The Prodigal Eagle Returns


From darrinm Mon Sep 13 10:37:24 -0700 1999
From: Darrin Mossor
To: lst_eagle
Subject: Welcome Back Thanks

[Note: If you have no interest in hearing about my adventures in my]
[first week back, delete this now. ]

I'd like to take few minutes to thank everyone involved in making me feel welcome my first week back. To each and everyone one of you, feel free to swing by and pick up your own personal restraining order when you get a chance.

I'd like to note a few of my favorites, just to make sure they're documented in case of future law suits:

First Runner Up: The lunch ditch. This went off very nicely and special recognition should go to Gordon for successfully ditching me in the bathroom of CPR after completing his business in 2.4 seconds. A certificate for a free visit to the Urologist of his choice awaits him upon request.

The award for the most successful prank: The Training Video.

This one caught me completely by surprise. I came back to my office late Wednesday to discover a video on my chair with a note from Shelly indicating that this was the latest "vision" video, "A Conversation with Aart" and that I needed to view it and get it back to her by tomorrow. Grrrrrr. Fine.

So, I get home late, like 6:50pm, late for dinner and my wife tells me I need to take my son to Scouts at 7pm. I probably knew this once but had forgotten it. Out the door I go, son in tow, sans dinner. We get home again about 9pm and I still have to watch the silly video. Double Grrrrrr.

I take a snack upstairs and pop that sucker in the VCR. Music rises, scenes of Synopsys abound. Voice over describing "Moore's Law" and Synopsys' goal to keep up with it, yadda yadda yadda. My eyes are drooping already. About five minutes in, the silly tape seems to skip back about 30 seconds and replay the previous boring part. Two minutes later, it happens again. Now I'm steaming!

Then, in the middle of some scene of several professionally dressed women chatting, I get Casablanca! Just about a 30 seconds or so. I rewind to see if I missed the segue that would make that make sense. Nope. Okay, now I'm really cheesed. I'm looking at a mangled tape! I sit through several more minutes of the tape inadvertently skipping back to reiterate a point. I'm now at full boil.

Suddenly, the tape jumps to the last scene of Casablanca ("This is the beginning of a beautiful friendship..."). Which, by the way, is way better than the Synopsys video, so I watch that instead, not fast forwarding. Credits begin to roll, my finger hovers over the fast forward button when suddenly ... I'm greeted by a shot of the entire group welcoming me back! It was priceless. I was stunned. I sat there for what seemed like forever with my jaw around my knees then began laughing so loud that my wife came up to see what in the video was so funny. It was great. And whoever did it (*cough*Bart) is not going to get his/her(/Bart's) tape back. So there.

Now, for some additional awards and recognition:

The "Oh, look, I'm being stalked" award goes to person(s) that cut out the advertisements and replaced the heads with mine. This demonstrates either alot of effort or too much time.

Honorable Mention: The Bewitched/"Welcome back Derwood/Donnie/Doug/etc" posters. These seemed to come back up nearly as quickly as I could take them down.

The "It's like I never left" award. I arrived in my office to discover that indeed I had a machine, it's just that it's a P100 PC that refuses to boot. Rainer arrives to help me install rain, the new Solaris box. I log in, remembering the Synopsys default password, and my silly environment returns just exactly as I left it! It appears everything has been restored. Rainer mentions that I might want to check my email, so I do, finding 190 messages! Rainer was kind enough to turn on my email almost two weeks earlier! Whatta guy ;-)

The "Almost, but not quite" award goes to whoever attempted to recreate the spinning business card of death and the hole punches that I am supposed to have done to Jaci. (Okay, I did do it. But mine worked. But, using Geoff's Japanese business card was a nice touch.) In this case, I opened the drawer, the card came around once, impacted the pile of hole punches and stopped. Too bad, that would have been fun. If the perpetrator would like to stop by, I can show them what went wrong and how to fix it in the future.

The "I gotta find some new tricks" award to whoever changed the web page icon and successfully chown/chmod'd it to look like I did it over a year ago. I didn't realize I got nailed for that one (the chown/chmod part).

I'm sure I forgot to mention a few (like the pieces of paper in the phone connections, keeping me from reporting that my phone was busted or a nameplate that finally spells my name like everyone else seems to think my name should be spelled), so if I missed your favorite, I'm sorry.

Finally, once again, my thanks to everyone for helping to make my first week back very memorable.

-Darrin


Darrin Mossor
Last modified: Thu Oct 14 16:21:17 1999