Office Birthday Party - Live Music

October 18, 2008 at 4:26 AM

As I hinted to yesterday, here is what a couple of engineers think "cubicle decorations" should look like:

We found an old Sun Sparc 10 workstation, tablet, an external hard drive & tape drive, several manuals dating to about 1990 or older, and an old phone. We were quite proud of ourselves and our creative decorating skills. Apparently while we were re-arranging things, we accidently dialed the IT helpdesk several times when we were moving the phone back behind the Sparc workstation. The Helpdesk guy on duty got concerned hearing strange noises and talking in the background and decided to come see what was going on. He got a good chuckle on what we were up to.

This is what it looked like by the morning:

Some folks added to the decor and brought food... alot of it. The Birthday Boy managed to move the antique equipment to the other side of his desk and get his original equipment back up and operational again.

By lunch time, we were already full with belly aches starting to develop. It was time for the Happy Birthday Saranade. Live music in the office (other than Ron's singing in the stairwell - great acoustics there BTW) is unhread of.

When I pulled the viola out of the case and put the shoulder rest on, my team was a little surprised that I was really going to play. They had gotten used to me bringing the viola into the office several times a week (I have rehearsals and lessons immediately after work most of days of the week). Rosining up the bow started a side conversation on the physics of bowing and the role of rosin. I started on the first Birthday Variation: doubled stopped with a few chords for the finale. A few folks that hadn't already left for "real" food were drawn by the unusal sounds of a viola being played in the office. Everyone was expecting for me to play out of tune on purpose. One lady asked if I could even play out of tune if I tried - so I tried. I just ended up playing in a minor key :) That opened things up to the 3rd variation: birthday trills, then a small discussion on if a trill should start on the higher or lower note.

It was the most unusual day I ever had in the office!

Most surprising was that there was not ONE single viola joke!

From Stephen Brivati
Posted on October 20, 2008 at 4:45 AM

Greetings,
your blogs are one of the high points of my life.
Not sure if that is good or bad though....;)
Cheers,
Buri

From Terez Mertes
Posted on October 20, 2008 at 4:44 PM

Woo hoo! Party!

From Mendy Smith
Posted on October 21, 2008 at 4:41 AM

Buri -

I don't know if I should feel elated or depressed :)

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