Any day at work which involves free ice cream is a good one, especially if said ice cream comes spiked with Heath bars.

In just over an hour I will be heading to a day spa here in town for a couple hours of totally useless indulgence. I got a bonus from my employer for 5 years of faithful service and I decided to take a chunk of that and blow it on a massage and facial. What better way to celebrate five years of cubicle dwelling than by being kneaded, squeezed, ( Read more... )

A short while ago a strange sound was heard in my office. My co-worker and I looked at each other, puzzled. Finally I said, "Is that...a typewriter?" Indeed it was. The rattling of a typeball was once the dominant background noise in probably every office in America. Now it sounds alien and out of place. I didn't even know we still had any ( Read more... )

Dear folks on distribution list:

Use "reply," not "reply to all." I do not need fifteen bajillion emails in my inbox.

Thank you,

Someone who knows how to distinguish between the two.

You know you're a dork when you see "PMMA" in a title and you can pound out "polymethylmethacrylate" in the keyword entry box without pausing for even half a second ( Read more... )

Awesome heavy metal band name unintentionally spawned from a biochemistry paper:

Death Domain

(The death domain is a six-helical bundle crystal and is part of the MyD88 adaptor molecule which sends a signal from a Toll-like receptor to a downstream kinase. Got that? Because we're having a quiz on Monday.)

The hard sell, it is on: we are being bombarded on all sides with requests, nay, demands to donate money to United Way. I estimate I have received no less than five emails from a Company Q bigwig exhorting us to attend near-daily lunchtime United Way informational meetings. Every available surface around the office bristles with United Way ( Read more... )

Having just moved into a new office with windows, I was eagerly awaiting the arrival of the first summer thunderstorm. Some background: at my previous location, our department was in a windowless metal converted warehouse. The only clues I had to the goings-on outside our little prison were the muffled drone of rain on the roof, the occasional ( Read more... )