While cleaning things I happen to cross a pile of papers and sticky notes containing random phrases and interesting comments from coworkers at a previous job I used to work. I felt the need to get these digitized and memorialized as soon as the wave of nostalgia hit.
As an initial prerequisite to reading/seeing this data: I was called “Sparky”, a name provided to me by David Molik shortly after I was employed. The reasoning was simple: There’s just too many “Matts” in an office building of 300 professionals to verbally discern me from the rest, so a moniker was appropriate. It stuck for a decade, and was much better than my previous moniker “Crash.”
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An email from Michael Galante dated April 4, 2016. This was a “collective response” email to the team of ~20 people. We had more emails from people who were working remote (pre-COVID), so we decided to respond that we were all in the office. #sarcasm
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This was an Instagram Post shared to me by Katie Bager on September 16, 2015 with the question “Is this you?”. The short answer was “no”, the longer answer was “Who’s Sophia Bush” (https://www.instagram.com/p/7oEcYjjiJZ/)
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I had a Dry-Erase board to my right at my desk. It started out as a place to put my name and a list of the times that the bus departs to get me home (Bus 75 from Buffalo to West Seneca: 1600, 1630, 1720, 1815, 1945). It evolved to ticket numbers and Michael’s fanciful Git drawing, then getting plastered with saying and workplace shenanigans:
- “Triglyceroids” -cbrill (Chad Brill)
- “I made it to the point where you would start to get serious in your email, then I just quit…” -mgalante 31 Oct 2016
- “Your testing instructions are always: Test Everything, Say Horray!” -msingh 5 Oct 2016 (Mohinder Singh)
- “I worked my Anti-Magic” -gwallace 31 Oct 2016 (Glenn Wallace)
- “At least the problem is easy…”
- “Mythical Velocity Pants” -jhutchins 21 April 2016 2:23pm (James Hutchins)
- “Bustificated”
- “Katie’s Temp Seat when Sparky is WFH” (Kaitlin Wieand)
- “Did not say it was your fault, Just said you were to blame.” -krufe (Ken Rufe)
- Nuances
- Inssheption
- “Bill Brady‘d”: Quiet for months, then decided not to give a shit and fail.
- “Throwing a wobbly” -tquiring 2 Sep 2015 @ 13:20:15 (Thomas Quiring)
- “Sweet_ad_cash++” -dconley 24 Feb 2017 10:07 (Dan Conley)
- “My Magnifying glass gets used extensively in my room!” -jhutchins 27 Oct 2016 (James Hutchins)
- “Fartitech – To produce and design farts…” -dgersh (Dave Gersh)
- Astobe Taging (a drunkmanteau of Adobe Staging)
- “If you hit a rock with a boat it’s named after you forever” -rcrandall 24 August 2016 (Russ Crandall)
- “I do not have the attention span to stalk you” -mgalante 14 Sep 2015
- “Synamagic!” -bperuski 13 Octt 2015 (Brad Peruski)
- “It’s in Jackland Now.” -bwang 30 Mar 2016 (Bo Wang)
- “CE is a psychopathic madhouse” -dlum 28 April 2015 (Dale Lum)
- “Instant Timeout” -Saddat Islam 15 Jan 2017
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I migrated from the board to sticky notes after an entire desk move from an “open workspace” to a semi-cubicle space. These sticky notes not only contained witty expressions from coworkers but also Fish-Based acronym proposals. Engineering is fun.
- That’s “wiki’d” -gwallace 11 Feb 2020 2:40p (Glenn Wallace)
- Its not the fall that kills you, its the ( mass times delta-velocity / delta-time)
- Its like comparing milk and Rollercoasters -@cat Aug 23 2018 2:16pm (Glenn Wallace)
- Less SAML, More SALMON (Security Assertion Language Markup Object Notation)
- “Did I just get an alert that there are cox settings in the ass?” -jkavanagh 2019-10-15 12:07pm (John Kavanagh)
- Fraud Identity Security Handler
- Concraptor – 12 July 2019 1321
- Hunchssumption -dgersh 12 Mar 2019 11:45am (Dave Gersh)
- Bejusted /Busted-Adjusted/ -rcrandall 4/29/2019 9:51am (Russ Crandall)
- Headless Object Notation for Executing Yaml
- “Can we not call today Monday and instead refer to it as Taco Tuesday cause its less Negative?” –Tim Finucane 10:45am 13 May 2019
- Legacy! Get Forked! -bwang 7/13/2018 9:44am (Bo Wang)
- Comment-sation. A conversation with Comments (Glenn + Me) / 11 Feb 2020 2:10pm
- “Touday!” – Yulin Qi 5/15/2018 9:48am
- “All deck on hand” – Yulin 4/19/2018 4:10pm
- “@here I have accepted a job outside of Synacor. Nov 4th will be my last day.” -jmenard 2019 Nov 20 2:54pm (Johnathan Menard)
- “If it works fir the Queen it works for me.” -bear 8 Nov 2019 10:16am (Jonathan Miller)
- Abominable James Man! -kbager 7 Feb 2018 9:20am (Kaitlin Wieand)
- Eng Siva Josh (huddlenom w/ Ted | Renee
- Bridge Metadata, IdP metadata, Authn? Authz 🙂 test accounts
- Mercedes eh | ay | ee
- (not) userguid instead of -| sessionid |- (ip)
- asstudely 10/18/2018 3:58pm
- “Which is my bike?” Best Password Reset… -cat 12/13/2018 10:01am (Glenn Wallace)
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Wrapping up with all the miscellaneous items, when people leave or get volun-told to not show up for work their desk has some artifacts that are no longer of possession. I chose to yeet two:
purple ladybug novelty (https://plbfun.com/) watermelon scratch-and-sniff stickers, of which you could scratch and sniff and smell watermelon. After 10 years they are more novelty than watermelon.
“The highlight of my day is hearing you talk so loud I can’t hear my own thoughts”.