This week I’ve been working in our Detroit office so I can spend time with my family leading up to the holiday. The office is in a large office park in a place called “Bingham Farm” which I think is actually a fancy name (ironically) for Southfield.
Everyone had to work from home for a week last month because the suite next to ours caught on fire. I never heard many details, so on this visit I was poking around being nosy. Turns out, the fire was caused by a massive fish tank.
Really? Something filled with water almost burns the building down? What are the odds?
Or – as I would like to think – maybe it was the fish themselves. When I was a kid, I had a goldfish that had a death wish and routinely flung himself out of his bowl. Maybe these fish were part of a larger sleeper cell and were willing to sacrifice themselves to wipe out some humans. Maybe the head goldfish promised them 72 virgin fish would be waiting for them in heaven.
Another thing that makes the Detroit office interesting is an ever-growing “word cloud” that’s kept on a white board in the conference room. It’s a cluster of the most common words you overhear on work calls, and it generally reads like a game of bullshit bingo, “Ping. Bubble up. Leverage.” You know the vocab.
Yesterday we were having a team lunch of pizza (from Buddy’s – which was GREAT!) when I spotted a new addition to the white board. “What’s ‘DUM’ all about?” I asked.
Apparently, someone who used to work in that office (who I think we can characterize as a bit of a Negative Nelly based on the frequency with which she pronounced things dumb) spelled it “dum.” The team thought it was her attempt at irony – but it turns out she actually thought that was how dumb was spelled. Bless her heart.
It’s a bit like this:
pithypants 
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