At one time the four story building I work in was the corporate HQ for the company.  After being acquired twice with layoffs we are now just one of the larger offices.  The top two floors of the building were vacant until we picked up a couple of renters from two different companies.  The fourth is now some corporate insurance group.  The third floor is what one of my coworkers would call "a high tech sweat shop".  They're a call center for a home security company.  From what little contact we've had with them it doesn't sound all that fun up there.  They're not allowed to have food or drink at their desks and such silly rules.  Although those rules might make more sense if we saw these people working.  They don't strike me as the brightest bulbs in the room.  It is just a feeling I get...

Anyhow the security between floors isn't super high tech but it does the job to keep people from being stupid enough to wander into another company's office and see all their sensitive materials.

Well apparently from what I've been told by an e-mail announcement and coworkers was that sometime last week someone from the third floor made it down to the first floor conference rooms.  These rooms are inside our offices.   That person then decided it would be a good idea to use the marker board to draw some local "gang graffiti" and then made his way down to the lower level offices and did some more urban art on some marker boards there too.  Dude got caught by cameras and reportedly was fired.

After that an e-mail came out announcing background checks would be done on all employees (apparently required in the past but not recently done).  Also additional security cameras would be going up, new security procedures, and so on and so forth.

It's a weird thing.  My office and where I live is in suburbia.  The dude doing the art work was obviously not supposed to be where he was and should have been fired.  At the same time do we think this guy was claiming some territory or something?  Was the next step strange men standing in the stairwells asking me if I'm looking to score some nice micro ballpoint pens?

I suggested to some coworkers we should do a drive by of the third floor just to make sure they know whose turf they're on but nobody took me up on the offer.

More Not So Great Stories from Work: The Pop Machine

A few months ago our soda machine started smoking.  First you could just smell it, after a while there was a bit of a haze in the room the machine sits in.  Eventually we unplugged it and called the service folks.   Nobody came for a week or two and this resulted in a process where people who wanted soda would plug the machine back in long enough to get some soda and then unplug it.  Once in a while some unaware folk would leave it plugged in and would then discover why we left it unplugged.

The machine was fixed and now it scares the hell out of me.  Whenever it fires up (presumably to cool the dang thing) it sounds like a helicopter taking off.  It works now without smoke but it is so loud you get that urge to step away as the sound makes you think it is really about to explode.  The disappointingly part is that it never does.

More Great Storeis from Work: Spicing Up IM Conversations

I like to spice up my IM conversations with coworkers.  A coworker working from home asked me to go check on another coworker at the office with me.  Some names were changed because i'm a scardycat:

Jeff  [9:14 PM]:

dp you happen to know if Steve is still working with <customer name censored> on the <censored> network?

duxup [9:14 PM]:

i'll check

Jeff  [9:15 PM]:

thanks

duxup [9:17 PM]:

steve is on the floor of his cube, his head looks like it was bashed in with a chair or something

i'd rather not deal with managers tonight so let's just pretend you didn't ask me to check

Jeff  [9:18 PM]:

um

Wired

When exactly did Wired (the magazine or the site) begin to suck?  I used to subscribe to the magazine in the late 1990s but didn't read it often enough to make it worth while.  Still I kept visiting the site and for a while.  Granted every magazine has its issues.  Wired's habit of worshiping at the feet of whatever internet / tech god happened to grant an interview to them and was never my cup of tea.  That wasn't the only flaw but I used to regularly visit the site.  I stopped visiting the site a while back and recently began visiting again.  Damn...  they're still worshiping at the feet of every tech guy who comes along but many of the articles seem more out of touch than your typical mainstream media discovers the internet articles from years ago.

Husi

My tracked user's husi diary postings seems to be thinning all the time :(  Is husy fading away?   What would I do without husi?  I don't know of any other non asshole heavy communities.