Thursday, November 08, 2007

Work tales

I think I mentioned that in my new position I'd get to work more often with my lunch boys. I knew it would be fun, but I had no idea just how much until yesterday.

John (Shop Dungarees) and I had a meeting together. The purpose of the meeting was for John to give my team an overview of the application he supports. John is great at explaining technical concepts to people who are less technically inclined than him. Yesterday was no exception.

Everything was going well, and at the end of the meeting he did a live demo of how the workflow process of the application worked. He said, "To help you guys understand this better, I'll use a real life example." His example? "Say you're in the bathroom here and because of a miscalculation you run out of toilet paper." Yes his example was bathroom related.

He proceeded to show us how the workflow might look if this situation were encountered. "The tp holder would send an email to Management which would say 'Need tp in 6th floor bathroom stall 1' and maybe would include a picture of me on the toilet with a sad face. Then Management would see the request and take tp down to that bathroom."

At this point I was barely holding it together. I couldn't even look at him because I was 100% sure I was going to wet my pants if I made eye contact. My whole team was there-my peers, our managers and their manager, a woman who is VERY high up in our organization. And everybody was losing their minds. By the way, don't try this yourself because you'll get fired. He is literally the only person on this entire planet that can get away with it.

Then in a final bid to get me to soil myself, he said, "Once management completes the task of coming to the bathroom, seeing me sitting on the stall and giving me toilet paper, they can either send a request to the cleaning lady to go mop up the mess or they can enter in some comments and close out the task." These are the comments he entered in:

"All set, Johnny Boy. Commence wiping."

Goddammit I love that guy.

1 comment:

John said...

Not a single comment. That's how funny I am.