Boring Work Week
Sep. 25th, 2005 07:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
danalwynIt's been a boring week at work, so boring in fact that the most exciting thing that happened involved the Endangered Species Act. And a bunch of pandas.
It was so boring, that I think I'm going to share it with you.
I was sitting in my office, finally getting some work down (for once) when there was a commotion in the hallway outside. Well, it was just one man, which is sort of not in the definition of commotion, but he was making a lot of noise.
"Scott!" I yelled, "what the hell are you doing out there?"
Now Scott is normally a pretty calm guy, as long as you don't accidentally soder his pants to his chair or something like that, but he definitely wasn't looking calm today. Actually he was screaming a lot, which, to me, normally indicates a definite lack of calm.
"Pandas!" he screamed, pointing behind him.
"What?" I asked. Because if you're going to interrupt the productive flow of a graduate student who is actually getting something done than you're going to have to have a hell of a lot better reason than just some big pandas.
"Pandas! There are a bunch of Giant Pandas in the copier room!"
"Damn," I swore. "Are they using up all the toner?"
"No."
"Oh," I paused. "So why do you care?"
He looked at me like I was a total idiot. "Because there are a bunch of eight-hundred pound giant bears in the copier room. They're probably going to eat us all."
"Scott you idiot," I said. "Pandas are herbivores, or at least mostly herbivores. They eat bamboo."
Scott paused. "Really?"
"Really. You can even look it up on Wikipedia."
"Oh," and then he wandered off again.
No sooner had I sat down and started coding a new sub-script to identify problem jobs than Scott comes running back down the hall, the only change from last time being the way he's holding his hand over his shoulder, and blood is staining his white shirt.
"Carnivorous pandas!" he screamed as he passed by my door.
I went outside to swear at him, because although carnivorous pandas are a better excuse for interrupting the productive flow than pandas they still don't even rate a one on my Things To Disturb Me About scale, but he had already run down the hall and disappeared. That given I was left with nothing to do about that except go back to my computer.
About twenty minutes of possibly productive effort later, Jim came in.
"Hey, did you see those pandas?"
"In the copier room, right?"
"No," he looked a bit puzzled. "They're in the reading room now, reading old editions of Popular Mechanics. I was wondering if you knew who let them in the building."
"They probably just showed up. After all, the undergrads keep doing that."
"True," he shrugged his shoulders. "Well, as long as they're toilet trained, it shouldn't be too much of a problem."
Twenty minutes after that, it was Raven who ran into my room.
"Some pandas just broke into my lab and stole my air compressor," she yelled at me.
I put my head down on my desk. I didn't need this. I mean, come on, for the first time in about three months I'm doing something more productive at my office than playing Go and turning Oxygen into Carbon Dioxide, and suddenly all anyone wants to do is bug me about pandas. I swear that this is the universe's sense of humor. See somebody working? Send giant ursine mammals to annoy him.
"Why are you telling me?"
"Because I want somebody to do something about it," she complained.
"Why don't you call animal control?"
"Fine," she sighed. "I'll see what they say. But these pandas are worrying me, they're behaving strangely."
"How so?" I asked.
"They unscrewed the air compressor before taking it."
I shrugged. I mean, if you're in the department you see a lot stranger things than pandas learning how to use screwdrivers. Sometimes you even get to see possums using monkey wrenches. But it's not my problem, regardless of how many people come by to ask me about it.
This time I managed to make it half an hour before I got interrupted. It was Jim again. "Come on down. They need you for this."
Raven was already standing down there, along with Donovan, our resident SysAdmin, both of them looking sort of put out. In front of them two men, one wearing a suit, and the other wearing a uniform that looked like it belonged to a utility worker.
"I don't care what the Act says," utility-worker wannabe was saying, "they're wild animals and they're in the middle of the city. They've got to be taken away."
"They're Endangered Species!" the suit-man said, actually managing to pronounce the capital letters. "They have to be treated with the utmost care. We can't afford to traumatize them by removing them from their new habitat without careful study."
"City ordinance says we have to get them out of there now!"
"And federal law says we have to wait!"
"Well fine, I'm going to go get my boss and let him come down here and tell you how the real world works."
"And I'll get my boss to beat you down into the ground."
"Fine!"
"Fine."
The two men stalked away, leaving me there with Jim, Raven, and Donovan.
"Well, that was interestingly non-productive," I pointed out.
Raven was probably about to reply in a snappy manner when there was a low growl. Around the corner of the building a large panda appeared, swerving around on the pavement in the seat of a Harley-Davidson. Then he gunned the engine and shot by us, squealing around the next corner. For a moment we stared at where he had come from, as if expecting another panda, or maybe a VW bug full of pandas.
"You know," I commented. "I'm beginning to think that this panda thing is getting out of control. Why don't we find Jack and Gary and see why they inflicted this problem on us."
"They didn't do it," Raven commented. "I asked them."
I gave her a look, but given the way she was dressed, that was probably true. Jack and Gary's ability to lie, and indeed their ability to communicate in any way, is directly proportional to their ability to believe that the person they are talking to has a Y chromosome. When confronted by a girl in a swimsuit their communicative ability falls so low that they retreat to their labs to hide in. This is why we don't let them go to the beach, or TA classes involving pre-meds. The last time was a disaster. It took the archaeo-linguists three days to figure out which language they were actually speaking.
"Anyway, I asked them to do something about it," Raven continued.
"You WHAT?"
"Hey," she stared all of us down. "If I don't get any work done today, neither does anybody else."
I grumbled at her and went back to my office. Maybe I could salvage something out of all of this mess. But no, ten minutes later I had Raven and Donovan in there arguing.
"Look," Raven was saying. "They're big and intelligent. Obviously they're mutations created by some underground laboratory or something, or some experiment trying to take over the world. Hence, they're the creation of technology, and they're your problem."
"Oh no you don't," Donovan retaliated. "They're probably possessed by ancient Chinese spirits bent on destruction or chaos or fulfilling some million-year-old prophecy. Magic. Not technology. Your problem."
"You are not foisting this off on me," Raven folded her arms across her chest.
"All right you two," I stood up, now really irritated. "What the hell are you guys arguing about this time?"
"Whose job it is to take care of those pandas," Donovan pointed to the window. "They're really causing havoc out there. But since I don't deal with magic things, that's Raven's department and-"
"Not magic," Raven complained. "Obviously genetic mutations."
"Look you two," I said. "They're dumb beasts. And they're not my problem."
"They're dumb beasts who are driving SUVs across the lawn and terrorizing the undergrads," Donovan said.
"Exactly my point. Who the hell drives an SUV with gas prices this high?"
"He's got a point there," Donovan admitted. A moment later, much to my relief, they left.
But alas, my brief moment of uninterrupted labor was lost when I got another visit. The visit I had been dreading. It was Jack and Gary, and they looked distinctly happy about something. Now, don't get me wrong, I don't mind it when they're happy, as long as somebody else picks up the pieces afterward. I don't want it to be my responsibility.
"We found a solution to the panda problem," Jack said.
"Ho boy," I sighed. But this I went to go look at, because somebody has to keep an eye on those two. They took me downstairs to the main lecture room and flung open the door. At first I thought it had snowed in there, because there was a lot more white there than there normally is. Then I realized that the white was in rather large blobs. Then some of the blobs moved.
"Polar bears?" I asked in disbelief.
"Yeah," Gary pointed. "Aren't they great?"
"And how do you expect this to help?" I yelled. "Polar bears may be big, but they don't eat anything nearly as large as a panda. What are they going to do, go hunt seals? They're solitary ice hunters, they'll probably just go for the nearest garbage dumpster and -- dear God, please do not tell me that I just saw that bear shoot laser beams out of its eyes."
"All right," Gary answered, sounding sort of nervous. "We won't tell you."
I sighed and exited the room, only to find Donovan and Raven arguing with each other in the hallway.
"We've got a problem. Gary and Jack came up with their solution."
I watched with great satisfaction as their faces blanched. Teach them to barge into my office.
"They've managed to, well...remember the Care Bears. There was like a green one and a purple one and-"
"There was Tenderheart Bear and Cheer Bear and...I mean," Raven looked at both of our faces. "Shut up!"
"Whatever," I shrugged. "Anyway, Gary and Jack have managed to clone Missile Defense Bear."
"I don't remember-" Raven began just as a beam of ruby-red laser light burst out of the lecture room and melted a nearby plaque.
"Wow!" Donovan said, staring inside. "He just fired laser beams out of his eyes. That is so frickin' awesome!"
"Will you shut up!"
Then there was the thump of heavy footsteps outside. The doors opened. And a whole gang of pandas, wearing leather jackets and carrying various heavy biking tools walked through the doors and squarely into the lecture hall. Feeling a bit worried, we followed the last one. All the pandas had lined up on one end of the room. All the polar bars were on the other side. It looked like somebody had accidentally merged a National Geographic special with West Side Story. All the animals were growling at each other.
"Raven," I whispered, "you can do that commune with the animals thing, can't you. You know, getting in touch with your inner spirit animal or whatever you do?"
"Actually," Raven began with the air of a true aficionado, "it's a mix between techniques developed in eclectic branches of-"
"I don't care if it's something you got off of a Cracker Jack box," I hissed. "Just tell me what they're saying."
She pointed slightly. "That panda just told the polar bears that their mothers were so wimpy they had to go out and buy fur coats just to get through winter."
"Is that an insult to a polar bear?"
"Do polar bears's eyes usually glow like that?"
"I'll take that as a yes." I sighed and looked around at both Donovan and Raven who were suddenly looking a bit forlorn.
"I'll go start filling out the insurance forms," Donovan said.
"I'll evacuate the building," Raven said.
"I guess I'll go tell students that classes are canceled." I turned to walk out just as a one thousand pound polar bear was sent crashing through the doorframe in front of me.
Anyway, I'm writing this just to tell the rest of the department that the trip we had planned to go to the zoo is definitely off until the zoo management can figure out how to refit the polar bear exhibit with laser-proof glass.
It was so boring, that I think I'm going to share it with you.
I was sitting in my office, finally getting some work down (for once) when there was a commotion in the hallway outside. Well, it was just one man, which is sort of not in the definition of commotion, but he was making a lot of noise.
"Scott!" I yelled, "what the hell are you doing out there?"
Now Scott is normally a pretty calm guy, as long as you don't accidentally soder his pants to his chair or something like that, but he definitely wasn't looking calm today. Actually he was screaming a lot, which, to me, normally indicates a definite lack of calm.
"Pandas!" he screamed, pointing behind him.
"What?" I asked. Because if you're going to interrupt the productive flow of a graduate student who is actually getting something done than you're going to have to have a hell of a lot better reason than just some big pandas.
"Pandas! There are a bunch of Giant Pandas in the copier room!"
"Damn," I swore. "Are they using up all the toner?"
"No."
"Oh," I paused. "So why do you care?"
He looked at me like I was a total idiot. "Because there are a bunch of eight-hundred pound giant bears in the copier room. They're probably going to eat us all."
"Scott you idiot," I said. "Pandas are herbivores, or at least mostly herbivores. They eat bamboo."
Scott paused. "Really?"
"Really. You can even look it up on Wikipedia."
"Oh," and then he wandered off again.
No sooner had I sat down and started coding a new sub-script to identify problem jobs than Scott comes running back down the hall, the only change from last time being the way he's holding his hand over his shoulder, and blood is staining his white shirt.
"Carnivorous pandas!" he screamed as he passed by my door.
I went outside to swear at him, because although carnivorous pandas are a better excuse for interrupting the productive flow than pandas they still don't even rate a one on my Things To Disturb Me About scale, but he had already run down the hall and disappeared. That given I was left with nothing to do about that except go back to my computer.
About twenty minutes of possibly productive effort later, Jim came in.
"Hey, did you see those pandas?"
"In the copier room, right?"
"No," he looked a bit puzzled. "They're in the reading room now, reading old editions of Popular Mechanics. I was wondering if you knew who let them in the building."
"They probably just showed up. After all, the undergrads keep doing that."
"True," he shrugged his shoulders. "Well, as long as they're toilet trained, it shouldn't be too much of a problem."
Twenty minutes after that, it was Raven who ran into my room.
"Some pandas just broke into my lab and stole my air compressor," she yelled at me.
I put my head down on my desk. I didn't need this. I mean, come on, for the first time in about three months I'm doing something more productive at my office than playing Go and turning Oxygen into Carbon Dioxide, and suddenly all anyone wants to do is bug me about pandas. I swear that this is the universe's sense of humor. See somebody working? Send giant ursine mammals to annoy him.
"Why are you telling me?"
"Because I want somebody to do something about it," she complained.
"Why don't you call animal control?"
"Fine," she sighed. "I'll see what they say. But these pandas are worrying me, they're behaving strangely."
"How so?" I asked.
"They unscrewed the air compressor before taking it."
I shrugged. I mean, if you're in the department you see a lot stranger things than pandas learning how to use screwdrivers. Sometimes you even get to see possums using monkey wrenches. But it's not my problem, regardless of how many people come by to ask me about it.
This time I managed to make it half an hour before I got interrupted. It was Jim again. "Come on down. They need you for this."
Raven was already standing down there, along with Donovan, our resident SysAdmin, both of them looking sort of put out. In front of them two men, one wearing a suit, and the other wearing a uniform that looked like it belonged to a utility worker.
"I don't care what the Act says," utility-worker wannabe was saying, "they're wild animals and they're in the middle of the city. They've got to be taken away."
"They're Endangered Species!" the suit-man said, actually managing to pronounce the capital letters. "They have to be treated with the utmost care. We can't afford to traumatize them by removing them from their new habitat without careful study."
"City ordinance says we have to get them out of there now!"
"And federal law says we have to wait!"
"Well fine, I'm going to go get my boss and let him come down here and tell you how the real world works."
"And I'll get my boss to beat you down into the ground."
"Fine!"
"Fine."
The two men stalked away, leaving me there with Jim, Raven, and Donovan.
"Well, that was interestingly non-productive," I pointed out.
Raven was probably about to reply in a snappy manner when there was a low growl. Around the corner of the building a large panda appeared, swerving around on the pavement in the seat of a Harley-Davidson. Then he gunned the engine and shot by us, squealing around the next corner. For a moment we stared at where he had come from, as if expecting another panda, or maybe a VW bug full of pandas.
"You know," I commented. "I'm beginning to think that this panda thing is getting out of control. Why don't we find Jack and Gary and see why they inflicted this problem on us."
"They didn't do it," Raven commented. "I asked them."
I gave her a look, but given the way she was dressed, that was probably true. Jack and Gary's ability to lie, and indeed their ability to communicate in any way, is directly proportional to their ability to believe that the person they are talking to has a Y chromosome. When confronted by a girl in a swimsuit their communicative ability falls so low that they retreat to their labs to hide in. This is why we don't let them go to the beach, or TA classes involving pre-meds. The last time was a disaster. It took the archaeo-linguists three days to figure out which language they were actually speaking.
"Anyway, I asked them to do something about it," Raven continued.
"You WHAT?"
"Hey," she stared all of us down. "If I don't get any work done today, neither does anybody else."
I grumbled at her and went back to my office. Maybe I could salvage something out of all of this mess. But no, ten minutes later I had Raven and Donovan in there arguing.
"Look," Raven was saying. "They're big and intelligent. Obviously they're mutations created by some underground laboratory or something, or some experiment trying to take over the world. Hence, they're the creation of technology, and they're your problem."
"Oh no you don't," Donovan retaliated. "They're probably possessed by ancient Chinese spirits bent on destruction or chaos or fulfilling some million-year-old prophecy. Magic. Not technology. Your problem."
"You are not foisting this off on me," Raven folded her arms across her chest.
"All right you two," I stood up, now really irritated. "What the hell are you guys arguing about this time?"
"Whose job it is to take care of those pandas," Donovan pointed to the window. "They're really causing havoc out there. But since I don't deal with magic things, that's Raven's department and-"
"Not magic," Raven complained. "Obviously genetic mutations."
"Look you two," I said. "They're dumb beasts. And they're not my problem."
"They're dumb beasts who are driving SUVs across the lawn and terrorizing the undergrads," Donovan said.
"Exactly my point. Who the hell drives an SUV with gas prices this high?"
"He's got a point there," Donovan admitted. A moment later, much to my relief, they left.
But alas, my brief moment of uninterrupted labor was lost when I got another visit. The visit I had been dreading. It was Jack and Gary, and they looked distinctly happy about something. Now, don't get me wrong, I don't mind it when they're happy, as long as somebody else picks up the pieces afterward. I don't want it to be my responsibility.
"We found a solution to the panda problem," Jack said.
"Ho boy," I sighed. But this I went to go look at, because somebody has to keep an eye on those two. They took me downstairs to the main lecture room and flung open the door. At first I thought it had snowed in there, because there was a lot more white there than there normally is. Then I realized that the white was in rather large blobs. Then some of the blobs moved.
"Polar bears?" I asked in disbelief.
"Yeah," Gary pointed. "Aren't they great?"
"And how do you expect this to help?" I yelled. "Polar bears may be big, but they don't eat anything nearly as large as a panda. What are they going to do, go hunt seals? They're solitary ice hunters, they'll probably just go for the nearest garbage dumpster and -- dear God, please do not tell me that I just saw that bear shoot laser beams out of its eyes."
"All right," Gary answered, sounding sort of nervous. "We won't tell you."
I sighed and exited the room, only to find Donovan and Raven arguing with each other in the hallway.
"We've got a problem. Gary and Jack came up with their solution."
I watched with great satisfaction as their faces blanched. Teach them to barge into my office.
"They've managed to, well...remember the Care Bears. There was like a green one and a purple one and-"
"There was Tenderheart Bear and Cheer Bear and...I mean," Raven looked at both of our faces. "Shut up!"
"Whatever," I shrugged. "Anyway, Gary and Jack have managed to clone Missile Defense Bear."
"I don't remember-" Raven began just as a beam of ruby-red laser light burst out of the lecture room and melted a nearby plaque.
"Wow!" Donovan said, staring inside. "He just fired laser beams out of his eyes. That is so frickin' awesome!"
"Will you shut up!"
Then there was the thump of heavy footsteps outside. The doors opened. And a whole gang of pandas, wearing leather jackets and carrying various heavy biking tools walked through the doors and squarely into the lecture hall. Feeling a bit worried, we followed the last one. All the pandas had lined up on one end of the room. All the polar bars were on the other side. It looked like somebody had accidentally merged a National Geographic special with West Side Story. All the animals were growling at each other.
"Raven," I whispered, "you can do that commune with the animals thing, can't you. You know, getting in touch with your inner spirit animal or whatever you do?"
"Actually," Raven began with the air of a true aficionado, "it's a mix between techniques developed in eclectic branches of-"
"I don't care if it's something you got off of a Cracker Jack box," I hissed. "Just tell me what they're saying."
She pointed slightly. "That panda just told the polar bears that their mothers were so wimpy they had to go out and buy fur coats just to get through winter."
"Is that an insult to a polar bear?"
"Do polar bears's eyes usually glow like that?"
"I'll take that as a yes." I sighed and looked around at both Donovan and Raven who were suddenly looking a bit forlorn.
"I'll go start filling out the insurance forms," Donovan said.
"I'll evacuate the building," Raven said.
"I guess I'll go tell students that classes are canceled." I turned to walk out just as a one thousand pound polar bear was sent crashing through the doorframe in front of me.
Anyway, I'm writing this just to tell the rest of the department that the trip we had planned to go to the zoo is definitely off until the zoo management can figure out how to refit the polar bear exhibit with laser-proof glass.