to perceive

Tomorrow is Jared’s birthday, and since he wasn’t going to make a big deal out of it, Mary and I decided we would.

Naturally he asked for the day off, but hadn’t found out whether or not our boss had approved it. We spoke to her while he was on the phone, showing her the candles and the “happy birthday” streamers we bought to ambush him on his lunch break - but we needed to know whether to do it today or tomorrow. She finally broke down and let him have tomorrow off, so Mary and I got down to some serious scheming.

Right before he normally goes for lunch, we went to the local market to pick up cheesecake - he’s a strange chap and doesn’t really like anything sweet and HATES cake, but for some reason cheesecake is his favourite. We don’t question it. We also got some really adorable Winnie the Pooh candles and bright pink candles to put on the cake, just to be as obnoxious as possible. When we got back, we had about 45 minutes to put our plan into action. We put the candles into the cakes and put them aside for lighting them when he got back. Then, we proceeded to wrap EVERYTHING in the birthday streamers. His phone, his monitor, his headset, his keyboard, his bag… It was so beautiful.

And then we had to wait for him to get back.

We loitered around the desktop guys’ area, and tried to convince our Russian friend and one of the other desktop guys to watch out for him, but they’re so antisocial that they were all “well by the time he gets in the door we can’t really stall him” blah blah excuses. Then we tried to make up some sort of situation where my project supervisor had a problem with her blackberry, something about “people aren’t calling me, my phone isn’t ringing!” (forever alone joke… I was sad) but the only problem we could come up with was “it won’t turn on herp derp derp”. So that was aborted. Finally we talked to our Executive Support guy and he had a legitimate question to ask Jared, and his cubicle was in the most convenient spot ever. So we executed our plan. With the one risk that he would walk through the other door… but it was a risk we were willing to take.

Thankfully he walked through the right door. I saw him walk in, and casually went around the cubicle to tell everyone by mouthing “IT’S JARED!!!11one!1!!” and flailing about. Mary and I walked back out of the cubicle very nonchalantly and said “good talk!”, turned around the corner as he said “oh hey Jared, can I talk to you about something?” and booked it down the hall to his desk. Frantically we were lighting the candles which was an absolute mess as I cannot work a lighter for the life of me (FAIL) and then almost extinguished the candles when we tried to take it to his desk. THANKFULLY it all worked out, the timing was perfect, and the look on his face was absolutely priceless. He seemed really pleased, and it was a good sendoff for his birthday weekend - especially with the cheesecake - and he left some of the streamers up.

Ambush: successful.

I forgot to mention: The tissue box that contained the money in it was a really ridiculous setup. Mary opened the tissue box, put the Shut Up And Take My Money Fry picture at the bottom, put the money in, put tissues on top, and taped the box up. So when our Russian friend dropped off the tissue box, my thoughts went something along the lines of “why is he here again I don’t need a tissue box oh shit Mary must have given him more things to leave on my desk why is he even agreeing to this OH GOD I’M STILL ON THE PHONE”.

Then today, I was talking to our technical writer about how to do some CSS style for the software we’re branding. Our Russian friend #2 comes over to talk to her, but instead of waiting beside the cubicles or at her desk, he just walks into my cubicle and stands there. Sipping his drink like it’s no big deal. And I look over at him, he sips his drink, and I proceed to apologise. For him being in my cubicle.

…It’s been a rough day.

Just when you think things at work can’t be more ridiculous than they already are (read: the post before this), life exceeds your expectations. The whole rage-face escapade went really well, everyone really liked them and that was all well and good. But then…

Mary, as I have mentioned, likes to buy me things and always refuses any money I try to give her, regardless of how determined and adament I am. It gets to a point of silliness, with one of us chasing the other around throwing money at them. Sometimes we throw the bills over the cubicles and then try to stealthily leave them in each others’ purses or desk drawers. I owe her a lot of money, to say the least, but she refuses to accept any of it…

So today I decided I really wanted a chai tea latte because oh my god no sleep ever due to working overtime. We went down to Starbucks and she paid for me, for the millionth time, to which point I got fed up and snuck a $10 bill into her pocket while she was debating some ridiculous topic with a coworker of ours. Thinking I got away with it, I felt all sneaky when she turned to me and said “don’t think I didn’t notice that, I’ll deal with YOU in a minute” aaaaand so that didn’t go well. It turned into a lot of awkward maneuvering and trying to throw money down my shirt and some groping, all while walking back (in public, no less!).

When we got back to the office, she chucked the money at me and ran, so I ran after her, past the director of the IT department’s office no less, and things got physical. There was a lot of chasing involved. Eventually we managed to get back to her desk, where I scattered the money on the table and in her desk, and ran away really fast. I got back to my desk, where a message saying “IT’S ON” from her was waiting for me, and I just said WHATEVER and went back to work.

Five minutes later, our Russian friend comes over to my cubicle with an envelope and says “this was sitting just over here outside of your cubicle so I’m guessing it’s yours…”

First, I’m completely thrown off. Then I realize what has just happened, and give him the most unimpressed look I have ever given anyone in my life, which seemed to simultaneously make him laugh, and make him want to leave. I said a really unenthusiastic thanks as he was leaving, and then said (a little TOO) loudly, DAMMIT MARY.

Apparently she wanted to “use my weakness” to get me to take my money back, so she went up to him and said “can you give this to her without mentioning it’s from me?” and for some reason he agreed. Right after that escapade, Jared (my coworker who knows I like accents a bit too much) messaged me saying, “did Mary just use the Russian with his accent to get you to take your money back? Man, you really DO have a weakness for accents.” Dammit Jared.

Red in the face from being so taken off guard, I stormed over to Mary’s desk and she just burst out laughing and couldn’t handle herself. I threw the envelope at her, trying so hard not to laugh, and said “KEEP YOUR MONEY. DON’T GET THE RUSSIANS INVOLVED.” and ran away, thinking it would be resolved. BUT NO, because this is Mary we’re talking about.

Then, shortly after, as I’m on the phone with a user, our Russian friend comes back to my cubicle and leaves a tissue box on my desk. Once again, completely flustered, I’m thinking to myself DAMMIT MARY. Except, while thinking this, I have no idea what the user on the phone is saying to me. The phone call, in my mind, went something like this:

User: “So when I log into the application here blah blah blah blah… blah blah blah blah blah?”

Me: “…uhhh. Er. Uh. Could… could you repeat that?”

User: “Sure. Blah blah blah blah blah blah, error blah blah blah blah. Blah?”

Me: “Uh, sure. Yeah. Just… just take a screen shot of the error and send it in to the Helpdesk, and then they’ll follow up with you with a series of questions on it. In the meantime use the web version of the application hope that helps is there anything else I can help you with today greathaveanexcellentdaybye!”

At this point I go to his cubicle, lecture him on never accepting anything from Mary ever again, go to Mary’s cubicle and throw half of the money down her dress, and things seem to be settled.

Until I run into him again and he starts laughing at me and I can’t make coherent sentences again. And Mary can’t contain herself because I sound like an idiot.

I have the best coworkers ever. ಠ_ಠ

At my workplace, a lot of things get done - including goofing off.

Mary (a summer student) and I, last year, became really good friends really quickly when I transferred to her location. I did a swap with the other summer student, so I went from doing hardware & desktop support to software support. Unfortunately, we were really understaffed at the time, so she had to train me on the go and I was doing a lot of front-line things while going in blind. Since things were really tough and stressful, we ended up just joking around a lot to make things a lot less tense and it helped us get through really stressful times with a lot of hilarious moments. For example, we once got a user’s computer and had to fix it, but while we were fixing everything, we noticed there was some unknown gooey substance on the bottom of his laptop. So we cleaned it off using a coworker’s screwdrivers. Needless to say it was REALLY GROSS.

We giggled a lot. It was a bit ridiculous. Chances are, there’d be some stupid scenario we’d make up, or we’d be joking about some idiot user we were trying to help, and burst into fits of giggles multiple times a day. Our boss would often ask from her office down the cubicles, “are those the girls again?” and everyone would monotonically respond with a tired “Yes”. But we were the only two girls on the entire team after Mary had been the only girl for about a year or so. The guys were really great, but after a while, I think one starts to kind of miss the things you can talk about within your gender - although Mary and I are not your typical females. We talked a lot about video games, stuff we’d seen on Reddit, and especially rage comics. We LOVE Rage Comics and during the (very rare) slow minutes, we’d gather around her computer and go through the best ones on f7u12. We also had downloaded MSN, and so we’d chat through there a lot, littering our conversation with appropriate rage faces and giggling intensively. By this time, we had a couple of new hires including our Russian friend, and we were thoroughly convinced we had scared them off. Worth it.

Towards the end of the summer, we though of the genius idea of putting the rage faces onto popsicle sticks (ended up using stir sticks - office supplies are limited!) and using them to poke over the cubicle sides to describe any user we were having trouble with, or any derpy moments we had. More giggling ensued. Unfortunately we only had about two weeks with those, but we made damn sure we used the hell out of them. When we both left the company to go back to school, I took them with me and had them in my room as a reminder of what awesome things happened the summer before and what I could look forward to the next summer. We were both not sure if we’d be returning to the same company, so I was eager to hold onto those in case anything happened and we weren’t working together again. Plus, they were great for using against my roommates.

This summer, the team’s back - Mary and I are as ridiculous as ever, only this time we know how to start our summer off properly. We loaded a whole bunch of rage faces into MSN, and use them on a regular basis, but a bit has changed this time around. Our cubicles are no longer the simple ones where we could talk to each other over the walls, but are now very private, and also very much far away from each other. I can’t even speak to my own team without having to get up from my chair (first world problems, yeah, yeah…)! And the whole atmosphere was so blah when we first started. So we decided to shake things up a bit.

The tops of the cubicles have glass in order to keep the noise out but also not have the cubicles too high and enclosing. We snuck some whiteboard markers, since we all have whiteboards in our cubicles, and periodically leave messages for each other on the glass. For example, when she came by to see if I was ready to go for lunch and I was in a meeting, she drew the Y U NO guy. And when I went to see her, I drew the Like A Sir guy. And we have this terribly terribly awkward joke involving the hyper troll guy, which is one of the most terrifying rage faces I have ever seen, so I printed it out and stuck it in her cubicle for the lols.

Except now our trend has spread…

With our coworkers passing by and seeing our cubicles going “what the hell is going on”, we’ve invited people to draw on our cubicles as well as we have initiated some hit-and-run style rage-face drawing on peoples’ cubicles after they’ve gone for lunch or gone home. Our technical writer saw these and was asking us what these are all from, so we tried to explain to her what the concept of rage faces is. We kind of succeeded, and in order to indoctrinate her to the unfortunate world of the internet, she is planning on drawing a rage face on Mary’s cubicle. But little does she know, I drew this cute little fella:

on her cubicle right after she left. I’m really excited to see her reaction tomorrow.

Then we had an idea: Infect the entire Service Desk area with rage faces?

At the office the other day, my coworker and I were talking about accents. I’ve been found out at my office for enjoying accents a little too much (specifically the Scottish and Russian variety), and I was accused of wanting to go to Scotland only because of the accent. This is most definitely not true, but is a perk of going there - I personally just love the whole idea of the culture in the United Kingdom, and Scottish history is just really fascinating; however, Russia is the country that I’m definitely the most fascinated with when it comes to history.

That country has just had the short end of the stick for as long as history has been recorded. The Czars just robbed the people of their money and skills, and majority of the people couldn’t read or write. Overall, they were over 100 years behind the rest of the world when it came to any progress. Eventually the whole revolution happened in 1917, and everything went really well until Lenin died and Stalin took over (against Lenin’s wishes - he was hoping for Trotsky but Stalin went and got him killed with an axe to the head) and then, well, the World Wars happened, followed by the Cold War with the United States and the USSR vying for Total World Political Domination. The USSR then fell due to a series of events, and the world realized how completely backwards they had everything, as well as how misguided of an impression the rest of the world had of the USSR. And since then, it’s still just had a rough time trying to get its footing as a result of still corrupt politics and a factor of many other things. The USSR also screwed over quite a few countries in its wake - Tajikistan, for example, was doing pretty decently considering they were all being given higher education, but no one was actually taught how to farm and survive off the land since all the goods were shipped to them from the Motherland. After the USSR fell, however… bad news bears.

Anyways, that lead to us talking about visiting Russia. I’d love to go there one day, just to actually see what I’ve heard so many things about - I, in no way, idolize the country for its political structure, but it’s still a fascinating place. I do idolize a lot of the musical ‘exports’ they’ve had though, as well as its strong interest in hockey. I only admire the hockey players though - I strongly dislike them if they beat Canada, though. Izvinitye, Russia.

Then came the revelation that, apparently, one of our Russian coworkers said to the coworker in question that the ratio of men to women in Russia is really, really low. My coworkers, both being male, started to have a bit of a hilariously awkward discussion about it, which got me thinking - with the whole shift towards women’s rights, and the desire in Eastern countries to have more female children than male, what are the ratios like in each country of men to women?

I hypothesised it would be more males than females in most third world countries, and a fluctuation between more females than males in more developed countries, but a pretty close split. I then found this graphic on Wikipedia (on the list of countries by sex ratios page):

The more red the country is, the more males there are; the more blue, the more females there are. Grey means there’s no available data.

Look at how many males there are in Saudi Arabia! That’s kind of terrifying! And Russia is such a dark shade of blue! That’s insane!

I’m a bit shocked, to say the least. This image is from 2006, so it’s slightly outdated, but still! It’s predictable that the South East Asian countries and China are slightly more male dominated, but I didn’t think it would be that low.  ALTHOUGH, this is for the “total population”. Here’s the one for Under Fifteen:

And the one for over 65:

I… wow. What do you guys think about these images?

There’s nothing like playing with a new band to boost the confidence of a musician. As I mentioned previously, this week I was asked to sub in with a band directed by my high school band director. I first received and read through the music on Wednesday, and the concert was today (Saturday) so it was a bit of a tight timeline on this concert. I showed up to the rehearsal which was being held at my high school, and man it felt weird going back. Those ideas continued after the cut.

The rehearsal went pretty well, all things considering. I was the only girl, as usual, but the guys that were there were really helpful and really friendly. All of them graduated from that high school too, but their graduating years were a few years before mine, to say the least. We were also joined by a few other people that graduated in the same year that I did, including one of my best friends from high school that goes to Uni across the country from me. It was great to play in a band with her again, but it was also just so surreal.

The concert today went surprisingly well. I practised a little bit on Thursday night, but not enough to master any of the tricky rhythms, but close enough for jazz, right? So I packed up my trombone and waited for Saturday.

We played five tunes including Spain by Chick Corea (I have ALWAYS wanted to play that song) and four other ones that were pretty reasonable, but also kind of tricky in some parts. But I made it! And the other guys sounded amazing, it was a really great experience playing with these musicians that also have it as a hobby, but sound damn good.

Right after we finished the set, the bass trombone player turned to me, smacked me with his folder, and said “you were amazing!!” and since I’m socially awkward as all hell, all I could do was say “thanks!” and turn bright red. Smooth. I went up to him when we were putting away our instruments and told him he sounded really good (because seriously, bass trombone is the best) and he said, “you were amazing! You didn’t miss a single beat, I was so impressed! You even got the music on Wednesday! Brilliant!” and I just kept saying that there were parts I was barely even playing, but apparently it sounded okay?! I don’t know how this works. My band director came up to me and gave me a huge hug too (I seriously don’t understand, I skipped over a LOT of the complicated rhythms…) and just told me how awesome I sounded. So, maybe I HAVE gotten better since I joined the Uni’s jazz band. And that makes me really happy!

I’m done bragging about how awesome I am. Feel free to read about my thoughts on returning to high school after the cut. Or don’t. It gets intense.  

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I think I may have found a quaint Bed & Breakfast place to stay at in Glasgow (these are actually words that I am thinking about, I cannot believe it)! It’s owned by this retired couple and they sound super adorable. It’s about 15 minutes by bus to the city centre, about 30 minutes to the University, and it seems pretty quiet. Plus there’s a TV so I may be able to watch the Olympics. I really want to watch the closing ceremonies of the Olympics that evening, because I’ll be in the proper time zone. How cool is that?

It’s so strange to have people at work ask me if I’m going anywhere exciting this summer. Normally it’s nothing too crazy, Vancouver or Toronto, the usual, to visit family, but this year, I’m like “well, no — actually… yes! I’m going to Scotland!” and everyone’s like WHAAAAT. It’s so wicked.

Things at work are going pretty well. I’ve been taking on a lot of small work, and been given overtime approvals AND have also been given an opportunity to do a pseudo-co-op workshop with work. It’s great! I get the co-op experience, but instead of forking out over $400 to participate with school, I get paid and free lunch for it. I think I like working more than school sometimes…

…and I got to leave my work AT WORK and go out with a friend to a pub afterwards. Gigantic food baby. So glorious. We talked about a lot of video games and movies and it was so great!

Now it’s bedtime because there was a massive thunderstorm (the first one of the season! The whole building was shaking from the thunder! I LOVE THESE STORMS) so I got completely soaked and was freezing. Draining. Wonderful.