I know it’s only Thursday, but technically it’s my Friday so Annexed is getting moved up. I actually didn’t spend much time here this week. I was out at the west office Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday morning. I discovered that having two desks isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, when you only have enough supplies for one. For example, I was granted a laptop when I got assigned to this Mall project because I would need to be portable and roam from meeting to meeting.  So, I got it, and all the paraphernalia that goes with it, while at The Mall. Consequently, my west office doesn’t have a docking station. Also, someone stole the hands free headset for my phone out there. So all week I was calling in to conferences and had to cradle my handset against my shoulder so I could type. Ugh! Maybe it was my chiropractor who stole it because I sure  need to see him now! I also hate shuffling files back and forth. Soooooo…for that reason I am preferring to work at The Mall until I can move back out west permanently.

Who knew The Mall would be the office of choice?

Because I wasn’t here much, I don’t have anything to report so I thought I’d do a run down comparison of the two.  

So, here it is, the head to head battle of East vs. West, Old vs. New, Dark vs. Light, Moldy vs. Unmoldy.

Is this corner we have long time fighter and veteran, The Mall! And in this corner, the new young champion, The West Office!

{ding! ding! ding!}

Bathrooms:
The West office has automatic EVERYTHING in their bathrooms – toilets, sinks, soap dispenser, and paper towels. The only thing not automatic are the doors. I  kind of wish they were. It would prevent me from having to use an extra paper towel to open them and then toss it back to the trash just as someone else is walking in, thereby hitting them in the face with a used towel. It’s embarrassing. Anyway, they clean the bathrooms there like 800 times a day. Seriously, it seems like every time I go for a potty break, they’re being cleaned. Don’t get me wrong, I love me a clean bathroom. I just don’t love sharing my “private time” with the Mexican cleaning ladies.

The Mall has tried to make updates and automate everything, it just doesn’t always work. Only one of the soap dispensers works, and it’s on the sink that has cold water (you can’t adjust the water temp here). So I find myself going to the hot water sink and then reaching across to use the soap dispenser on the cold water sink. If there’s another person washing their hands at the same time, it gets awkward. The paper towels don’t always dispense either and have gotten stuck on several occasions. Thank goodness one of the Texans knows how to fix it. Otherwise we’d all be walking around with wet hands. The cleanliness of these bathrooms is questionable. The cleaning ladies are in here probably once a day, which is better than nothing. Thank goodness too or who knows how long I would have laid on the floor. Also, let’s not forget stall #1. Weird things go on in there.

Speaking of weird – look what I found waiting for me in the stall today…

Here’s the closeup:

Yes that says #10 on it

Winner: The West office.

Kitchen Facilities:

The kitchen here at The Mall wins in the size category. It’s probably 2-3 times the size of the one out west. It literally  has 4 refrigerators in it! I haven’t quite figured out why though. There aren’t that many people in the Annex. Oh well, it means that my food doesn’t have to fight for space with someone else’s so that’s cool. There’s a TV in this kitchen too, but it’s never on. There are also 3 microwaves, which is nice for the lunch rush. I have yet to wait in line for a microwave to become available. There was no hand soap when we first got here but The Strangler took care of that in a hurry and we have some now. There are also no paper plates here, which I find odd. There’s also 3 vending machines in there – one for food and 2 for beverages. Oh, and as an added bonus – this kitchen has a helium tank that you can use to blow up balloons!

The kitchen at the West Office is smaller and more compact. Only one ‘fridge and one microwave. They do have plenty of paper goods though and the color scheme/vibe of it is nicer. Never thought I’d say this but…

Winner: The Mall – any kitchen capable of blowing up balloons wins in my book!

Desks:
You’ve all seen what my desk looks like here at The Mall. It’s  your basic cubicle  – square-shaped, 3 walls, some cubby things, etc. Nothing to write home about. But, it’s a pretty decent size and I have privacy. I don’t have any drawers though. There are supposed to be some but they were missing when I got here. The colors are your basic brown and grey. Nothing fun and exciting.

My desk at the West office is in a pod so there are only 2 walls – it’s like a regular cubicle cut in half from corner to corner. We have nice tall closets for our coats and to keep stuff in. I also have drawers there. There isn’t as much privacy and being in a pod lends itself to more conversation and collaboration. It’s definitely more modern.

Winner: it’s a tie. I like the size of The Mall desk but the collaboration of the West Office set up.

Location:
Believe it or not, I live about halfway between the 2 offices so it’s about the same distance for me to drive to either one. However, getting to the West Office is all interstate and to The Mall is all back roads. The West Office is in a more central hub of the city and you can find just about anything within a 5-10 minute drive and most stuff is even closer than that. Makes it really easy to run errands over lunch or after work. Also provides a whole host of eat out options!

The Mall on the other hand is sort of secluded. It makes it worse that I know squat about this area. No errands get run while I’m here and we always eat here. And let us not forget, that the office is located inside a mall! I mean, while it has its charms and I’ve grown sort of fond of it (in a “feel sorry for the strange old man next door sorta way”), it is what it is and there’s  no denying the crapiness of it all.

Winner: hands down, The West Office.

People:
The West Office is where all my technology peeps are, and more specifically, the other BA’s that I work with. I have a lot of friends there and enjoy our chats, lunches, and work together.

The Mall has operational people here, of whom I know very little. I’ve met many more of them being here but they treat our little team as outsiders. However, our team is awesome. Between The Brit (aka, The Strangler), Bob, the Texans and the Indians, we have a lot of fun. Our group is starting to break up though. Bob moved his stuff back to the West Office yesterday and The Brit will be splitting her time, probably spending most of it out west, when she gets back from vacation. The Indians have started leaving too so I imagine the days won’t be as much fun anymore. Makes me kind of sad really.

We also can’t forget the other cast of characters at The Mall – Scooter, John, the mall walkers, and other random visitors here. That’s definitely something the West office doesn’t have.

Winner: the West Office only because it has all my BA peeps as well as the project team once we move back there. If the project team was stuck here forever, I would have made it a tie. 

Well, I think the West Office is the overall winner, by a small margin. It’s funny to say that now. 2 months ago when I moved down to The Mall, I would have made the West Office the clear winner by A LOT! But, I’ve grown fond of this sad little place and am glad for the experience here.

Annex will probably be on a break next week since I’m only working 2 days, unless something very noteworthy happens that I have to share with ya’ll!

Happy Holidays! 

A holiday greeting from The Strangler

You've been Annexed!

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Annexed

In this edition of Annexed: a mysterious caller, The real Strangler, a science experiment, scales, and good-byes.

Mystery # 1 – Alan:
On Monday, one of the teams (the one that The Strangler and Bob are on) had a conference call. Seems pretty typical in an office right? Well, what wasn’t typical was that some random guy named Alan called in. He announced himself and then came that awkward moment of, “Who is this guy? Is he invited? Should I know who this is?” and frantically searching your brain for the answers. There were none. No one knew who Alan was. So, the call proceeded. Afterwards, after everyone had hung up, the gang came running out and said “Who’s Alan?” Still no one knew. We determined that it was a Conference Call Crasher. You know, people who dial in to random conference calls just to mess with those on the line. What a fun idea! So we decided to try it. On our  next departmental meeting, Bob announced himself as Alan. It threw our manager off a bit but then he recognized the voice and said, “Bob, is that you?” We’re going to continue crashing conference calls and pretending we are supposed to be there.

• “Hi this is Alan!”
• “Alan?….um, this is the XYZ Project meeting. Are you on the right call?”
• “Yep, Mike sent me.”
• “Oh. Um, what department are you with?”
• “[static]I’m with the [static] department”
• “Oh, ok….”
• The meeting proceeds…Alan interrupts the agenda, “Hey this is Alan. Are we going to talk about the baseline?”
• “Well, no, that’s not on the agenda.”
• “Well that’s why I dialed in. Here let me just tell you that we need to see some dates soon or we won’t support this project.”
• “Oh well um, we’re not quite there yet Alan but I’ll see what I can do. What department are you with again?”
• “[static] the [static] department”
• “I’m sorry what?”
• “Ok this is getting ridiculous. That’s it, I’m  hanging up and talking to Mike about this!” [click]

Mystery # 2 – The Strangler:
Ok so you all know that I call my British co-worker “The Strangler”. It started as a funny  joke because she can be a hard ass. Well, it’s not so funny anymore. Turns out The Mall has its own Strangler and this person is leaving us morbid notes at our desks!

This was the first item to show up:

In case you can’t tell, it’s a Christmas Card. It’s actually the card that the Brit left for Bob. But, when we came back from lunch one day, Bob returned to his desk to find it like this! How alarming! We all brushed it off as a joke, until this appeared on Bob’s desk the next day…

WTF!? This is no longer funny and we’re all a bit on edge. But, since both items were on Bob’s desk, we all felt solace in the fact that The Strangler (or T.S. ) seemed to have a thing for Bob. Hey, better him than me right? Or so I thought.

This was found on my monitor yesterday…

Are we seeing a pattern here people? Obviously T.S. has a calling card and he’s now aiming his antics at me!

So far nothing has happened today so maybe it was a lark. I’ll keep you posted…

Science #1 – The Experiment
Remember how I told you last Friday that I was going to conduct a very intricate experiment this week? Well here it is. Basically, I laid 3 random objects in various spots around The Mall. The goal was to see how long they would stay before being taken or moved.

Here are the items and their locations:

A quarter: I placed a quarter on the floor, next to one of the planters. It was visible but out-of-the-way enough that it wouldn’t be too obvious.

Post-it Note: I stuck a post-it to the wall next to the cafeteria. It was lower on the wall and somewhat inconspicuous. I wrote “You’ve been Annexed :)” on it.

Candy bar: the last item was a mini, somewhat stale, candy bar. I placed it on the back of a bench.

I laid the items out at about 2:40 p.m. on Monday. My plan was to check on them every day for progress. **NERD ALERT**NERD ALERT** I even made an Excel spreadsheet to track my data!  Late afternoon I was hungry for chocolate and almost went back out to snatch  my precious little morsal back, but I resisted. I didn’t want to taint the experiment! When I left that night around 5, I could see that the quarter was still there. I didn’t go check on the other items. Tuesday morning I came in and could see that the quarter was gone. Around 9:30 a.m. I went to check on the other items and they were gone too.

Conclusions: Either The Mall has a cleaning crew that removed all the items OR Scooter snagged ’em all up and stowed them away in his bathroom-stall-shrine to me. One of these days I’ll send Bob in to the bathroom to check the stall and verify that last point.

Science #2 – The Scales:
Remember how I told you all that The Mall has 2 scales in it? Well I figured it was high time to put them to the test so I  marched out and jumped right on. The first one I tried was the  one downstairs:

I had to search for the coin slot. What’s that? There are directions and arrows clearly marked on the sign, directing me to said slot? Whatever. If I had followed those directions I wouldn’t have found this:

click to view larger image

What a find! Apparently someone had weighed themselves just minutes before I arrived and forgot to take their printout with them! Suh-weet! Naturally I snagged it and here’s what I gleaned:

1. The person was 232.6 lbs (or 105.5 kg) but should weigh 158.0 lbs or (71.7 kg). Conclusion – this person is overweight by about 75 pounds!
2. To keep up that weight, this person needs to continue eating 3489 calories a day.  Conclusion – this person eats a lot.
3. To lose weight, they should eat 2370 calories daily. Conclusion – even if trying to lose weight, this person would still eat a lot!

Now it was time for me to weigh myself. I put my quarter in and stepped on the scale. It greeted me and then asked a series of questions:

1. Adult or child? (I answered adult. I know this is debatable sometimes with my mental state, but my body is adult sized)
2. Male or female? (Female, like, duh)
3. Small, medium or large build? (I went with medium)
4. Height (5’7″ – I can hear my sister now shouting “no you’re  not – you’re 5’6”!! Hey, it’s my experiment so I’m including the extra inch dammit!)
5. Social Security Number (###-##-1234)
6. Username/Password to my bank account (Hahayouwish/notonyourlife)
7. Did I want to also get my lucky lotto numbers? (I said no because it would have cost me another quarter and I only had 2 – one for this scale and one for the other one. This would be a good time to shout out to Bob for loaning me the quarters! Thanks dude!)

Then it did its little magic and spit out this:

click to view larger

 Here are my results:

1. I weigh 140 lbs (63.5 kg) – it says to allow 5 – 10 lbs for clothing…I’m going to allow 10. What?
2. My ideal weight is 148.0 lbs (67.1 kg). In case you didn’t bother with the math, that means this thing thinks I’m underweight! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Tell that to my muffin top!
3. If I want to maintain this weight, I should eat 2100 calories daily. Finally I have permission to pig out!
4. If I want to *gain* weight, I should eat 2220 calories daily. Not only permission, but encouragement! Thank you Mall Gods!

Then it told me to enjoy my day. Are you kidding? I get to eat 2200 calories! You bet I’m going to enjoy my day!

Next I went to the other scale:

I had saved this one for last because it was the cute one with Bugsy on it. No bonus printout on this one so I put my quarter in, and it promptly ate it and didn’t turn on. The damn thing doesn’t work! I could have used that quarter to get my lucky lotto  numbers!!! Stupid bug…

Theatre #1 – Good-byes

One of the Indians left this week. He was the leader of the pack and a royal pain in the butt on many occasions. But overall he was a nice guy and it was kind of sad to say good-bye. It was also the first indication that these projects will not last forever and while I will be happy to migrate back to the west office, a part of me will miss this place. Despite the unpleasantness of the surroundings, our little group has a lot of fun. Someone told me last night that they would love to work here because it looks like we have a blast all day. And we do. But it’s also a lot of hard work. We have to be silly and goofy to get through the other crap. Eases the stress.

Also said goodbye to The Brit today, but this is just temporary. She is heading back home to visit family and friends for the holidays. She’ll be gone for 2 weeks and we’ll miss her terribly. But this also means we can totally dog’s breakfast with her stuff whilst she’s away! [If she’s reading this she literally just had a heart attack because a) I used English slang and b) she’s picturing us touching her things].

Here she is at the airport – making sure she is fully prepared for a trip abroad. She has the basics covered – beer and medication  

Before the beer...

After the beer

Theatre #2 – Zombies

So, we often refer to The Mall as the Dawn of the Dead because it’s so. freakin’. empty. We joke about zombies being around. Some zombie skin even showed up on The Brit’s desk the other day (and it touched her spoon. When she discovered this her head exploded and then she got a new spoon). Well, funny thing – yesterday we were eating lunch at John’s and there was a big family at the table next to us (big as in there were a lot of them, not that they’re fat. Although, John’s food could contribute to that too…). One of the gals had 2 kids with her and when they were done eating she told them to go out in the mall and play, which pretty much meant run around screaming. At one point they came in to get a drink and I heard the boy say, “Next time, can I be the zombie?”  Beautiful.

Bonus items:

Before I wrap up, I have to mention 2 other things. First of all, the Greater Omaha Area Bowling Association put up some holiday decor. Hey, someone’s got to!

And finally, this is what I saw when I walked in to the bathroom after lunch:

Apparently someone didn’t have the $.25 needed and were badly in need of a diaper feminine pad so they broke in and took one. Maybe they should have looked around the mall first. You can sometimes find a quarter or candy bar lying about…

Until next week….you’ve been Annexed!!