Friday Tieday & Other Silliness

During the Omaha trip, one of the random topics of conversation that came up was my experimentation with an "anti-Casual Friday" dress routine at my last company. Places where dress is always fairly casual, I figured the concept of Casual Friday was pretty moot, if not a total sham, so from time to time I would actually dress up on Friday. Someone mentioned that we should try that with the coworkers in our cubicle row. Rather than going to the extent of recommending a full style of dress, we decided to just ask everyone to wear ties, one way or another.

Well, this past Friday was our proof of concept, and it worked. About 2/3rds of us actually took the plunge, far more than I honestly expected. Rather than laughs from folks on other teams that didn't know what was going on, I actually got complements, and even a couple requests to extend the newly founded tradition to the entire user experience team (most of the floor of our building). I don't think we're ready for all that just yet, but maybe we can find a second small team to combine forces with and extend our pilot test.

"Help! It's attacking my neck!"

Speaking of combining forces, my team underwent a merger this week with another group of equal size. The other team worked on a slightly different aspect of the application than us, so the biggest real change for us is that now instead of having three sorta-managers, we will have one. Well, at least we will once our new manager gets up to speed with what we do and how we work. Good stuff there.

The big fire recently enveloping my old project continued to burn heartily, and this week some of the swirling embers congealed into a new page flow, labelled #12 (out of the 2 originally planned). I managed to get that stomped out, but there are still flames everywhere. Thankfully my newer major project is so far behind due do delays upstream that it will probably have to be pushed back a release. However, delay or no delay, I'm still lined up for an executive design review on Wednesday, so here I am, midday on a holiday, merely taking a break before going back to work on these darn mockups.