Tell us your naughty stories

Heck, working in monitoring I know that there are jobs where punctuality is very important. Although I don't usually do shifts myself I've done few when there's noone else available, and it was very embarrasing when I forgot and showed up late one morning to replace a sleepy night shift guy.

But that's something we try to avoid as a team, not some corporate policy managers can hide behind to screw you over and/or cover their asses.

And in Bombay.

I had already learned to type qwerty a few years before taking my high school typing class. The first time that our teacher tested us, I was already typing over 60 WPM. By the end of the class, I was typing at 95 WPM, a good thirty WPM or so above the next student. Unfortunately, at the end of the class, my grade was 69.45 (70 was passing). The reason? Every week, the teacher required us to turn in a five page hand-written essay that we would type on Friday. I had originally learned to type because I hated hand-writing and I would turn the paper in typed and printed from my home computer (An Apple IIe). The teacher would give me a zero every week for not following the rules and I would argue with her that I was taking a typing class, not a penmanship class.

On the last day of class, before she turned in the grades, she offered to let me write an essay in exchange for 1 point. I decided practicality in this case was better than stubbornness and wrote the essay. I believe I chose a theme of practicality, stubbornness, compassion, and compromise.

I was taking a computer science course back in the late '80s in the UK. The course was a straight-to-masters 4 year undergraduate course. One of the requirements was that you were 'sponsored' by a company to get through the course, and IIRC they actually payed some of the tuition. You also had to present your thesis at the end of the 4 years to the faculty and representatives from the various sponsoring companies, a usually sombre and somewhat dull 2-day affair (6 students each day, of the 12 or so of us in each year).

Early in the final year, some friends and I were talking about the presentation, and relating how dull the previous year's was. Earnest undergrads desperately trying not to screw up, and impress the array of suits before them. During the conversation, we decided that it would be awesome if someone showed up in full evening dress.... and later on in the evening, somewhat worse for the wear, I proclaimed that if someone procured me an evening dress, I would wear it for my presentation.

Fast forward to the night before our presentation, after a less than stellar academic year on my part. A knock on the door just after I get back from a subdued night at the bar. A friend has found something for me to wear - not an evening dress, after all, but a dayglo orange halter top and mini-skirt. I figure, what the hell, as I didn't seem to have much to lose.

Next day, I'm on second. I show up early wearing an unseasonable long winter coat (it's may, and even in the north of England it's too warm for a long winter coat). I get a few odd looks, but I don't think anyone actually realizes that I'm presenting next that day.

First guy on that morning finished his presentation, and now it's my turn to present. I stand up at the back of the room, and take off my coat. The prof at the front who is MCing this shindig is the only one who is looking in my direction, and he said something like 'And now we have Mr. Pe.....'. His jaw dropped. I think it was the only time I ever saw him speechless. But then, he probably didn't see male students dressed in dayglo orange mini-skirts and halter tops every day, either...

I stood up, walked to the front, and gave my presentation as if there was nothing unusual going on. You know, I figured I'd already blown it so hard I couldn't screw it up any more. It was probably one of the easiest presentations I've ever done.

Anyway, a few weeks later I found out I'd passed, and I often wonder how much that last minute costume change worked in my favor... I did hear that the next year, the invitations discretely had 'business attire required' on them...

When I was still working as a software dev in a shared cubicle, my cube-mate and I would bitch about the distracting psychological effect of having that open door behind us while we worked. The cubicle walls were decently high -- you had to be pretty tall to peer over them -- but we were in a central location, so other developers, managers, execs, etc. were constantly walking by and scanning us and our screens.

Not that we were doing anything reprehensible, but the idea that we could work for 4 hours straight then spend 5 minutes on Slashdot and be shoulder-surfed by just the wrong person didn't sit well.

Well, during a tour of the new server room, we found a little side closet containing... leftover cubicle pieces! Knowing it probably wouldn't fly, we ran the idea by the boss anyway: can we take the leftover pieces and build an entryway to our cubicle?

Hmm - he'd check on that and get back to us. Soon the word came back -- kudos for our creativity, sure it was a neat idea, but due to fire regulations we couldn't extend our cube into that main hallway.

Okay, so he didn't want to mess with the status quo but didn't want to have to argue about it, so he was passing the buck, which I admit annoyed me a bit. Fortunately, it's pretty trivial to call the local Fire Marshall and check this sort of thing, so I did. Turns out that if your hallway is still as wide as the exit door, you aren't breaking any regulations, so the cube-mate and I brought lunch the next day, waited until the rest of the office went out to eat, and got out the allen wrenches.

We were just tightening the last bolts when or manager got back.

--Hey guys, now wait a minute - --Ah, don't worry! It's okay: I checked with the fire marshall, and we actually could expand by another 5 or 6 feet and still be fine! We're sticking to the original plan, though...

He didn't have much response to that beyond a wry smile.