I Hope It's Not Contagious
Just how much air could possibly fit inside Airy Fairy's head? Ponder this...
I had a really tough time deciding how to decorate my cube when I first got assigned one after months of sitting with UI Dev Lead and one other developer in a bullpen. Left to my own devices, I'd rather not fill my workspace with useless kitsch proclaiming how much better my personal life is than other people's personal lives. Proclamations, I feel, are best left to the insecure.
But nothing could take away the fact that part of the cube wall was glass, and when Clueless Himbo Backstabber came to visit my neighbor, I didn't care for the idea of him seeing code on my screen and making up stories about how I was trying to hack into the corporate systems.*
I found an old relic from my first days at university which fits the bill, dimensionally. It is a map of my university town, labeled at the top very clearly:
Actually, the latter line is much bigger - about 125 point. Even bats could tell what it says. If they could read.
So AF, our native 55 year old Lolita, drops by to chat with my neighbor. She mock-casually peeks over my way, and asks:
"Oh! Is that London?"
Uhhhh. I really didn't know what to say, except, "No.... It's Oxford..." I point to the big bat letters in an effort to help her understand.
"Oh, OK! It's just, it looked like London, with those streets!" She vaguely motions at the High Street and Queen Street.
It should look like Oxford, with that lettering, I desperately think to myself, in an attempt to understand what possible logic exists in this utterly soul-killing small talk. And every city has streets.
"Um," I just about manage to spit out.
"It looks like a very small place!" She breezily proclaims.
If you thought it was London 5 seconds ago, how in holy criminy can you now suggest that it's small? I will my phone to ring. Ring, dammit. Even a telemarketer would do.
"Er, Oxford's actually quite a big city," I stammer. Usually I'm halfway decent at playing to people's conversational gambits; Airy's given me what Americans would call "bupkus".
Eventually, bored of mingling with peons who don't compliment her brassy hair enough, she wanders off. I quickly scribble on my Potential Entrepreneurial Ideas List: "Sell AF's head to bouncy castle vendors."
*Stuff like this actually happens to me. Don't bother asking me about the time a deeply ignorant man who claimed to know enough technology to be a development team manager shopped me to corporate security because he thought it was suspicious that a business analyst was in the command line environment typing something that looked indented, like code. If he'd bothered to ask me or my manager, either of us would have explained that it was Perl, which I was using to write a small utility script for a user. But he thought I was just reading about gemstones I might find when I programmatically cracked the safe at the glowing core of the building. Yeah, after I regexed everyone to death.
I had a really tough time deciding how to decorate my cube when I first got assigned one after months of sitting with UI Dev Lead and one other developer in a bullpen. Left to my own devices, I'd rather not fill my workspace with useless kitsch proclaiming how much better my personal life is than other people's personal lives. Proclamations, I feel, are best left to the insecure.
But nothing could take away the fact that part of the cube wall was glass, and when Clueless Himbo Backstabber came to visit my neighbor, I didn't care for the idea of him seeing code on my screen and making up stories about how I was trying to hack into the corporate systems.*
I found an old relic from my first days at university which fits the bill, dimensionally. It is a map of my university town, labeled at the top very clearly:
Blackwell's
OXFORD
OXFORD
Actually, the latter line is much bigger - about 125 point. Even bats could tell what it says. If they could read.
So AF, our native 55 year old Lolita, drops by to chat with my neighbor. She mock-casually peeks over my way, and asks:
"Oh! Is that London?"
Uhhhh. I really didn't know what to say, except, "No.... It's Oxford..." I point to the big bat letters in an effort to help her understand.
"Oh, OK! It's just, it looked like London, with those streets!" She vaguely motions at the High Street and Queen Street.
It should look like Oxford, with that lettering, I desperately think to myself, in an attempt to understand what possible logic exists in this utterly soul-killing small talk. And every city has streets.
"Um," I just about manage to spit out.
"It looks like a very small place!" She breezily proclaims.
If you thought it was London 5 seconds ago, how in holy criminy can you now suggest that it's small? I will my phone to ring. Ring, dammit. Even a telemarketer would do.
"Er, Oxford's actually quite a big city," I stammer. Usually I'm halfway decent at playing to people's conversational gambits; Airy's given me what Americans would call "bupkus".
Eventually, bored of mingling with peons who don't compliment her brassy hair enough, she wanders off. I quickly scribble on my Potential Entrepreneurial Ideas List: "Sell AF's head to bouncy castle vendors."
*Stuff like this actually happens to me. Don't bother asking me about the time a deeply ignorant man who claimed to know enough technology to be a development team manager shopped me to corporate security because he thought it was suspicious that a business analyst was in the command line environment typing something that looked indented, like code. If he'd bothered to ask me or my manager, either of us would have explained that it was Perl, which I was using to write a small utility script for a user. But he thought I was just reading about gemstones I might find when I programmatically cracked the safe at the glowing core of the building. Yeah, after I regexed everyone to death.
posted by Little Green Potato at 5:30 PM
3 Comments:
I love it! You've brightened up my day, after I discovered that I have to fill out a tax return (I thought only Americans had to do such things!)
Anyway, doesn't the fair Kingdom of Britain exist in the average US mind as a thin strip of land that runs from London, through Oxford (pronounced Oxford) to Edinburgh? All the interesting places, to be fair...
I thought Edinburgh (e-dinn-BURG) was in Scotland, not in the Euuuwww-Kayyy?
UK: United Kingdom! In name, anyway. Now the Scots have their own parliament all hell has broken loose, while the noble principality of Wales still strives for independence from the English oppression.
We're just repeating all the mistakes we made with that colony across the Atlantic.
Post a Comment
<< Home