Legacy testers

We used to have two Development Departments but merged them together. The original one was for what we then called “Legacy” software since it was our older product, and emphasis was moving over to our new flagship product which I was working on. The “Legacy” Testers seemed a much older group, and even the younger ones were less technical, yet maybe more socially quirky than our group.

We also noticed different behaviors and preferences. They seemed to have much more stationary so didn’t just have a small notebook and a single pen like we did, but would have a more impressive collection of post-it notes, hole puncher, stapler, and assortment of coloured pens or highlighters. They would often want an ergonomic keyboard and mouse, with a fancy chair. They seemed to love using the printer as well.

No idea if their work actually called for any of these items, because our job certainly didn’t require it.

There’s that meme template “X starter pack” so a colleague liked making ones for the likes of the Legacy Testers. So he included an ergonomic keyboard, fancy chair, excessive amount of stationary and stack of printed paper.

He made a different one which I think had walking boots, wrist support, a programming book used as a monitor stand, and Lego.

With our group, there was a subgroup that loved multiplayer computer gaming, and loved Marvel merchandise, often having figures like Funko Pops or even Lego on their desk; so maybe they were the most alike.

“when there’s a lack of people in the office, it’s either because there’s a new game out, or it’s the Testing Conference”

Towel Chronicles

One thing that I miss about office working is the emergent stories you get from people interacting with people. It can be fairly innocuous scenarios that escalate or become inside-jokes. A classic example is when the cleaner Pauline wasn’t allowed to let us use her towels in the kitchen anymore. One day, a colleague emails to declare that Pauline was taking home the towels for the final time.

Pauline used to take home and wash all the tea towels, but after some office politics with her employers she doesn't do it anymore, hence no more tea towels.

Cheers, 
Isobel Johnson

Nick has offered to buy tea-towels for the kitchens if we volunteer to take them home at the weekend to wash them (there are no facilities to wash them here).

I don’t mind doing this once a month (for the upstairs kitchen I use). If you currently use the paper towel and prefer to use tea towels and don’t mind washing them now and again then let me know. (Or if you use the downstairs kitchen and want tea towels and are happy to wash them, also let me know.)

Cheers,
Isobel Johnson

I’ve bought some fresh new tea towels for the upstairs kitchen.

Please consider others who might want to use them. Please don’t use them to dry your hands or wipe coffee stains from the inside of your mug. There are blue paper towels for that stuff.

Cheers,
Isobel Johnson

One of the tea-towels is missing from the upstairs kitchen. Please can you return it if you have it so that I can take them both home to wash.

Cheers, 
Isobel Johnson

There are fresh clean tea towels in the upstairs kitchen – I’ve replaced the missing one. 
I’ve bought these and wash them weekly so please look after them.
 
Thanks! 
Isobel Johnson

So a thing that you take for granted; having a tea towel in the kitchen – has lots of “office politics” and requires organisation. Isobel initially managed to get the development manager to buy the replacement towels, but soon became stained then one went missing. Absolute disrespect for those towels.

Office Pranks

Even though I don’t like mean-spirited pranks, sometimes they do make the day memorable, and even small quirky things people do lead to funny situations.

Simulated Mouse Movements

One good prank was done by a software tester called Chris. I think he unplugged Ryan’s mouse, then plugged his own mouse to Ryan’s PC. When Ryan returned to his desk and moved his mouse (which wasn’t plugged in; or plugged into someone else’s machine for extra bantz), Chris tried to emulate his mouse movements, and tried to match his movements for as long as possible.

Ryan was obviously struggling to hit some icons/buttons, and would see a lag before the mouse moved so was really confused.

Steve in the kitchen

I was in the kitchen, and got the urge to look up, there was a picture of Steve’s face stuck to the ceiling. I wondered how long it had been there and how many people had even seen it.

Keyboard Hijack

One classic thing people loved doing is sending messages to people if you walked away without locking your screen. There were a few times I got back to my desk to find our tester had messaged my line manager, or even his line manager.

Me 11:10:
I miss working with you Matty
Matty 11:10:
😕
Me 11:22:
I think Suhail hacked me when my back was turned
we do miss working with you though
 
 
 
Me 11:09:
I cant stop touching Suhail
Keith 11:10:
Again?!
Me 11:10:
He's got a nice red top on
Keith 11:11:
Haha
Me 11:22:
I think Suhail hacked me when my back was turned
Keith 11:23:
I figured 😛

Top Hat

There was a Christmas Party where we dressed up and someone wore a Top Hat. Afterwards I think they brought it to the office and left it there.

Josh placed a Christmas Pudding on Andy’s chair, but because there was little chance he would just sit on it, he decided to cover it up with the Top Hat in hope he would remove the hat and not expect anything else there. It didn’t work, but Andy thought it was funny anyway.

For a second attempt, Josh decided to place a smaller item; a sachet of vinegar. A manager came over wanting to talk to someone nearby. She initially grabbed the chair and saw the top hat. She began to pick it up but then realised the vinegar was there also. She then grabbed a different chair and exclaimed.

“I didn’t want to take that chair because it had a Top Hat and vinegar on it”
Natalie

So the prank was brilliant because it forced a manager to come out with a statement that you never thought you would hear them say.

Air Con Game

I was going through some old emails and came across this gem from when we worked in the office.

Hi all
We are aware that the air conditioning is not working correctly and that it is too hot upstairs. Unfortunately the cupboard where the controls are is locked at present so there is nothing we can do about it.
The key is being located and brought across but even then, the A/C has been set up in zones but we don’t know which zone is which. The person who does know how to control it is on holiday for a couple of days.

How can you have that many levels of failures? The person who controls the Air Conditioning is on holiday, the key is in another building, but even if they managed to find it, the controls can’t be understood. It sounds like some convoluted sequence of puzzles for a point-and-click adventure game.

Employee Profiles: Philip

I was going through some old chat logs and was reminiscing about a former employee called Philip who was a Senior Software Developer in his 50’s and had an attitude problem. In addition to being flippant and unprofessional, he seemed to have the common attitude with some older developers where they seem annoyed that the programming language they specialised in has now essentially become obsolete and are very reluctant to learn new things.

We were coding in C# and SQL, but he has experience in some old specialised languages like MUMPS and had C++ experience in his Commodore 64 days.

My employer always seemed reluctant to sack anyone, so would just leave them to it and hope that they quit one day.

Philip never seemed to ask for help so would just write comments on the Work Items that he couldn’t do it, would spend hours procrastinating at his desk, and sometimes fell asleep.

When he did socialise, he would come up with random stories that seemed far fetched.

Chilling

Our software is large and complicated so we have a batch file called BuildCompleteSolution which used to take about 40 minutes to complete. You only needed to run it when there’s major updates/breaking changes, but Philip seemed to run it everyday just to procrastinate.

Dean 11:45: 
he's moved to another team
but when i saw him the other day
he was building complete solution
Me 11:45: 
what's he doing? back working with his old software?
Dean 11:45: 
apparently he's working for Digital
we've never heard of it
our theory is that they've set up a dummy company to distract Philip
Me 11:46: 
probably just a sister company they have made, then gonna announce redundancies
“this month, we have closed Digital and the Venezuela office”

Me 14:52:
I like how Philip often runs Outlook rules. It's like his new buildcompletesolution
seems to take an hour to process
Jim 14:53:
:D. He's very set in his ways. And very vocal about them.
Me 14:54:
looks like he is doing a noob c# course on pluralsight
he didn't learn from his years of experience with my team
Jim 14:54:
Really? He's finally stopped programming in the 80s?
How are you checking this?
Me 14:56:
I can see his monitor
Jim 14:56:
Ah.
Me 14:57:
seems to be going through data structures like dictionaries and arrays
and his progress bar on outlook has been there for a good 15 minutes and has gone from 80% to 95%
I often see him sitting there idle, watching the progress bar

Me 15:48:
looks like Philip is taking his time deciding if he should purchase some Nik Naks
Paul 15:48:
LOL
Me 15:48:
what do you think his favourite flavour is?
I reckon Scampi
Paul 15:48:
Nice and Spicy
Has to be
Me 15:49:
or maybe he hasn't decided
he will abandon the purchase and just buy Monster Munch
Paul 15:49:
Is he doing his online shop??
Me 15:49:
ooh I think there's Twiglets now
Paul 15:49:
Choices choices
Me 15:55:
I think he has given up coding, and shopping instead

Mary 15:19: 
look at Philip
HORIZONTAL!
Me 15:20: 
just messaged Matt about it
he has readjusted now
Mary 15:20: 
did u see him fall asleep the other day!? 😐
Me 15:35: 
no
Mary15:35: 
that was FUNNY
his head kept on falling LOOOOOL

Updates With Attitude

Matt: "Philip, so what did you do"
Philip: "CARRIED
ON
LOOKING
AT
IT
NEXT!"

“Argument with UX. They want the text to be sentence casing, so I said NO”
Philip’s standup update

Philip added a comment.
Technical Authors decided on some changes.
I need to find out how to change the text on the buttons for the dialogue box, if this type of dialogue can handle such.
Wouldn't it be nice if anything had any sort of documentation available. Guess we can all dream.

Philip added a comment.
Looks like another hijacked job.
The code has been moved around.
Thu, 01/10/2015 11:19

“I was constipated all day yesterday and the day before”
Philip

Tall Tales


Me 09:06:
because the Columbians don't want the world to know what their real coffee tastes like, each bag comes with 6 months jail sentence
#PhilipsFacts
Dean 09:08:
lol what?
Me 09:12:
Jim says he remembers Philip telling that story about 5 years ago
if you try smuggle their proper coffee out of Columbia, then you get thrown in jail
I wonder how many of his stories are true
might have to search Snopes for it
saying you can't take their "real" coffee out of the country, and the only coffee you import is lower quality

Me 09:44:
Philip is talking about curries again
rats and cats found in the freezer
Dean 09:45:
haha what
Me 09:49:
A takeaway got shut down for selling cat curries
#Philip'sFacts "most of the curries are Portuguese"

Philip's mate drank 2 bottles of vodka, took his clothes off and went to sleep in the hospital car park. His blood-alcohol level stopped him dying of hyperthermia
Dean 12:44:
haha
i have heard of that kind of thing happening before
Me 12:45:
I like how he went to sleep in a hospital car park
in the case that he does get in trouble, a doctor may save him
Dean 12:45:
clever

I wish I could remember more of his tales. There was one about a casino scam with the poker player stacking his chips comedically high. Then another about censorship in cartoons with characters headbutting each other.

Miscellaneous

There was a new communications platform we were trialling, and as a Job Role, Philip set his job title as “Low-paid grunt”

“hope you’ve gone to a much better place”
Philip written in Leigh’s leaving card

One time, IT updated our Desktop wallpapers and in my opinion was only marginally brighter than the previous one. However, many staff members complained, including Philip.

“So the attitude is to kick everyone in the head for the sake of a couple of people, not the least bit friendly.

I have a stigmatism in both eyes meaning that backdrop is physically painful to view and so has been removed.

Just this place has a Health Plan, not “Plan to ensure no health possible”.”

Me 13:46:
Philip came back from lunch completely bald. Now he is googling hairdressers
I wonder if he is regretting his decision
Daniel 13:47:
haha
Me 13:47:
“can you rollback my hair please?”

Flapjack Chronicles

When we worked in the office, I noticed a Developer Keith often ate flapjacks from our vending machine. I started some bantz with a colleague called Josh who had a wild imagination and then it became a bit of a running joke.

These conversations are from some old chat logs I found.

Me 10:39:
have you noticed that Keith likes Flapjacks?
Josh 10:40:
lmao
yeah I have actually
Me 10:40:
that's the worst thing I can come up with for him
Josh 10:40:
love Keith, such a pleasant man
i know that's like his worst feature
im convinced he's a sleeper agent for our government
and he's got a silenced pistol in his drawer
in the event of a terrorist attack he'll preserve the technical staff
Me 10:44:
good theory

Josh 10:41:
I'm a bit concerned about Keith
he came up to me yesterday outside my house and asked me if I was interested in a metric ton of those flapjacks
apparently he "knows a guy"

 
Josh 14:01:
is he writing out the ingredients listed on the back of the flapjack packet again?
Me 14:03:
one day he will work out the recipe
Josh 14:03:
hahahah
that 0.1% missing, but vital ingredient he can't pinpoint

Josh 16:36:
bumped into des
we were discussing our mutual theories of Keith's secret agent/sleeper government agent mission
we both can't be wrong..

Me 09:53:
just so you know, Keith has already ate his flapjack
Josh 09:53:
wtf
already?
Dude can you get together a Flapjack Crisis Meeting
?
I'll call in backup
Me 09:56:
looks like he has 2 coffee cups as well
something isn't right
Josh 09:56:
hold him down
im coming in right now with flapjack concentrate
i reckon 50ml in a pinhead syringe should do
do we have alcoholic wipes to disinfect the injection area?
something isn't right
lol
anyone looking at these conversations would think we're the odd ones, right heheh? idiots.... :^)
Me 10:00:
50% of our conversations start with Flapjack

Skin-tone plasters

Big changes coming from the Employee Forum. We are getting a variety of skin-tone plasters (band-aid) for the first aid kit. What sort of insane social justice warrior asked for that?

If anything, the default plaster is brown so us white folk need lighter ones.

This is the most extreme woke thing I have ever heard of. I don’t think we will beat it.

Skin Tone Plasters. A great shout and a big thank you for the lack of variety being highlighted to the Employee Forum. Aligning to our environmental credentials, the incumbent plasters will remain where they’re within a 3yr use-by lifespan. As we move to replace, this will be done with a wide variety of skin colour matching plasters.

I asked a friend what he thought of this:

Jack: I've heard of this before, so dumb

Me: Bet we get sacked for using the black plaster

Jack: Haha I would, just to make a point. Whoever came up with this has too much time on their hands, and whoever gets upset about wearing a wrong coloured plaster is a melt

Me: I should swap 'em with kids ones with cartoon characters on them

I do raise a good point there. If you did use the wrong colour plaster, would people get offended? What happens if you took the last dark-skinned one and someone saw you and they wanted it?

How often do you need a plaster when you are in the office? If the plaster is in a visible part of your body, is the presence of the plaster uncomfortable/embarrassing anyway regardless of colour? I think the default brown one is probably a good compromise for all skin types anyway, but I suppose modern ones can be white or transparent.

This surely has to be a case of a white person suggesting this, using their wokeness to raise an injustice against darker skinned people, even though no dark-skinned person was actually offended. However, if you now take the plaster that is reserved for them; then they will be offended.

Do we have the same policy in regards to bandages? They are usually white too.

Office Tales: Food

One thing we miss now that we work at home is the free treats people will bring in, and some interesting food thefts. Here is a collection of stories I found from old emails and chat conversations.

Suspicious Chocolates

I was once walking past the security desk, and the security guard was quizzing a guy that had turned up with a box of chocolates. When the security guard asked who the chocolates were for, he kept on saying “for the person in charge”. Yet he couldn’t specifically name someone, or explain why they would be receiving such a gift. I couldn’t guess what his aim was. Was he expecting to be let through to wander around the office on his own. I think the best he could have done is for the security guard to take the chocolates.

Office Treats

When people do bring in treats, it was always a good read when they tried to write a humorous email to declare it.

Hi all,

There is a selection of young Tobleronette in the upstairs kitchen freshly picked on the Swiss Alps this weekend.

It’s been a poor harvest this year due to bad weather (caused primarily by the blocking highs in the UK) so you might as well take this opportunity to savour some wholesome mountain produce.

Who knows when you may get the chance again.

Bon appetit

David

Canteen

We used to have a canteen that was announced to be closing due to cost cutting. However, it ended up being very temporary.

Farewell canteen and the awesome staff that knew us all by name, how cool is that? They provided caffeine infused productivity juice that was both hot, fresh and cheaper than anywhere else. Hello vending machine, with your cold touch and bags of mini-cheddars. 2016 has really sucked.

Sausages

This is a weird email to send, admittedly, but has someone taken my sausages out of the downstairs kitchen fridge? 

Thanks, 

Andy

This triggered some humorous replies with various sausage pictures

Stolen Milk

Me: There's a note on our kitchen door saying that "someone has been SEEN taking DI Team's milk"

Andy: hahaha

Me: not sure why they didn't reprimand the guilty culprit

it's like he was only partially seen so couldn't be identified. But all they know is that he was non-DI

Fruits

A few developers had dried up fruits on their desks, like a shrivelled orange. They claimed the office environment naturally dried the fruit rather than rotting it, then they kept it as an ornament. I wondered if they took the fruits home and still have them on their desks.

Missing Mugs

Someone has left a black flask/cup on my desk this morning which says “Looking after your world” and “Hot Stuff…” on it. 

If this is yours, please come claim it.

Morning,

If anyone has seen my ‘Slave’s mug’ mug please can you let me know? I left it in the upstairs kitchen with my teapot on Friday afternoon and it’s this morning it was gone.

I’ve had it 20 years and grown quite attached to it.

Thanks,

Kettle

Hi all

If you are filling the kettle please ensure you don’t dip the bottom of it in the bowl of water (perhaps emptying the water out of the washing up bowl first would be the way forward?). It will trip the electrics out (as has just happened) and water on the kettle base is potentially dangerous anyway.

Fí

Cafe2u

There used to be a van that came to the office to serve fresh coffee and snacks which was called Cafe2U. Someone mailed about it and typed U2. I made a great joke about it.

From: Me

Subject: FW: CafeU2

 

Like Coffee?

Like U2?

Check out Café U2. They have parked where the streets have no name.

 

Café U2 Promoter | Bono Enterprise

 



From: Gill

Subject: Cafe2u Yeadon
 

Cafeu2 are here. 

Gill |  Testing | Development

Ant Infestation

Me: Did you hear about the ant infestation caused by Chris? anyway, Mel said that Chris left a can of Red Bull in the office for a few days, and a horde of ants were around it, so they had to call pest control.

Andy: haha i’m sure we don’t call it pest control in england. yet again an americanism

Me: we call them Bug Bashers around here. Sam has spilled a drink behind his monitor and has left it. Mel is kicking off about it, fearing a new infestation.

Pig Balloon meeting

No idea what a pig balloon meeting is, but I love how passive aggressive this is.

I have made the executive decision, by reason of proximity to where these were left lying around unclaimed, to do something with the pop and dips left over from your pig balloon meeting.

I have put the pop (which is probably flat now) and the dips (BBQ – expire Sept 17) into the downstairs kitchen for people to take. If they are not used up/gone by Friday, they shall be binned. Please help yourselves.

Dorothy