Patrick the Prankster
One aspect [at least on occasion] of life at Microsoft is some good-natured [well, at least, hope that’s what it is] practical joking. Patrick pulled off a couple of gems recently (I won’t name the targets, but they’d be well-known to the community at large).
The One True Popper
In the first one- a key senior member of our development team went on a well-deserved vacation, including some well-earned time with his latest progeny. He returned in early January to find a sign on his office door announcing [a paraphrase on my part] it had been child-proofed. As for the office? Layers and layers of bubble wrap- the floor, walls, duct taped in several layers about the chair, and more… For a while there, you could tell when he was in the office by tracking the pops…
The Developer’s Day Hath Come
In the second case, another member of the development team went abroad to give several of our WinHEC presentations [including the one Ilias and I did at the original event] at WinHEC events in Asia. A picture of him appeared in a Chinese-language web report. When we attempted to read the article, the weaknesses in machine translation from Chinese to English were very apparent, and were [in English] quite hilarious.
At a team luncheon, he was presented with some more of our prankster’s handiwork- a photoshopped image of a cereal box (WinHECies) with his photo and snippets of several phrases from the article, along with some advertising blurbs [“Help Fight Crashes” “You can make a difference!”]. I’d be tempted to post a copy, but having had to tolerate people [when I was running my laundry business] who pointedly looked down upon Asian immigrants because of similar issues with English, I thought it better not to provide anything to play into those prejudices. But it was a masterful job [and in good taste- don’t misjudge my concerns].
It would be nice to see an engineer get that sort of star treatment, wouldn’t it?
For my parting thought- I should feel lucky- all he’s done to me lately is obliterate me in Halo…
