Heinous in Germany - 19 Jan 2001

> This morning I woke up and had a nice East German Bratwurst on the way to work for Frühstück. It was quite good. After being at work for a while, I said goodbye to Randall, who was leaving for Switzerland, humorously enough, just a day before I am to leave. I think he is going to a town north of Zürich, however.

In the afternoon, I discovered the SuSE ping-pong table. Oh, what a horrible discovery this is. It seems that when there is a ping-pong table in the vicinity, all productivity goes out the window, for me. I don't know why this is. It is not that I am good at ping-pong. On the contrary, I am amazingly bad at ping-pong. There is just something addictive about hitting those bouncy little balls around. I discovered the table, when I headed downstairs for a smoke, and to find some chocolate. Marc helped me find the place where all of the food and chocolate was. As we were doing this, we passed by the evil ping-pong table. I couldn't stop myself from skipping into the room and picking up a paddle and a ball. Marc and I played for a while, and fortunately he is not that much better than I am. We played off of the walls, the radiator, the floor, the ceiling, etc. It was, what I like to call, "Creative Ping-pong".

After that, it was hard to work, because I kept thinking about the darned table. I got an email from Jay (another guy from the Oakland office), saying that he had arrived in Nuremberg. He called, and we discussed if we should go out to dinner or breakfast. I informed him of my early departure to Switzerland, and Frühstück seemed to be out of the question, given the jet-lagging he will probably be doing. I'll probably end up seeing him next week some time.

Our file server went down, for a little bit. It was not too bad, just a problem with one of the switches, so I didn't loose any work. I keep joking the the German office is just trying to be as cool as the Oakland office, which seems to be going down quite a bit in this silly power crises. The server went up and down for the rest of the day, until I got tired of waiting for it to work, and went to play more ping-pong with Marc. After about 2 hours of ping-pong, we got tired, and left for unknown parts for dinner. I think we are going to try a German Mexican restaurant. That should be an experience.


More to come later . . .