My normal work schedule has me working from home on Mondays and Fridays with Tuesday through Thursdays being spent in the office. My manager and one teammate work at the same location as well as others in my organization including several other managers so it is good to not be out of sight to avoid being out of mind. I have a spreadsheet (of course) that has calculated the cost of driving to work versus staying at home. That same spreadsheet also has cheaper options based on how soon I enter or exit the toll road between home and work (or if I avoid them altogether and add time to my commute). It is a delicate balance but it is always good to have some solid numbers as a basis for a decision. Is 5 or 10 minutes more time at home (and not on the road) worth the extra $1 or $2 per day that the toll road will cost me? Perhaps I should work from home on Wednesdays as well since the main cost of going into the office is the gas and not the tolls anyway. It is a question I ask myself every week (and almost every day the days I drive to work). I am getting old enough that I think about my time left on this earth and how I want to spend it. I imagine my old age will be a constant tortuous math problem the sort that I am going through now only for every single thing I do. God help my wife when I get there.
One thing to put on the pro side of the argument of going into the office is the 6th floor arcade. Yes, my workplace has an arcade complete with the following combo machines (all set to free play)…
- Pac Man / Ms Pac Man / Galaga
- Donkey Kong / Donkey Kong Jr / Mario Bros
- Defender / Defender 2
- Joust / Robotron 2084
- Centipede / Millipede / Missile Command / Bowling
There is also a nice foosball table and a Wii hooked up to a big, flat screen TV. There is a pinball machine as well but it is not set to fee play.
I spend a large portion of my lunch hour up there whenever my schedule allows. I tend to spend my time on the Donkey Kong machine trying to save the princess. I remember only being able to get so far when I played this game as a kid and I still cannot get past that level (the 5th rivet board). There is another player in the building who evidently can get past that level based on the high score on the machine (I am about 30k points shy of it). I used to have the high score on the Pac Man machine and spent time at home on my MAME machine perfecting my patterns but Pac Man is a bit tedious and takes too long compared to the time that I have to spend there.
Since the arcade is on the 6th floor and I work on the first floor I take the escalators. I could take an elevator (or even the stairs) but walking while on the escalators provides me with enough exercise that my guilt is subsided (compared to taking the elevator). Sometimes my progress is impeded by people who are content to stand and ride the escalator. On a side not, several years ago I wrote a blog about a suggested improvement to the buildings escalators.
Since the new year I have been drinking more water (and less every thing else [save for coffee']). I even bought a water bottle (with my company’s logo on it no less) so I could keep it at work. I usually bring this water bottle with me when I make the trek up the escalators on my way to attempt to save the princess. There is time between levels to take a quick drink. I try to fill it up before I go into the arcade and since there are areas on each floor to get water (or coffee) sometimes I just fill up on the 6th floor. This past week however I had to wait in line on the 6th floor.
In front of me was a lady getting ice. The machine that spits out ice is the same machine that also spits out water so I waited (impatiently). Once she had filled her very large cup up with ice she moved ever so slightly to the right to the coffee machine. It is actually a coffee maker but it does also have a place to dispense hot water for tea. Despite the ice machine having perfectly good water (albeit not that cold) and despite the fact that she was just there and despite the fact that the water from the coffee machine was boiling hot, she proceeded to fill her cup up to the top with hot water. The ice almost all melted as she was doing this and the result had to be be water about the same temperature as she would have received had she done what I was going to do, namely get water from the ice maker. I had a princess to save so I did not ask her why she mixed this odd combination although I did think about the waste of energy in freezing one set of water only to mix it with water that had been heated.
I was telling this to my wife today and the only plausible explanation she came up with was that perhaps the woman felt that the hot water was somehow more pure (the heat purifying it somehow). Following this logic, the ice that came from the machine where I get water would not be that pure / clean. I tried to ask Señor Google but the only things that returned were physics problems about entropy (if you have x ml of liquid at temperature y and z ml of liquid at temperature w then what is the resulting temperature) so I do not think there is any logic to this odd combination. There is always the possibility that she was messing with me and I was part of some sort of experiment (what would people’s reaction be if I mixed ice with hot water). There is also the possibility that she is insane. I think I will just fill my water bottle up on a different floor just to be safe.
Jon
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