The C# PM Team Goes to Dixie and Meets the Man
After hanging out with us all summer (and doing more than his share of excellent work), our intern Alex Turner headed back to school this evening. To send him off, the team went out to Dixie's, a favorite barbecue spot here in the Seattle area. Dixie’s is an earthy joint built in an old auto-repair shop. It has the flavor of a real Louisiana restaurant from down in the bayou. Replete with a growling staff that cheerfully pokes good natured fun aimed at both their fellow workers and their customers, Dixie’s features as a star attraction a barbecue sauce called "the man" that is designed to set normal human beings flat on their backs.
You can get a sense of the rough hewn décor at Dixie's by checking out this picture of the C# PM’s chowing down with the fancy cutlery:
I'm a vegetarian, so I stuck with the delicious corn bred. But you can see from the empty plates that my team members appeared to enjoy their meal.
If you are not familiar with the Microsoft C# PM team, this is an excellent chance to become acquainted with them. (Click on the picture to pop up a full sized view of the image.) Moving your eyes around the table clockwise from the left you will discover Karen Liu (IDE), DJ Park (IDE), Raj Pai (our fearless leader), Anson Horton (the brains of the outfit), Luca Bolognese (manager of the IDE, Compiler, Language and DLINQ PM’s), Alex Turner, and Luke Hoban (Compiler). Missing from the team picture shown above are, Scott Nonnenberg (leads meetings, keeps us on schedule), Dinesh Kulkarni (DLINQ) and Mads Torgersen (Language).
If you look carefully at Alex’s face, you can see that it is a bit red, and that his smile is a little tentative. This is because Raj, Luca and others cajoled him into accepting an extra large helping of “the man.” Taking interns and new employees to Dixie and feeding them the man is something of a Microsoft initiation right.
To give you some sense of what Alex is facing, I’ll describe my own encounter with that dubious concoction. The guy who serves it, a gruff voiced stocky man with a blustery manner, dipped a toothpick about an eighth of an inch into the sauce, and the passed it to me. Though there was less than a drop of the vile looking stuff on the end of that shard of wood, I was soon gasping for air, and begging for mercy. That was what one tiny dallop of the stuff does. Alex had a at least one heaping spoonful. The following picture captures something of his condition:
If you look carefully on Alex's left cheek, you can see a bead of sweat that trickled down from his sideburn despite the cool, windy Seattle weather. Notice also the hunched shoulders, the red face, and his perpetually good natured grin which in this picture nearly threatens to fade into a ghastly rictus. The day before Alex had presented a very tough specification in front of a difficult audience, and never once faltered. So you can just imagine the pressure he was under if he was reduced to this state. To his credit, he cheerfully finished his whole meal, though even Raj advised him to relent. He’s flying home tonight by plane, and I’m worried about anyone who has to sit next to him.
Given my culinary habits, I'm obviously not the one to give Dixie's a review. But I have lived down in the bayou of Lousiania in a place called Houma. From my experience, I would say these guys definitely have the appropriate decor down pat. It was fun to go there, soak up the ambiance, and have even a passing encounter with "the man."
(The photos in this blog were taken with my Motorola Q.)
