Subject: Technicalities Resent-From: staff.newyork@agency.com Date: Mon, 31 Jul 2000 10:49:19 -0400 From: "Mitch Golden" To: nystaff@agency.com, woodbridge@agency.com Technicalities July 31, 2000 *) My Punishment It has been a long time since your e-mail filter has sorted one of these into your "delete without reading" box. It's not that there is nothing going on in the tech dept, it's just that I haven't been around to see it. You see, at the end of last month, Ritesh and Thor were looking for a way to make sure I'd stop making trouble around the office. Probably I had neglected one time too many to get my hours in on time. Knowing that I would not mind very much if I had to deposit my checks manually (which I did anyway until Feb of this year), they decided on a more nefarious punishment: have me spend my summer flying back and forth to St. Louis. So, while you all were sunning yourselves on the beach on the long July 4 weekend, I was learning about eMaritz. While you all were lolling about in the midsummer (post Compaq) doldrums, Eric Valinsky, Yuju Yen, Soma Chaudhury, Laurence Hill, and I were spending time in the land of roast pork steaks. (And Henry Sauvageot and Phaedra Divras were there whenever we weren't.) You'd better believe my hours have been in by Monday noon all month. *) The Tech Department's Latest Fad The weeks we were down there did not feature a great deal of entertainment options. It was work from 8:30 till 7, then go out to dinner. With your business colleagues, you're unlikely to talk about romance, politics, or religion (though we did remark on the proliferation of huge, ugly churches of various denominations that flanked the highways between the hotel, Maritz, and the airport). With little else to discuss, our main topic of conversation was Yuju's diet. Those of you outside the tech department probably don't yet know that Yuju is on the Atkins Diet. Surely you've heard of it - it's where you have to cut back your intake of carbohydrates by 90+%. You get to eat all the meat and cheese and nuts you want, you just stay clear of milk and potatoes. Now while I don't have the same response to someone indulging in crackpot ideas about nutrition as I would for example if Yuju were espousing the abolition of the estate tax or trying to convert me the Unitarian Church, it really is disconcerting repeatedly to eat with someone who claims to be on a diet and who keeps ordering huge slabs of steak. "Oh, and give me the sauce on the side." (The waitress in the KC Masterpiece restaurant told Yuju that her parents were on the diet, and gained 20 lbs as soon as they went off. It warmed my heart.) As odd as this is, I had the same experience recently with another member of the tech department. It seems that Peter Gluck is on some similar program. When we were all driving out to Boyds and we stopped for lunch, he proceeded to pull out of his bag and consume not one but two huge slabs of cheese. Someone has persuaded a supposedly rational member of our organization that he can lose weight by eating a lunch consisting of 1500 calories of fat. Can someone tell me, is it just the tech department that has been affected this way, or have people in other departments lost their minds as well? *) A Great Mystery Solved One of the complaints I'm likely to receive about this week's issue is the lack of any pornographic content. Rendering titillating a description of what we've been doing the past few weeks - spending all our waking hours building ER diagrams in Rational Rose - is certainly beyond my limited writing abilities. On the other hand, we did stay at one of those high-tone hotels that offers pornography beamed right to the edge of your king-size bed thanks to the miracles of pay cable TV. I've recently been taking an informal survey of my friends as to why they - like me - never buy any such entertainment when they are traveling on business. Everyone agrees, and the reason is actually simple: it's that supposedly reassuring line the TV flashes about how the name of the movie won't appear on the hotel bill. Look, if I hand in an expense report with an attached hotel receipt with a line that reads $9.95 - 11PM-1AM - Movie. Title suppressed. the client will know exactly what's going on. Who wants the folks on 12 looking edgewise at me when I pick up the expense check? No, discretion is the better part of valor. CNN and HBO will have to do. Now, if these hotels really want to meet the needs of the business traveler, they'll print a name of a movie on your hotel bill, just not the name of the movie you watched. I'm surprised they need me to point this out to them. *) Speaking of 12 Laurence Hill submited this item: Has everyone noticed that while those of us who earn revenue for the company have to buy water from the Coke machines (in furtherence of which enterprise no one has changed the filters on the taps since we moved in, and they now take fully 15 minutes to produce a single cup of water), on 12 the people who are administrative overhead get to drink actual Poland Spring water, dispensed from company-subsidized coolers? Anyone down there have any comment? *) Why I Hate Saturday Night Live They tell the same jokes over and over, week after week, until the last person on the planet who can possibly have thought it was funny is sick to death of it. To which I add this note: Remedy is still not up. *) Let's Hire This Guy There's a fellow who sits on the sidewalk at 42nd St and 7th Ave in Times Square on Friday nights with a sign that beckons to the crouds of tourists: Tell Me Off $1.00 Anyone who has been a VP can recount stories of doing this for a living, though the clients pay a great deal more for it. (By my calculation, $1 would buy about 10 seconds of tell-off at typical AGENCY.COM VP rates.) This is known in the service corporation technical jargon as "getting a spanking". Ritesh is an absolute master at this, so much so that the company has taken to sending him to receive spankings for jobs that he had nothing to do with, even work that was done in other offices. In fact, Ritesh is so good at it that recently Scient expressed interest in having AGENCY send him to _their_ clients. *) Woodbridge Since I was even further west than New Jersey for much of July, I don't really know what is going on in our nearby, newly independent office. In fact, due to the monsoon-like conditions that day, I failed to make it to the beach party I described in the last issue. (Much to the great relief of all the partygoers.) The one interesting Woodbridge-related event of the last month was when I received from Richard Harris a little movie referring to a comment I made in one of these newsletters about how the advertizing photos would make Benyo look like Fabio. (Check it out: http://intranet.agency.com/AgencyKR/DocRetrieval/target?Document=com.webridge.entity.Entity%5BOID%5BE747D6D2EE66D41185680008C7E6499C%5D%5D&Section=com.webridge.entity.Entity%5BOID%5BBAEDB4EBD119D311A6340050049D3176%5D%5D Don't you love the intranet URLs?) While I note that it is impressive that Woodbridge now has a creative department capable of producing such a video, I think it shows they still have a way to go. For one thing, did you note that the soundtrack was ABBA, of all things?! Or that when you get to the end of it there's no way to exit, only to play again? Or maybe Richard made this video himself? Or maybe he wants someone to make _him_ look like Fabio? *) Imitation is... I understand that Sarah Miller is now writing a newsletter for the copyrighter's group with the title "Banalities".