The first time I met him, we were at a company picnic. We were eating. I was with the Chief and he was with his wife. Random Task and I were in line to get food at the same time. He asked me if my name was "TurkeyToad" and I said "yes." (He asked me about my real name, not my blog name. My blog did not exist then...)
His next question to me was "How old are you?" I think I was 31 at the time and I tell him. He thinks about this for a minute then his next question is "You are a manager right?" At the time I had 3 people reporting to me so I naturally responded yes. His next comment puzzled me a bit. He said that Managers need to be at least 35 years old and normally they need to be 40. OK. I'm not sure about that but my boss had at least 8 direct reports at the time and she is one year older than me...
Random Task has a habit of asking some rather bizarre questions. Here are some of the highlights:
"How many push-ups can you do?"
"What do you know about trees?"
"What do you do here?" - asking someone in international sales what their job function was.
"He does like girls, right?" - talking about another coworker that always dresses nice and does in fact, like girls.Another time Random Task was in a meeting with chemists and others from the international group. Random Task was showing some data he had gathered including a graph of the data. The graph consisted of a control sample and the "suspect" sample. The two lines on the graph were significantly different. Someone in the international group commented on the graphs saying how the suspect sample was not nearly as good as the control.
A little while later, Random Task visited the person commenting on the graphs in International Sales and asked if she had a chemistry degree. She said no. Then he asked how she was able to read that graph in the meeting. I guess people without chemistry degrees should not be able to read graphs - go tell that to engineers...
One last bit... a few days before Random Task announced he was going to a new company I was walking near his desk and he walked around the corner. Then he said something about what happens if you tuck your shirt into your underwear. Then he stops next to me and said that I made it funnier. I'm still not sure what that was about.
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Another worker in our company likes to use post-it notes. At any given time there are no fewer than 30 on his desk. These are the 4 inch by 6 inch lined post-it notes. It appears there is a progression of the notes. If they are important they are front and center on the edge of his desk. If they are less important they are relegated to the pile which is a few days away from the trash bin.
Since there are so many notes on his desk, he would not notice a couple more notes...
Some of the notes we added are:
- A listing of all the My Drunk Kitchen episodes
- Things Chuck Norris did - including: slammed a revolving door, counted to infinity twice
- Things a honey badger might say
- The department members favorite colors. This was fun because if there person was not available during the interview then we made them up. My best one was "deer through the scope brown."
He is a good sport and tacks them up to the side of his cube.
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