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So this afternoon, the entire company went lawn bowling. No, it wasn’t some kind of anachronistic insurrection, agonizingly raising an arthritic middle finger at upper management. Rather, it was a sanctioned social event intended to build a team atmosphere. Me being me, I was way to competitive and certainly made more people hate me than if I’d just stayed behind.

On our team was Gordon, who said “Sweet” ALL THE TIME and bowled like he was on PCP but was otherwise really cool, and Leila and Jackie, who seemed nice.

I feel happy to have spent an afternoon in the last sun of summer.

Day 1 is over, and they had trouble dragging me out of the place. Time has never gone so fast. Ever.

Spent most of the day trying to understand other people’s perl code and massively recursive Makefiles. Bizarrely, it was fun. Working with friends is cool.

[whistles a merry tune]

Today is the first day of my new job as a senior developer in a company, ooh, 1000 times the size of my former employer. Will I become swamped in beaurocracy? Or will I valiantly ford the raging rivers of big company politics? Or will I just do what I normally do and hope no-one sees me for what I really am worthless hopeless a fraud a fake and unloveable oh please let the agony of existence end so that I may finally be at peace?

Oh, and I sure do feel relaxed after the 0 days I took off in between my old job and new job.

Ripped straight from Matt’s blog.

From usenet:

If you were a company called Powergen and you had a subsidiary that operated in Italy, what would you call that company’s website?

Oh, yes you would.

Tonight, The Debacles played Impro Sundae as a house band. It went far more smoothly than I’d dared to hope, and I’m really impressed by Brent (guitar/bass) and Matt (drums) for their sterling effort in completely unfamiliar circumstances. Brent, in particular, because he’s currently sleeping about 3 hours a night while raising a 2-month-old child.

It started shakily when the host (Dave Williams) introduced us and asked us to play a little riff; we stumbled through 30 seconds of dissonant garbage as we tried in vain to come up with a funky progression. However we soon found our feet, conveniently located at the ends of our legs, and that made all the difference.

Probably the most challenging game for me personally was Balladeer, in which a player sings a few verses, then the players advance the story, then he sings another few verses, and another advance by the players, and so on. We played a completely different tune in a different style for each verse and some of them worked really well, like the Nick Cave one where Andy managed to put in a Red Right Hand reference right at the end. We’d played none of the tunes before, we just agreed on them while the players were acting out the scene, and then jumped in.

Another fun game was Greatest Hits, which tonight was Greatest Hits of the Gatekeeper (?). Cam named himself something like Oleg the Dirty Fuck (or similar) and announced hits along the lines of Youse Cunts Stay Out. My mother was really impressed. At the end, Cam started groping co-host Janelle’s breasts in a scene that can only be described as highly unlikely to appear on broadcast television any time soon. Perhaps it’s his frustration at the relatively gentile constraints of his own Cable show(s)? It was, however, absolutely hilarious.

As was Nick throwing the word Zimbabwe at random into a word-at-a-time story about an anorexic swimmer.

Anyhoo, we played pretty well and improvised as well as could be expected, and none of the players seemed to have any complaints.

Three word assessment: Hard But Fun!

We’ll be back.