Pico de Greedo
by Scott Hardie on May 4, 2014
On Friday, my company threw a part Mexican, part Star Wars party in celebration of Cinco de Mayo and Star Wars Day ("May the 4th be with you"). It was a weird combination but it worked, with games like a lightsaber piñata bash. Kelly made "lightsabers" (pretzel rods frosted with blue and red frosting), but she really got interested when I mentioned that the salsa contest offered three prizes and only had three teams on the signup sheet. She made two jars of her usual medium-hot salsa, I borrowed art from a webcomic to made a quick label, and the result won first prize, over the six other competitors that ultimately entered. The prize was just a $15 gift card to Taco Bell, but it was fun, and fun was the point. It was a good day.
It's the first time that I've entered a work contest since joining this company last fall, and really the first one in several years. I regret the way that I behaved after winning a contest at the last employer and decided not to enter any more contests as long as I worked there. That company sometimes offered really amazing prizes, like a $700 gift certificate to a local restaurant who couldn't pay their advertising bill and offered the certificate in trade, so when various bosses started hyping the "amazing" prize being offered one December, my team went nuts making a gingerbread office. We were quite disappointed with the first prize that we won, a 15-minute massage for each of us at some local parlor. The second-place team got a paid night out bowling together, which we would have much preferred. We moaned and griped about the prize so much that I came to feel really embarrassed about how entitled and ungrateful we must have seemed, and I decided that I wasn't mature enough to handle future contests. Hopefully my modest gratitude upon winning a simple lunch for two at Taco Bell this weekend is sign that I've grown.
Happy Star Ways Day and Cinco de Mayo, everybody.
One Reply to Pico de Greedo
Logical Operator
The creator of Funeratic, Scott Hardie, blogs about running this site, losing weight, and other passions including his wife Kelly, his friends, movies, gaming, and Florida. Read more »
Thus Spoke Jeffy
This has been around for a while I'm sure, but it's new to me and I love it: The Nietzsche Family Circus. Go »Signs of Summer
The recent Florida wildfires have been a nasty reminder (I drove through one burned-down forest and it was a terrible sight), but if you need any more indication that summer is here, just step outside: It's scorching. Apparently one local still didn't think it was hot enough to take precautions, as evidenced by the recent explosion in the parking lot when we pulled into a strip mall for lunch. An entire trailer had burned into ash with only a skeletal frame and two melted tires remaining. Go »I Want to Play Sega with Harrison Ford
Behold the bizarre, pop-culture-inspired visions of Brandon Bird: (link) Thanks, Maggie. Go »So Long, NCSA Primer
Someone asked me for help learning HTML today. I turned to my trusted traditional source, the good old primer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, but alas, it has finally been removed after all these years. This was one of the major how-to guides in the early years of the web, and it's the very guide that I used to teach myself HTML one weekend in 1996, from which this very site you're reading has since evolved. Go »Fur and Feathers
Yesterday was a good day: To celebrate my mother's 75th birthday, we took her out for a day around Sarasota doing things that appealed to her love of animals. After starting with a big breakfast, we went to a local attraction that we've all been meaning to see for years, the Big Cat Habitat that takes care of exotic animals that were born in captivity but abandoned by their owners. The lions and tigers and liger were the prime attraction, but they also had bears, monkeys, a chimpanzee, parrots, emu, turkeys, goats, koi, and even stranger animals like a kangaroo, kinkajou, and coati. Go »
Evie Totty | May 6, 2014
Good for you! I too have moments (too many) in my life where I let my ego run it.
And grats on the win! (It IS good stuff!)