies.
I'm not feeling to good about the head of the cleaning services at this point.
KHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAAANNNNNNN!!!!!!!!!!!
Thursday, November 10th 2005 08:56:28
But, everything is good again. Fortunately the losers that do the cleaning chose to put the papers in their own double-black-bag and didn't add any other "recycling" material to it. So I'm totally saved. Sorry Juan Miguel Sanchez, but Derek Wyatt is still alive!
And all of the paper is back in the recycling bins where it belongs. Think this is a stupid idea?? You're probably right.
Thursday, November 10th 2005 08:56:28
I created a makeshift pair of pants from half of one of the newspapers. I feel mysterious, like an Asian spy hiding in the dark corners of Africa, fighting the evils of the world through... aw hell... I feel like an idiot wearing newspaper pants.
It's time to go back to work... I mean, there's programs to be written, design docs to be faked and bugs to create!
Thursday, November 10th 2005 16:43:41
Ok! Now we're getting somewhere. That white board wasn't as easy to wrap as you'd think, but at least now I've concealed all of the recycling boxes with some good quality Chinese newsprint. You know what? That's a pretty damned good newspaper... It's colourful, and from what I can gather from the hot Taiwanese model you can see in the upper right hand corner there, it's also a very insightful newspaper. And let's not overlook the obvious... tear-away pants!
Thursday, November 10th 2005 20:07:56
Finished. Well, it was quite a day, but here's what I've ended up with:
Welcome back Richard. I hope you had fun.
Thanks to someone we'll call "Malcolm" for letting me use his camera for this. No thanks to my wife for taking ours with her while she went to visit her friend out of town.
If you make your own tear-away Chinese newspaper pants, please send me a photo.
No pants were actually harmed in the papering of this cubicle.