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I've been tagged by Devious Steve O a few days ago. How dare you! :-)
Anyway, here we go.

The Rules: List 8 things about yourself. At the end of the post, tag and link to 8 other people. Leave a comment at those sites, letting them know they’ve been tagged, and asking them to come read the post so they know what to do.

1. I'm very generous, but I get very upset and bitchy when someone draws on my generosity.
2. I think that if everyone would be a little bit less selfish, world would be much better.
3. I fight for other people's right without any fear of reprisals. However, I can't stand up for my own rights at all.
4. I wish I could speak Spanish, Italian or French.
5. I wish I could meet some of the people that are on my blogroll.
6. My favorite TV show was "Friends", runner-ups: "How I met your mother", "Golden Girls", "The Nanny".
7. I haven't been in a McDonalds, Burger King, or similar establishment in one entire year.
8. My most recent obsession is my bike. Biking is sooo much fun. I wish I had discovered this fun earlier.

I'm not obeying by the rules strictly, I'm not tagging anybody, since almost all bloggers I would tag have already been tagged by someone else. If you want to do this meme, feel free to do so.

Here's another post about office madness at work. If you guys are wondering at wich company I work ... well, I cannot tell. But it's not a small rat shop, it's a global corporate union, with sites everywhere. Goods produced by "my" company are almost in every kitchen, basement, workshop, or car (depending on the business unit) in Germany, and most likely in your countries as well. I work for the head of the central IT department at headquarters. That's just to give you an idea of the environment.

Ok, here are the funny things that happened recently:

A coworker filed a suggestion for improvement to the appropriate central unit (not IT). The response she got was a funy form. Someone literally used "cut & paste" on it. That means, the text was (probably) written in word, then cut out with scissors and pasted on the form with real glue. We assume that an intern in that department got the order to cut and paste the data into the form and just accepted it at face value.
My coworker then had another idea for improvement, about "cut and paste" done with a computer, but we decided to not file it as it might be considered sarcastic--which in fact it would have been.

Then again, the girl who already asked if there's a video projector and network ports in a virtual room in a colaboration tool still didn't understand the concept of virtual rooms. She made another request this week and asked if there's coffee and soda in this room, and if not, where she can order some. We're not yet sure if she's just being cheeky or utterly stupid.

Since last week there's a sign at the entrance of this weird guy's cubicle that bilingualy says "Enter at own's risk - Zutritt auf eigene Gefahr". If this guy wrote it himself, he's a big freak. If someone else wrote it, it's hilarious. I smile each and every time I walk past this sign.

The last weeks were like programming at home from 7am to 9am for a customer of mine, programming at work from 9.15am to 7pm, programming at home again from 7.15pm to 2am. I finally finished one of the projects I was working on. So there won't be any before-work and after-work shifts in the next weeks. However, our magazine needs quite much attention right now, editorial deadline is next week, and I'm the guy who's responsible for selling all the ads, but that's supposed to be a hobby, it is fun. I need to repeat that sentence some more times in my head, maybe I will finally believe it.

So, today was the first day where I didn't write code until my eyes are closing inevitably. Actually it was a very nice evening. I was invited for a BBQ at Julia and Rick's house. It was a very pleasant evening, and I had a lot of fun. (They're both reading my blog regularly, so I have to write that. Just kidding! I really enjoyed the evening very much.) We played some fun games and laughed a lot. I probably had a little bit too much booze at the beginning, but I had too much ice cream for dessert, so that should make up for the booze.

The way home was quite funny as well. They live in a small suburbian village near Stuttgart. There are only very few busses at night, like three in an hour, but I managed to take a wrong one. So I've boldly gone where no man had ever gone before, at least it seemed like that. But I arrived home safely, the natives didn't tie me up on a stake and set it on fire. Our football team won the national championship today, which came in quite handy for me, so people were celebrating on the streets everywere, the entire city was blocked, and more trains were running at night.

Ok, so you're probably asking what this has to do with the title of the post. Well, we played Cranium, and it was quite funny, because, you know, the language questions are supposed to be difficult for native speakers, they're almost impossible for Germans. So, in my team there was a Puerto Rican, another German and me, the other team were three Americans. Of course we got all the language questions, and they had to build dicks out of clay, or draw a clown. We got things like "Spell floccipaucinihilipilification backwards without writing it down", or "fill in the blanks: F __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ S __ __ __ __ __ __ __ A". It was fun anyway, and I actually managed some of the spelling questions. I'm so proud, I'm gonna wear a tie to sleep tonight.

There was this guy in my office. I neither know his name, nor which team he belongs to. But he's been on the phone almost all the time, I guess he was some 2nd level support, he had a deep and loud noise voice. He's somehow choleric, and I was going did-he-relly-just-say-this quite often. Although his place was many cubicals away, I heard him all day long. He's regularly been the reason of many smiles among my co-workers. It just never got boring with him at the other end of the open-plan office.

Thursday and Friday last week were the best days ever. It was his derniére. They've been moving him and his team to another place. When the movers came, he gave all he could, and there were some loud fights. I'm still pitying the girl that coordinated the moving. Well, she did a good job and showed balls. But I guess it wasn't her easiest week at work. But we had the best show.

Friday afternoon was very weird. It was quiet in the office. Nobody was yelling, nobody was insulting callers on the phone. He was gone. Work will never be the same again ...

Last Tuesday (May 1^st) there was a holiday in Germany, namely Labor Day. Yes guys, in Germany we have Labor Day on 1^st of May. By the way, isn't it strange that "Labor Day" is free, while Friday (in German "Freitag", which literally means "free day") is a regular working day?

Anyway, I went on a hike with some friends. Hiking is the traditional activity on German Labor Day, unless you're a member of a labor union, then it's probably your duty to attend a demonstration or whatever.

We had a blast on our hike, and we had some stops for coffee and ice cream and BBQ and all that usual stuff. A lesbian couple also brought their cute dog "Trude". I have no idea what kind of breed Trude is, but I would say it's close to a chocolate colored Labrador Retriever. The dog has something with her eyes that will get worse in sunlight, so the vet made her wear sunglasses outside. You have no idea how cute a dog with sunglasses looks. Unfortunately I didn't take any pictures that day.

Of course I wasn't the only one who thinks a dog with sunglasses looks very cute, so everybody we've seen that day said something about the dog. You might think, "there must be at least one person that didn't say something." No, you're wrong. Literally e-v-e-r-y-b-o-d-y felt an urge to say something. Hence here's my advice, if you ever feel lonely, buy sunglasses for your dog and go for a walk. There won't be another chance to meet more people than by doing this.

While I was an early early-adaptor of internet access, and I'm using it regularly since 1994 (nobody knew the internet existed back then, not even our computer teacher had an idea of what the internet was), my mom didn't have access at home. When I was visiting her I either had to drive to her office in the neighboring village, or use (a quite expensive dial-up connction on) my cell phone and my PDA to check my emails.

But last Friday she has finally been assimilated, and now she has a very fast connection that came with a wireless router, a movie on demand flat fee subscription, free national landline and cell phone calls and what-have-you. Now being here doesn't neccessarily mean being cut off from the rest of the world technically.

On Friday my mom didn't even use her new internet, and I was wondering if she will use it at all. But yesterday she was catching up. I mean, I browse a lot, and I can spend much time online, but my Mom... I thought we need a knife to seperate her from her notebook in the night.

Anyway, I'm glad my Mom enjoys it, and I hope she won't be taken in. We all know that the internet has a dark side and that you can meet very weird people. An avid user might realize when something is wrong, but a newbie probably not...