The next installment of the Dogs of Bore is on its way. In the meantime, I've got a great idea -- let's fill a vending machine with gold and stick it right in the middle of the airport!
No, really.
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Saturday, June 6, 2009
The Dogs of Bore, Part Two: Rorschach's Revenge
(Ed. note: Welcome back! It has been six weeks since I last posted, which is an eternity in blog years. I got caught up in being a rental property manager there for a bit, which turned out fantastically well but took A LOT of time. But stick with me, won’t you? I won’t be this neglectful again.)
When we left the action, Hapless Carpenter and TwitchyWitch Arts Girl had vacated my cube in a sawdusty huff, threatening to return in two hours to inflict art in an undisclosed location. I spent those two hours collating colorful charts and graphs which indicated how many out of a list of 30,000 financial advisors had actually opened each of the mass informational emails BigAnonymous sent them every month for a year. (The emails included links to various documents that were available on our website and told advisors via punchy little blurbs it was my job to write that the documents were, in fact, available on our website.) The answer: not that many. Then I went to my meeting.
“But what is it?” said Ivy, a petite brunette with glasses, a fabulous wardrobe and the most sarcastic sense of humor I'd encountered in my wanderings at BigAnonymous. I was a fan of Ivy, not least because as a rule in corporate America I have found that those who crack the wisest tend to be the wisest.
“I have no idea,” said the Mountie. The Mountie was our boss. (For the record, he’s not actually, and never has been, a Mountie; I’ll leave it to you to decide why it’s an appropriate nickname. It could be, for instance, that I think it would be fantastic if he were a Mountie on the side, like a volunteer fireman. Because I do.)
“It just looked like a bunch of Rorschach blots,” said someone else. Their conversation faded as they walked down the hall, shaking their heads. It didn’t matter that I couldn’t hear the rest; they could only be talking about one thing. I ran into the conference room. There, along the solid wall just beyond the glass, were the missing shelves:
They’d been hung in four rows, each about eight feet long. Spaced evenly across the rows was a series of 4x6 inch black frames. In each frame was a black blob printed on a white background. Hapless and TWAG had barged into my cube at nine in the morning, unannounced and in a big important hurry, because they were on a mission to install forty-eight framed black blobs on a conference room wall. Because the blobs were presumably expensive and copyrighted (I know they were numbered, because I checked), I can’t show you a real one. But let’s approximate:
Depending on your budget, you are looking either at a very expensive corporate art installation or at a black blob made in 45 seconds for free on my laptop. For the former, multiply by 48, place in custom-ordered plain black metal frames and line up in rows in a conference room.
Over the next few days we played some spirited rounds of Name That Blob, a game won decisively by a colleague I’ll call the Mailman, for reasons you are again invited to infer. (Like the Mountie, the Mailman is not, in fact, a mailman.) “They all look like pints to me,” he said. We imagined the blobs morphing into 48 silhouettes of cold, foamy beer steins and let out a collective sigh. “Mmmmmm, piiiiiiiiiiints,” we thought. Then we retired the Mailman’s number and hung it from the rafters.
But we got bored with the game, and I got restless. Like Poe's telltale heart, the blobs cried to me through the glass conference room wall, demanding attention. (I wasn’t the only one who found them irresistible. Someone was sneaking into the conference room and turning two or three of the frames around to face the wall; I admired the impulse, but I wanted something with a little more ooomph.) One day, after eight solid hours of taking screenshots of the BigAnonymous web content management system and marking them up with red ovals and arrows and things for a technical guide I was writing--work that is both extremely detailed and excruciatingly boring, the double crucifix of much corporate activity--this picture caught my eye from its position on the interior wall of my cube:
That is a picture of my dog, and as soon as I saw it I knew what to do. Because it doesn’t take a lot of Photoshop skill to turn that into this:
You see where this is going, right? Of course you do.
That night after everyone left I slipped into the conference room and brought one of the frames back to my desk. I slid out the cardboard backing and lifted the blob off the small sheet of glass. I printed out the Rosie silhouette, centered the outline of her giant ears against the glass, slid the whole thing back into the frame and slipped back into the conference room, where I placed it smack dab in the middle of the second shelf down—eye level for most people—hiding, in all its glory, like Poe’s purloined letter this time, in plain sight.
And then I waited.
Next up: Part Three: Is That a Dog?
Coming much, much sooner than Part Two.
When we left the action, Hapless Carpenter and TwitchyWitch Arts Girl had vacated my cube in a sawdusty huff, threatening to return in two hours to inflict art in an undisclosed location. I spent those two hours collating colorful charts and graphs which indicated how many out of a list of 30,000 financial advisors had actually opened each of the mass informational emails BigAnonymous sent them every month for a year. (The emails included links to various documents that were available on our website and told advisors via punchy little blurbs it was my job to write that the documents were, in fact, available on our website.) The answer: not that many. Then I went to my meeting.
When I returned to my cube after the meeting and lunch, about three hours later, virtually all traces of Hapless and TWAG were gone. No more shelves, no power tools, no rubble—just a hint of sawdust on my chair. Huh, I thought. What had they done? More to the point, where had they done it? To understand the answer, you’ll need to know the lay of the land in question:
Take note of the glass wall in the conference room across from my cube. I could see about 85% of what happened in there. Because people often either a) talked really loudly, or b) left the door ajar, I could also hear about 85% of what happened in there. There was no newly installed art in my cube (leaving unanswered the question of why Hapless had chosen to dump the narrow shelves in it) and none on the walls anywhere around me. I was about to walk down the hall looking for—well, for something, I wasn’t sure what—when a small knot of people came out of the conference room all a-chatter.
“But what is it?” said Ivy, a petite brunette with glasses, a fabulous wardrobe and the most sarcastic sense of humor I'd encountered in my wanderings at BigAnonymous. I was a fan of Ivy, not least because as a rule in corporate America I have found that those who crack the wisest tend to be the wisest.
“I have no idea,” said the Mountie. The Mountie was our boss. (For the record, he’s not actually, and never has been, a Mountie; I’ll leave it to you to decide why it’s an appropriate nickname. It could be, for instance, that I think it would be fantastic if he were a Mountie on the side, like a volunteer fireman. Because I do.)
“It just looked like a bunch of Rorschach blots,” said someone else. Their conversation faded as they walked down the hall, shaking their heads. It didn’t matter that I couldn’t hear the rest; they could only be talking about one thing. I ran into the conference room. There, along the solid wall just beyond the glass, were the missing shelves:
They’d been hung in four rows, each about eight feet long. Spaced evenly across the rows was a series of 4x6 inch black frames. In each frame was a black blob printed on a white background. Hapless and TWAG had barged into my cube at nine in the morning, unannounced and in a big important hurry, because they were on a mission to install forty-eight framed black blobs on a conference room wall. Because the blobs were presumably expensive and copyrighted (I know they were numbered, because I checked), I can’t show you a real one. But let’s approximate:
Depending on your budget, you are looking either at a very expensive corporate art installation or at a black blob made in 45 seconds for free on my laptop. For the former, multiply by 48, place in custom-ordered plain black metal frames and line up in rows in a conference room.
Over the next few days we played some spirited rounds of Name That Blob, a game won decisively by a colleague I’ll call the Mailman, for reasons you are again invited to infer. (Like the Mountie, the Mailman is not, in fact, a mailman.) “They all look like pints to me,” he said. We imagined the blobs morphing into 48 silhouettes of cold, foamy beer steins and let out a collective sigh. “Mmmmmm, piiiiiiiiiiints,” we thought. Then we retired the Mailman’s number and hung it from the rafters.
But we got bored with the game, and I got restless. Like Poe's telltale heart, the blobs cried to me through the glass conference room wall, demanding attention. (I wasn’t the only one who found them irresistible. Someone was sneaking into the conference room and turning two or three of the frames around to face the wall; I admired the impulse, but I wanted something with a little more ooomph.) One day, after eight solid hours of taking screenshots of the BigAnonymous web content management system and marking them up with red ovals and arrows and things for a technical guide I was writing--work that is both extremely detailed and excruciatingly boring, the double crucifix of much corporate activity--this picture caught my eye from its position on the interior wall of my cube:
That is a picture of my dog, and as soon as I saw it I knew what to do. Because it doesn’t take a lot of Photoshop skill to turn that into this:
You see where this is going, right? Of course you do.
That night after everyone left I slipped into the conference room and brought one of the frames back to my desk. I slid out the cardboard backing and lifted the blob off the small sheet of glass. I printed out the Rosie silhouette, centered the outline of her giant ears against the glass, slid the whole thing back into the frame and slipped back into the conference room, where I placed it smack dab in the middle of the second shelf down—eye level for most people—hiding, in all its glory, like Poe’s purloined letter this time, in plain sight.
And then I waited.
###
Next up: Part Three: Is That a Dog?
Coming much, much sooner than Part Two.
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