my office is so bright, I gotta wear shades

A long-standing Microsoft tradition is to decorate the offices of people who go on vacation. Last week, the developer lead for PowerPoint took a well-earned week to go skiing. Now, of course, I have absolutely no idea whatsoever who might have been involved with such a thing. The rest of the team here in California was snug in their offices, working away hard at the upcoming 12.0.1 and file format converter updates. It must have been elves.

It's probably the same elves who decorated our development manager's office when he was in Hawaii a couple of weeks ago. While he was gone, we had a pile of really big empty boxes in our hallway. The boxes are big enough that the PowerPoint dev lead could, after cutting out eye holes and drawing on a face, fit into one of them:

Now, if one were mathematically inclined (as one could imagine that a group of software engineers are), one could determine that, given the volume of the development manager's office and the size of each of the boxes, how many of those boxes would fit into the office if it were packed perfectly. Of course, you can't get a perfect pack, since the office has minor things like furniture in there. So the real answer to how many boxes can fit in is also an exercise in mathematics, albeit more difficult to calculate. It's so difficult to calculate that it might simply be easier to count the number of boxes that end up in the room. The answer, in case you're curious, is 33. (I have a maths degree, so I figured it out.) Photographic evidence is lacking, however, because the boxes were so well-packed that all pictures simply came out brown. Or so the elves tell me, anyway.

The elves were kind enough to take pictures of their latest handiwork, though.

Here's the back wall (note that the window is covered, as is the light above -- I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader, and the PowerPoint dev lead, to figure out what everything else in there is):

Everything on his bookcase, and even his posters, were covered too:

The back of his desk got the full treatment as well. The cables have now formed a weird spiderweb sort of thing that looks pretty cool. Why the elves left a bookend on the floor is a mystery to me.

The dev lead got back from vacation this morning, and has found two of his monitors (he has a total of four), and one each of his keyboards and mice. When the lights are on, the office is about three times as bright as it usually is -- I'm surprised that he's not wearing sunglasses.  He's not sure if he's actually holding up a coffee mug or not here ...

(More pictures might come later, if more pictures captured by the elves came out okay ... )

Comments

• Anonymous
  March 13, 2008
  hahahaha.......