The Sociology of Urinals

So today was a typical day, you can tell by the lack of updates that my life is both too boring to write about and too busy to have the time.

Work is still fun. I am always amazed at how fast my extra-long day flies by because I am genuinely interested in what I'm doing and doing it well. Compare that to Avenza where I was usually falling asleep by 2pm. I think the difference is in focus. At Avenza I spent a lot of time surfing barely-legal goat porn (5+ years old), exchanging funny links, chatting, etc. Surprisingly, this sort of distraction is actually more boring and tiring than being engrossed in interesting work. I went to the DMV during lunch to finish my car registration and after work I went to a State Farm place to sign up for car insurance.

It was pretty amusing to deal with the insurance people, these guys stay at work until very late and are all good friends. They also have a pretty kickass conference room with a big screen TV and so on. Anyway, as soon as this agent guy found out I make software he said they need someone to do freelance making modifications to their existing software. I told him I might be up for it, but that I'm expensive. We'll see, I might follow up with him about it next week. Do I really want more work? This might be sweet to do on the side.

At Thomson I've noticed something peculiar that I feel is important to bring to everyone's attention. Our washroom has exactly two urinals and three stalls. While this fact is not earthshattering, what is strange is that one urinal is your typical man-height urinal, but the other one is at the right height for a child or midget. Now, since we know that Thomson doesn't employ children (at least not in their North American offices; the Beijing lab, however...), we are left with only one conclusion: Thomson has a midget-to-norm ratio of 1:1. This is stupendous. I haven't really *seen* any midgets around the office campus, but based on this evidence I'm sure there are many of them around. Maybe they get a different lunch hour so that they avoid getting crushed by the rest of us. What I don't get is how come there is only the one life-size chess set outside the building. How do the midgets play chess when the pieces are so big relative to them? Do they get forklifts or something? Is there a version of the Segway for these little people?

Don't be giving me guff about calling them midgets. At least I'm not calling them "talking footballs" or "another one of my fetishes".

Tomorrow I will write about the co-worker nuances that drive me crazy whenever I start a new job.