Wyszdom

We are temporarily unable to process your purchase, so we’d like to offer you access to Gogo free of charge for the duration of your flight. Lucky You. Enjoy!

This made my day, and is an excellent lesson in customer service. Something was wrong with Gogo’s service, and they had the choice between frustrating me or making me happy. One of the easiest ways to annoy me is to mess with my Internet access, so it’s quite possible that if I wasn’t able to get online I’d refuse to pay for Gogo in the future. (Remember I’m the guy who refuses to sign up for Netflix because they buy popup ads.) But since Gogo decided to throw me an hour of free Wi-Fi instead (short flight), I’m now using my time to blog about how great they are.

You know how your pets walk around in circles in the kitchen when they’re about to be fed? You should see me waiting for a pizza to heat up. Same thing.

I have two creative projects that I need to complete this week:

1. A funny presentation at work
2. A Halloween costume

I’m having a tough time coming up with useable ideas for both. I have never been good at this. Even back in high school when I made funny videos, I was rarely responsible for coming up with the initial idea. I loved to help develop other ideas and do anything else for a project, but I never really cared if it was my idea.

This is my third year of having to deal with the recent burden of coming up with a Halloween costume. Until I joined Google, I had not dressed up since sixth grade. I had 10 years off, but at Google, Halloween is a pretty big deal so I’d feel bad if I didn’t participate.

I thought that I would have a good Halloween costume this year. I was going to be Zeke the Plumber from Salute Your Shorts, because referencing minor characters from Nickelodeon shows is cool. For months, I thought I was all set. I even had a document with screenshots from the show, things I could say, and a list of items to buy. This past weekend, when I was about to start picking up items for my costume, I realized that it was stupid. Not only did nobody remember Zeke, but I would have to wear a mask. Wearing a mask is fine if one is going trick-or-treating. I did that many times when I was a kid. But this year, the only times I’ll be wearing my costume are at parties where I’ll want to be able to eat and drink. So now I need to come up with an idea that doesn’t require a mask. Here are some ideas I’ve had:

• Someone wearing a suit
• Hatman, the guy who wears a hat
• Mustache guy, who wears a fake mustache
• A Halloween costume, which would be something simple like a ghost, but with a hanger and price tag attached. Maybe the entire thing covered in plastic wrap and some sort of label if I want to go all-out. (This was my alternate idea when I came up with the Play on Words costume.)
• Anything from that old SNL sketch where Dan Aykroyd plays the salesman pitching children’s costumes

The funny thing is, my first year at Google, Matt was basically a combination of Someone wearing a suit and Mustache guy.

If you have any suggestions for what I should be for Halloween this year, please leave them in the comments. If it involves chef pants and/or a hard hat, that’s cool, because I already have them.

Lately I’ve refrained from constantly making fun of California, even as Nelson has recently become quite the little jokester when it comes to talking about the East Coast. He has the great bit about how the East Coast would react to sunshine.

But today something happened that I felt like sharing. Note that the exchange below is paraphrased and did not actually include a hyperlink.

Nelson: You added a question to the Moderator page for today’s presentation, right?
Me: Well, I had, but I deleted it since it’s no longer relevant. I posted it a few weeks ago before the meeting was postponed. Remember they rescheduled it?
Erin: Oh, yeah, on the day of the storm.

“The Storm?” I wondered to myself as I tried to think back to that day and figure out what she meant. Was it a sporting event that I was unaware of? The name of a Google event I forgot to attend?

Then, I remembered something about that day.

Me: You mean the time that it rained?

We had a good laugh as she confirmed my assumption. I then had one more question:

Me: But we didn’t cancel the meeting because of the rain, right?

Wrong.

If you’ve watched Conan recently, you may have seen him make fun of how Californians react to the rain. It’s not far from the truth:

To those of you who are trying to watch the clips outside of the US or after they expire, I apologize for using Hulu.

P.S. I like California.

Earlier today, Nelson informed me that it is Boss’s Day, a holiday on which, according to Wikipedia, employees should thank their bosses “for being kind and fair throughout the year.” I’m a pretty big fan of holidays, so I jumped right into it and left this note on my manager’s desk while he was away at a meeting:

Now my boss didn’t get to where he is today with out a critical eye, and as you can see by some underlining added by my boss, he wasn’t content to simply take my note at face value when he discovered it. When he pinged me about the note, suspecting that I left it, I went over to his desk to discover him trying to decipher a secret message spelled out using the first letter of each word. You can’t get anything past this guy.