I found this kind of strange, seeing how stealing coffee makers away from desks is the kind of thing you might normally expect a security department to try and stop. I figure they're probably just trying to drum up business for themselves. In any case, it's all kind of ironic.

(Alanis Morisette: It's like raiiiiinnnnn on your wedding day, or a free riiiiiide when you've already paid, or... like, maybe a singer becoming really happy and rich by complaining about how bitter and unhappy she is.)

Actually, I've got no problem with Alanis Morisette. Yeah, I know she's kind of a poseur who secretly wishes she could sing "Puff the Magic Dragon" and wear earrings that say, "Don't Worry, Be Happy!" (by the way, if you're one of those people who actually bought anything with the words "Don't Worry, Be Happy!" on it in 1989, you instantly lose 200 bonus points.) But the way I see it, even blues musicians have good days, and you never go around calling them poseurs.

And since I'm on the topic, the winner of Most Ironic Event of the Week was when I bought 100% Certified Organic milk to pour on top of my Lucky Charms Cereal, with New-and-Improved Brighter Colored Marshmallow-Like Food Particles. When I mixed the two things together, they canceled each other out and my entire cereal bowl disappeared in a puff of smoke. But I digress...

I knew something was wrong when I arrived at my desk and found it less cluttered than usual. This is a big problem for me, seeing as how my job consists of...

1. Watching my screen saver until my mind goes completely blank. (You've all done this too... admit it. It's all very zen -- who needs a 1-hand-clapping riddle when you can stare at flying toasters?)
2. Playing Duke Nukem (it's a game much like Doom, except a) It's bloodier, and b) It involves women in bikinis. Needless to say, it's a best-seller.)
3. Passing on chain Email to friends on the belief that it will improve my sex life, when all it really succeeds in doing is pissing of my friends for sending them yet another piece of chain Email.
4. Trying to give the impression that I'm doing real work. I give this impression so that nobody will want to assign me any more work and I can spend more time mastering the subtle nuances of Duke Nukem, which generally involves finding all the pictures of women in bikinis.

My second method is to surround myself with Dilbert cartoons. I do this for several reasons. First, I'm pretty sure it's a federal law that anybody who works in a big corporation has to have at least two Dilbert cartoons outside their cubicle. (Unless you work in a science field, in which case it's okay to use The Far Side instead.) Second, the first few seconds it takes for people to read me cartoons before entering gives me the crucial time I need to switch Netscape from, say, "Bob's Web Page of Jokes Involving a Guy Walking Into a Bar" to "Joe's House of SQL Application Utilities." And third, there's an understanding that the only people who actually find Dilbert funny are people who do lots of work. For example, your average Dilbert cartoon goes something like:

Dilbert: Why have we cut our R&D budget in half but then increase bonuses to sales staff by 46%?
Boss: Clearly, if we can accelerate net gain in initial customers, we'll obtain a profit margin through support initiatives.
Dilbert: I guess we'll have to call it "Beta."

My third, and most important way of looking busy is to keep my desk cluttered. Xerox copies, books with titles that involve any computer product with a coffee-related name ("Learn Java and Mocha and Rebellious-Cafe-Worker-With-Several-Piercings-Who-Only-Is-A-Cafe-Worker-Until-His-Big-Acting-Break-Comes-Along in 21 days!"), paper clips, plants, old summer interns, you name it. I've got 'em on my desk.

So, you can imagine my shock when Oracle security came to take my coffee maker away. All of a sudden, I had this big neat space on my desk. People started coming up to me and saying, "Hey, Todd. I guess you've got enough free time to clean your desk. How about doing this big project for me?" It was a disaster.

Well, I managed to get my coffee maker back. It turns out they took it away because it's illegal to have a coffee maker at your desk. (This is California's official "sleepy worker" law.) Apparently, it's some sort of fire hazard. (I thought about asking them about my collection of firecrackers, gasoline, and soldering irons in my desk, then thought better of it.) But in order to get it back, I had to promise them that I wouldn't use it again at work.

So now I'm stuck without a coffee maker. I tried covering it up with broken pieces of computer hardware (actually, they weren't really broken. Until I removed them from my co-worker's machine, that is), but it was just too late. So now I'm stuck doing actual work, and I'm angry and bitter about it. But am I going to go around complaining about it? Of course not.

On the other hand, if I did, I probably would've won several grammys.

Back to the Cron Job home page