An Exercise in Avoiding Boredom

The hoopla around same-sex marriage on the radio today is deafening. The more amused I was when a friend sent me a link to this photo, courtesy of one “joestump” on Flickr.

You may have seen it on American TV and not believed it. But it is true. Seen in my neighborhood, fortunately not too close to where I live.

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Now I know the real reasons behind the demise of my Roomba.

As the photo below demonstrates, the skills needed for succeeding in the military are non-trivial. Looking at the photo (not sure which army or military organization this is), suggests that you should neither like to eat beans, onions, or garlic, and also that you should not be ticklish or heat sensitive in your private parts. Poor guys!

The 2007 SAP Research Report is out… Subtitled: thinking out of the box… Wished they had asked a native speaker. At least my thinking doesn’t come out of a box. It sure is unique! I hope the readers of this blog can attest to it.

If you use Google as an oracle, it shows to be a common mistake. “Thinking outside the box” gives us 961,000 hits today, and “thinking out of the box” gives us 214,000 hits. So there was a 20% chance to get it wrong. Stuff happens…

Today, at work, I went running over lunch. When I returned to the locker room, I couldn’t open the lock to my locker with my clothes in it. Not sure what had happened, maybe the lock I was using had gotten old. In any case, I needed help, and so I went to the reception desk and asked for someone with a bolt cutter.

“Oh, you need facilities,” she said, “let me call them.”

As it turned out, facilities was out, having lunch. Nobody could be reached. When I insisted, the receptionist got defensive: “I’ve been trained to call Junior,” she said, “and that’s what I did. I can’t help it. However, I can file a CSS ticket for you.” (A CSS ticket, at SAP, is a formal request for help in a computer system. It typically takes ages to get someone to respond, and frequently they are just forgotten.) So much for a quick solution.

Still wearing my running clothes, I decided to go eat myself. When I returned, facilities was still having lunch. After a bit of back and forth, I left to ask our usually well-informed secretary for help, who gave me the number of the facilities hot-line. When I called facilities myself, I got directed to… the receptionist, the one who had been trained to call Junior. So I went back to talk with the receptionist and convinced her to call facilities once more. Finally, one hour after we had first tried, she got someone on the phone. “Is it about a lock?” Junior must have said, “Then you’ve got to call security.”

So security we called. We got someone on the phone right away. It took them 15min to show up and cut the padlock, but at least they were available. “24 by 7,” they proudly said, and “Why did you try facilities in the first place? Everybody knows they are out having lunch most of the time.”

Ah, organizational hierarchy. So I learned something.

And as to our receptionist? She was friendly, professional, and barely useful. She reminded me of a cab driver who had lost her navigator.

As an experiment, I micro-blogged Josef Joffe’s lecture-turned-seminar at the German Stanford Association annual gathering in Heidelberg. Here the live(!) tweets, FWIW:

Josef Joffe turned lecture into seminar in Alte Aula. — 08:05 AM June 07, 2008 from TwitterBerry

Joffe: Does the world need the U.S. as a sheriff? — 08:07 AM June 07, 2008 from TwitterBerry

Joffe: Was it fear of American strength and now it is fear of American weakness? — 08:14 AM June 07, 2008 from TwitterBerry

Putting into Joffe’s mouth: Do we need committee leadership rather than a sheriff? — 08:19 AM June 07, 2008 from TwitterBerry

Sigh, no recognition of collective intelligence, only an example: selecting the president. — 08:24 AM June 07, 2008 from TwitterBerry

What a contrast: Outside a drunk cheering crowd, inside spirited intellectual (over the top?) debate. — 08:27 AM June 07, 2008 from TwitterBerry

Joffe: Barbara provided continuity on foreign policy between Carter and Reagan administration by knowing where the files were. — 08:33 AM June 07, 2008 from TwitterBerry

Joffe: Europeans will be disappointed when Obama becomes president. — 08:36 AM June 07, 2008 from TwitterBerry

Joffe: The U.S. is good at reinventing itself. — 08:41 AM June 07, 2008 from TwitterBerry

Putting into Joffe’s mouth: Wo bleibt Frau Chen? — 08:50 AM June 07, 2008 from TwitterBerry

The time stamp (not surprisingly) is off by 9 hours. I guess Twitter declared GMT to run through its Bay Area headquarter.

In business class, all stewardesses are blond and beautiful.

Unless, of course, you are flying United, in case of which they have claws and fangs.

Well, to be precise, exactly at Muttern…