Stinkoman!

How I love to waste time at www.homestarrunner.com! This week's episode of Strongbad Emails has an easter egg that lets you create your own Stinkoman comics. (http://www.homestarrunner.com/stinko_comic.html) Check mine out below.

"Dude", a Badge of Love

So this morning my daughter came up to me with a sticker that says "DUDE" and said, "Here, daddy, this is for you." She then pressed it to the front of my dress shirt with a look of satisfaction on her face.

When I got to the train station to get on the MARC, I considered removing it, but then I remembered how happy she looked putting it on my shirt and decided I could wear it for just a little longer.

By the time I got to work, I'd forgotten that I still had it on. My supervisor looked at me quizzically and asked, "Why do you have the word 'DUDE' on your shirt?" I looked down, remembered my daughter's smiling face, and said, "Because my daughter wanted to give me a sticker this morning."

The world may see "DUDE", an oddly incongruous sticker, but I see a badge of love.

Women's Lotions

Has anyone else noticed that women's lotions and shampoos have more to do with food than they do with skin care or cleanliness? The other day I came home and my wife was slathering her hands with something called "Watermelon Essence & Mint Jelly"; earlier that morning she'd washed her hair with "Extract of Apple & Lime" -- When I walked through the door, I thought we were having fruit salad for dinner.

Seriously, though, I figure it's either got to be that women have taken this whole "The way to a man's heart is through his stomach" thing waaay too far or they're just really hungry. I mean, why else would you cover yourself in food? Mmmm, Janice have you tried the "Essence of Caramel with Chocolate Extract"? It's divine -- Don't eat it, though! There's just something wrong with that.

Speaking of which, I tried drinking some of the stuff the other day -- WHOO-WEE! It DOES NOT taste as good as it smells!

I've decided that they can't be doing it for us men, though. If they were, they would NOT be using extracts of fruits and vegetables. Mmmm, honey, do I smell barbeque sauce and ribs? Now THAT would be something a man could appreciate. A beautiful woman and a grill, that's pretty much a man's paradise.

I guess I should be grateful that they're not doing it for us, though. The problem is, when I smell barbeque, I want to eat barbeque. Too much of that might turn into a beautiful woman ON a grill. I don't know, officer, she was slathered in barbeque sauce -- things just got out of hand. The sad thing is, he'd probably understand. That's alright, I've done it once or twice myself. Mind if I try a rib?

Yeah, it's got to be something to do with how diet-conscious women are. If I can't eat it, at least I can wear it.

Love is a Stranger (a work in progress)

Here is a short story I started working on several months ago.

"Love is a Stranger"

Mrs. William Schaeffer was in the garden weeding when the man approached from the field. The day was hot and the whistle of the noon train still echoed in her mind's ear. The man came from the direction of the depot. As he drew nearer, she stood and wiped the grimy sweat from her brow.

The man walked as though he carried a great weight, but he carried nothing. Seeing Mrs. Schaeffer, he bent his the trajectory of his walk toward her like a stone falling back to earth, his face hungry, like a child's face when it sees its mother. His clothing bore the dust of many roads.

Seeing him, Mrs. Schaeffer thought that he looked a sad figure. He seemed smaller than he was, as though the weight of life on the road had shrunk him into something smaller than he was meant to be. Thinking of life on the road, she remembered her husband and felt her heart stiffen. The man was a bum. There was no point in romanticizing him out of proportion. She bent back to her work.

A few minutes later, the man was at the fence. He drew his worn hat from his head and coughed to get her attention. Mrs. Schaeffer lingered a moment longer at her work, then stood and said, with steel in her voice, "What?" Her eyes met his and she saw that they were clear, but tired. So he was human, she thought to herself, and not just another dog from the road.

"Excuse me, ma'am, I'm looking for work. If you have something for me to do, I'd be much obliged." He spoke softly, but it was clear that his voice had once been strong. She looked at him a moment longer, then looked away. She wondered if her William wasn't somewhere, hat in hand.

"Well, there is the garden to be weeded. If you'll do that, I'll make you lunch; I'm a widow, though, so I can't pay more than that." She looked at him again, the steel back in her heart.

"That suits me fine." The man said, and he took off his coat and came through the gate.

After he'd gotten started, Mrs. Schaeffer gathered some of the riper vegetables and went into the house. The kitchen had a big picture window that looked out over the garden. She washed the vegetables in a basin and watched the man working. He made steady progress. After a time, he paused, removed his hat, and wiped the sweat from his brow with the sleeve of his shirt. He stood for a moment, then stretched his back, and bent back down to his weeding.

Mrs. Schaeffer thought of her father. How he had loved to farm! She remembered him tall and strong, glistening with sweat and coated with a fine covering of soil, smiling as he raised the glass of cold water she'd brought him from the house. Men these days were weak, dry as tumbleweeds. They rolled where the wind took them and didn't know what it meant to have roots.

And that is as far as I've gotten.

The general gist of the story is that the main character, Mrs. Schaeffer, meets a stanger, a drifter who reminds her of her husband, a man who has also turned to the road and who she resents. At the same time, the drifter reminds her of her father, the first man she loved and admired. The drifter stays on to help her out and eventually she comes to love him. After he moves on, her husband returns and, thanks to the thawing in her heart brought on by her experience with the drifter, she is able to see him in a new light and love and accept him again.

Now, if I can just find some free time, maybe I will finish it.

Bad Jokes

SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING: Reading this post may lower your opinion of me.

If you know me, but don't know that I have a juvenile sense of humor, well, then you probably don't know me all that well. My wife likes to say that when it comes to humor, I'm a 12-year old trapped in a man's body.

So, with that to recommend me, here are a few jokes I've made up recently.

1. Here's one you'll never find in Reader's Digest's "Life in These United States":

I knew things were going to be a little crazy when the new test lead stated that he couldn't bring both his testes to the meeting.

"Testes?" I asked with some hesitation.

"Yeah, testes -- you know, the guys who test stuff." He said.

Riiight, those testes. At least now I knew he had two.

2. And now one that you might:

Recently I was out walking my pet weasel, as I do every night. We'd just stopped by our favorite mulberry bush when my neighbor's pet monkey burst through the window. "All around the mulberry bush ..."

3. Now for some vocabulary:

dotcommunist: (noun) A true believer in technology as the solution to every problem.
Sample sentence: "I tried to convince my boss that the problem was with our policies and procedures, but he's a hard-line dotcommunist; now we've got PeopleSoft."

mommunist: (noun) Children who prefer their mother to all other adults including their father.
Sample sentence: "When I walked into the kitchen, the mommunists were clinging to my wife's legs like marxists to a defunct ideology."

It's true -- I think communists are funny. Those wacky Reds! They actually think everyone should just want to share stuff without getting anything for it -- Wait, I think those are parents; communists just want everyone to share the means of production. Oh, well. Whatever. They're both crazy ideas that don't work.

Ba-dump-bump! I'll be here all night.

Dan, I hardly knew ye

I've copied below the body of an email exchange I had recently with one of the guys where I work.

All,

After close to 6 years at Vecna I have decided to move on. It has been a great time, and I feel privileged to have been able to get to know and work with many wonderful people. During this time Vecna has experienced great growth and success, and I am sure will see that success continue in the future.

My last day will be Thursday, Sep 6.

I will remain in the DC area and so hope to see many of you around, and wish everyone the best.

- Dan

Dan,

Man, it's hard to believe you are leaving! You're one of the last of the elder statesmen of Vecna engineering. Well, I can't claim that we were close, but I have appreciated the technical expertise and experience you've shared and the guidance you've given to the projects I've managed. Thanks.

Good luck in your new endeavors.

Mike


Mike,

Thanks! i think that's the first time i have been called an "elder statesman". kind of frightening - but i'll take it as a good thing :-) . it was a pleasure working with you also on the few occasions we did, and good luck in the future.

-dan

So why does this exchange mean anything to me? At first brush, it's just a pleasantly mundane email exchange between two coworkers, one who's staying and one who's moving on.

Now for some back story.

When I first met Dan, I didn't really know what to make of him. I was just another new guy while he was clearly part of the engineering "in" crowd. I got the impression that he had important things to do and didn't really have the time to talk to someone new and relatively green like myself. As time went on, I never really made any inroads into the engineering "in" crowd, but luckily for me, I had other friends in the company that I knew prior to joining the company, so I managed to get along in spite of that handicap.

The thing is, in the early days when I joined Vecna, it wasn't the kind of place where a loner or introvert was likely to succeed. Getting into the "in" crowd wasn't just something to make the work day brighter, it was necessary to keep your job. Your daily work life was ruled by three big realities:

1. The "Free Market System" (FMS),
2. Your "Minimum Billable Requirement" (MBR), and
   
3. The fact that Engineering was king.

Now, in a lot of startup IT companies, the third reality is well-understood and is just taken as a given; however, the first two realities were both new to me. Having never been a lawyer or a consultant, I'd never experienced first hand the joy of trying to track every minute to one client or another in order to meet an imposed minimum number of billable hours to be generated each week. Furthermore, in spite of my general familiarity with and support for free markets and capitalist economics, I'd never lived with them as a daily reality.

But that changed when I joined Vecna.

You see, at Vecna, at the time that I joined the company, everyone had to shoulder the responsibility of ensuring Vecna's continued profitability by making their MBR every week. If you missed your MBR too many weeks in a row, you could expect to have an uncomfortable talk with the company president.

And how were you to meet your MBR?

Well, at the time I joined the company, you did it by participating actively in Vecna's FMS. You see, in the FMS, all employees are peers and free agents who make contracts with each other for work that they need completed. So how do you get work (so that you'll have some that needs to be completed)? You market your skills and experience to someone who has work that needs to be done. Assuming that they accept your offer, you've got work, and, if they don't, well, every hour that you spend hunting for work is non-billable and counts against you meeting your MBR. Oh, yeah, and the FMS -- it's completely unregulated, pure laissez faire economics.

So I think you get the picture:

• If you don't meet your MBR, you're out of a job.
• To meet your MBR, you've got be hustling every day in the FMS, competing against people who have already established their presence in the market place and can leverage their personal relationships.
• The engineering "in" crowd rules the FMS.

Now, imagine having that reality dawn upon you at about the same time that you realize that you are never going to be a part of the engineering "in" crowd. That was me about three or four weeks into the job.

So why am I telling you all of this when this post is supposed to be about me and Dan, a coworker who's now leaving the company and with whom I was never really all that close?

Here's why:

About that time (three or four weeks into the job), something happened that ensured I would never be all that close with Dan.

During my first job, my brother, who is just a year younger than I am and who matters a great deal to me, gave me a toy monkey. Nothing big, just a monkey with a banana on a string attached to the monkey's belly. It's made of plastic and is about two inches tall and an inch in diameter, and if you hang its banana over the edge of the desk, it will walk to the edge off the desk and fall off. Not all that valuable. Except to me.

Every job I've gone to since, I've taken that monkey with me. I've even given him a name - Mao. For a while, a coworker and I in my first job had a running joke about Mao. "Bow to the Moa!" We'd say to each other whenever anyone would call us for help and then we'd chuckle. We even took pictures of Moa, blew them up, and made a poster.

So you see, Mao was a big deal to me.

When I joined Vecna, they'd just recently moved to a new building and set up a cube farm on the second floor. Dan and I were assigned cubes in the same aisle directly across from each other, an arrangement that would seem insignificant, except for this fact: his desk was the closest desk to my own that wasn't blocked by a partition.

Why does that matter?

One morning, I came into work to find Mao broken in pieces on Dan's desk.

Well, you can imagine for yourself how I felt about that. Here he was, an accepted, even venerated, member of the "in" crowd who couldn't even be bothered to talk to me on most days, who had just assumed he could play with my monkey and now it was broken. AND HE HADN'T EVEN BOTHERED TO HIDE THE EVIDENCE!

I was fuming. All morning long, I thought about it. At this point, I was very familiar with my precarious position in the organization. But I couldn't let it go. HE HAD BROKEN MOA! Finally I dashed off an email telling him to leave the things on my desk alone and sent it before I could talk myself out of it.

Then I never heard a thing from him about it.

Now here's the trick of it all: One morning, a few months after I'd finally gotten established, I was watching the President's children playing in the office. It wasn't uncommon for them to be there because he is the President and his wife is the CEO, so the company and its offices are just an extension of their family home (something that was literally true when the company was first founded). Anyhow, as I watched one of them grab something from someone's desk, I suddenly realized I'd been totally wrong about Dan. He hadn't touched my monkey at all. I felt a great sense of foolishness mixed with shame.

But there was nothing I could do about it.

He had never called me on my accusations and he still hardly spoke to me, except when absolutely necessary. Suddenly, I could understand why. No doubt, I'd come across like some kind of paranoid lunatic, someone best to be avoided as much as possible.

And so much time had passed. I didn't really know how to broach the subject, and, besides, maybe he'd already forgotten the whole incident. I didn't really know. In any case, it seemed best just to let it be water under the bridge.

Except, of course, that you can't actually do that.

Every interaction that I had with him from that time forward was always colored by the fact that I'd once accused him of something he hadn't done and had never apologized for it. Eventually, as you can tell from the email exchange, we came to have a functional working relationship, but we never became friends or even just friendly coworkers.

So, you see, in a way, my email to him is an attempt to say "I'm sorry" and to acknowledge that I know he is a better person than the kind of person I accused him of being. I hope he saw it in there somewhere, hiding inside the mundane well-wishes of one employee who is staying on to another employee who has decided to go.

Good luck to you, Dan. I wish you well in your new endeavors.

Land Shark

So, tonight I thought I'd write a little bit about why I call my blog "Candy Gram".

Growing up, I heard bits and pieces about a Saturday Night Live skit involving a land shark. My parents weren't regular viewers, but they'd watch SNL from time to time. Anyhow, at some point they'd seen one of the land shark skits and were talking about it one evening in my presence. Being about 5 or 6 at the time, the idea of a shark on land wasn't as funny to me as it was to the adult world. Even after my parents had reassured me that there were no such things as land sharks, I remember being scared that they might be wrong and I could wake up one night to a shark hovering over my bed.

Well, obviously that never happened.

What did happen is that I got older and realized that rather than being a threat, a land shark is pretty funny. In fact, as I got older, I started to realize that a lot of things I'd been afraid of weren't so bad. Looking at them from the other side of childhood, I began to see them as silly or ridiculous -- like a shark, hunting on land. Anyhow, in some way, as I matured, "land shark" came to represent the bogarts that inhabit the silly, irrational, superstitious part of my inner world: more funny than frightening when you see them for what they really are.

So what's all of this got to do with my blog's name? Well, the most well-known skit of the land shark has the land shark trying to get a woman to open the door by pretending to deliver what? That's right -- a candy gram.

[Scene: A New York apartment. Someone knocks on the door.]

Woman: [not opening the door] Yes?

Voice: (mumbling) Mrs. Arlsburgerhhh?

Woman: What?

Voice: (mumbling) Mrs. Johannesburrrr?

Woman: Who is it?

Voice: [pause] Flowers.

Woman: Flowers for whom?

Voice: [long pause] Plumber, ma'am.

Woman: I don't need a plumber. You're that clever shark, aren't you?

Voice: [pause] Candygram.

Woman: Candygram, my foot. Get out of here before I call the police. You're the shark, and you know it.

Voice: I'm only a dolphin, ma'am.

Woman: A dolphin? Well...okay. [opens door]

[Huge latex and foam-rubber shark head lunges through open door, chomps down on woman's head, and drags her out of the apartment, all while the Jaws attack music is playing.]

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landshark.

What's that? I've got to go. I think I hear someone at the door.