Must I thus leave thee, Paradise? — thus leave
Thee, native soil, these happy walks and shades?
Platform Engineering’s fall from grace has been ignominious indeed. At the height of our powers, we had a commanding view of the campus from the top floor of Building A. Then they moved us down to the second floor of Building A. Then the second floor of Building B, Building A’s poor cousin. And finally, tomorrow we move across the street to the newly-reclaimed Building E. Somebody up there hates us.
A couple of weeks ago, several of us went on an exploratory mission to Building E. The place was gutted — walls stripped to the studs, pipes exposed, workers welding, the smell of gypsum everywhere. We trooped up the stairs to check out our floor. Ryan opened the stairwell door, looked out at our floor, closed the door, and said, “It’s raining in there.” We thought Ryan was kidding, but sure enough, water was streaming down from a ceiling pipe and pooling on the new carpet. The puddle was large enough to comfortably support several full-grown koi. As we gawked, a construction worker with no hard hat snapped at us, “This is a hard hat area.” Nothing to see here, move along…
Anyway, it could be worse — at least they didn’t shuffle us off to the satellite campus at Mission College. I mean, we’re not total losers.
Will the koi be there when you move in? I like koi.
No koi, unfortunately. To make matters worse, the conference rooms on our floor have names like “Aspire”, “Dream”, “Create”, et cetera. Our previous building had conference rooms all named after Roman gods. This is how much they hate us: we’ve gone from ANGRY PAGAN THUNDER GODS to frickin’ Deepak Chopra. Kill me now.
It could be worse. I’m trying to figure out how it could be….maybe it would be worse if the rooms were named after flavors of sorbet?
You’re a writer, why don’t you write up some new, cooler names? Names of famous military victories? Sports cars? Birds of Prey? Wonders of the World?
Our conference rooms are named after tropical islands. Guam, Bora Bora, etc. I think the inspirational poster names are still worse, though…
My dept. tried to get our conference rooms named “Pirate Cove” & “Ninja Hideout”. Sadly, we were shot down by the Engineers and HR, who frankly have no pinache. But on the upside we don’t have to share seating with Koi.
Bonus question, name that movie:
“You’ve got a mongrel koi in your pond, its the most dangerous of all goldfish!”
Deuce Bigalow