We do "The Wave"

I know I left the teaser on Home Depot Expo (HDE for short) and didn't actually blog about it yet, well, here's another teaser because I still haven't had a chance to go ape on their customer service staff and get my refund. Until then I can't email the CEO (thanks to Intern Jon, I have his email address) and I can't really tell you all the story. Soooo... on another note, I thought I'd share this fun tidbit with you all.

In my new role it's been very busy. A good busy though because I'm learning stuff and have lots of smart work to do (as opposed to the stupid work that I was asked to do in my old role). The new role even comes with some hidden, unforeseen benefits that I'm happy to report.

• When someone leaves the group, has a milestone achievement or something, we celebrate! That means food, balloons and we all flock to the center of "the pit" (the low lying cubicles that house the teams working on the largest project) to line up for food. It's more like army ants than cows being herded. We're organized followers (or rather drinkers of the coolaid).
  
• The leader of our group (the big kahuna) comes to some of our "all hands" meetings (btw, i really don't like that term "all hands" because some people may not have hands or may only have one hand and then will feel inadequate) and he actually does a motivational speech about how we need to stay positive, focus on our release, really be happy about our accomplishments. He makes us all feel good and doesn't actually beat anyone up and nobody spits when they talk. It's nice (weird I know).
  
• We have more acronyms than development does. It's a bit crazy that a business group has more acronyms than an IT group.. very weird but true. I never thought it would happen but I like it because I'm starting to say sentences with minimal words like "Take the 07 WP and IR to BR and get a sign off" and people actually understand what I'm saying! My goal is to eliminate all the middle words and say only sentences with acronyms. Then I can officially be a part of generation z and IM people sentences of acronyms.
  
• This is one of the best... every time our application successfully passes a phase in testing a bell is rung. It's kind of like one of those old school bells or rather a church bell. It says "dung" instead of "ring" or "jing-a-ling". The fun part about it is that my cube neighbor and I have started the clap and wave after the bell is tolled. We now have 4 rows of people in on this. It goes like this... "Dung", "Clap, clap, clap", "whoo hooo" (from Jim) and the wave continues on past me to Doug and then to some guy in the 4th row. Our goal is to make it all the way down the cubicles so that the guys in the pit can actually notice that we are a bit crazy. I think it will work. We may all have to add a "woo hoo" to get more attention though. I think we'll have a meeting about it.
  
• And this is the best so far - every Thursday at 2:30 pm there's free ice cream!!! Now who can beat that! We of course all line up again like army ants waiting for Christine from the catering staff to come by with ice cream. Last week she was late an hour and there was almost a riot. To avoid the riot, some guy kept moving someone out of line so then everyone got confused and they didn't notice she was late.
  

This is so much better than what I just heard from a guy (we’ll call him Crazy Commuter or CC for short) in the old group. He just told me he didn’t get his paycheck. Sounds like things are going well over there! I also received good bye messages from 4 folks in the past two weeks. It’s going really well.

So, for the new group sign me up… I know, I sound like a groupie. But there's free ice cream!

-s