Ok Ok You got me!

Well RB finally called me out on one of the ideas that I like to joke about, but quite honestly never actually plan to follow through with. For the last couple of years I’ve been joking that I would like to have a birthday party at Chucky Cheese. You know the kid place with all of the arcade games, skeeball, the ball pit, and singing animatronics. In fact over the last couple of months I took it a step further and started to ask for a piñata along with the party! Why? No reason I just found the entire idea amusing. I knew a lot of people would think it was crazy and or annoying, so of course I loved to play it up. So what happened?

Well – I guess that: A) I should watch what I say and #2 I shouldn’t be so trusting! RB told me that one of the children she nannies was having a birthday and that she would like to stop by. This sounded fine to me. Did I even think that it was coincidental that this kid’s b-day and mine where so close. Nah. So we made plans to go Saturday night. Little did I know that my girlfriend had been up to no good. She had saved an eMail I had sent to everyone that had a lot of my friend’s addresses on it. So she created an eVite and started working on her little plan. She must have worked on it over a couple of weeks and no one let me know what was up.

So that Saturday night came and did a little shopping and headed over to the Chucky Cheese for this little kid’s party. When I walked in I looked over and saw GM and AL. I really still had no clue, I just thought they had ended up there with a kid AL watches and what a deal I could chat it up with my buddy. Then I heard a bunch of people, including GM and AL hollering “SURPRISE”. I panned and saw a dozen of my friends standing there, and only then did it start to dawn on me that I had been had! RB had pulled it off flawlessly.

We had a pretty good time. Though I was a bit embarrassed – and wanted nothing to do with the person dressed up as Chucky Cheese the mouse – I had a pretty good time. RB had gotten a stack of tokens to play games and everyone actually had a good time doing it. I do have to admit that I cracked the Johnny Walker that CB had brought as a present. We played a bunch of skeeball, shot some hoops, and played a bunch of other games. We even had cake and pizza. Crazy. After that we all loaded into cars and went to the bar. Oh yeah and AP and MP brought me a freaking piñata!

So the moral of the story is as follows: Watch what you tell your crazy girlfriend she might call you out on it. “Yeah Babe, I want to have my party at Chucky Cheese!” So now I tell her I want my birthday in Mexico! I ‘m pretty sure that everyone else was pretty pleased with her also as now there is one less asinine statement I can make over, and over again! Don’t worry though I’ll just have to make my jokes a little grander and a little less based in the realm of plausibility….

$450 Just to feel comfortable

I started to write this blog a while ago. I thought it was funny, but after trying to put any length into the entry I realized it was a one trick pony. Therefore, while I still find this subject amusing, I decided to cut this down to a mini entry.

The other night I stayed up and worked pretty late. I ended the day with a 13.5 hours in because I let myself get fixated on creating a pretty complicated excel workbook. The uses arrayed functions to count multiple conditioned rows to track items that we have in process. It is basically a dashboard on a single process thread of our project.

I got to thinking when I finished the next day that I spent 4.5 hours working on that workbook over two days. That means I have 4.5 billable hours into a single document; at a cost $100/hour the workbook cost my client $450 dollars. I find this very amusing. I find it amusing because the entire purpose for these modifications, to the document, is to help the customer feel more comfortable with the process. In the end this doesn’t expedite the work it just creates some overhead that gives management visibility.

Why am I putting any thought into this? Well I was just wondering how much money is spent in the corporate world to help management feel emotionally better? None of the above task helps to get the job done (I know I’ve mentioned that). I was also in a meeting today that wasted a few thousand dollars talking about how we could reorganize documents that don’t need to be reorganized. Now I’m all for planning and organization, but to be efficient you have to stop changing things and doing client handholding to do some actual work!

Vegas Redux

Well, RB and I went to Vegas (that’s short for Las Vegas for y’all not in the know) a couple weeks ago. I meant to write about it sooner but work has been getting crazy lately. So I’m going to be brief.

We had a blast as a summary here is the list of things that RB came up with that we did on our trip:

Hi honey

So, here is the list that I have compiled of all the things that we have done in Vegas, let me know if I missed something:

Hoover Dam tour
Jubilee at Bally's
Bellagio Fountains
Bellagio Indoor Garden
Fall of Atlantis in Caesars Palace
Star Trek at Hilton
Desert Passage at Alladin (shopping area)
Fremont Street
Car Showroom at Imperial Palace
Red Square Restaurant at Mandalay Bay
Lion Habitat at MGM
Erupting Volcano at Mirage
N.Y.N.Y. Roller Coaster (Manhattan Express)
Gondola Ride in Venetian
Madame Tussauds Wax Exhibit

And the list of all the hotels we've visited:
Bally's
Caesars
Bellagio
Sahara
Circus Circus
Hilton
Alladin
Excalibur
Flamingo
Harrah's
Imperial Palace
Luxor
Mandalay Bay
MGM Grand
Mirage
Monte Carlo
NYNY
Stratosphere
Treasure Island
Venetian
Wynn

PS: we also saw that waterfall with the forest and stuff at the Wynn, but I don't know what it is called.

Number 1: Yes she addresses me as honey in eMail from time to time.

B: I think she did a pretty good job of summing every thing up. She did miss a few things. We also road the new monorail they have that runs most of the length of the strip, ate at a Wolfgang Puck restaurant, saw a few living statues, saw the people dressed up in Roman garb and we went to the Palms Casino as well. She later when I pressed her she said her favorite thing we did was the gondola through the canals at the Venetian. It was a lot of fun and our gondolier was from Italy and sand us a nice Italian song.

During the firs part of our trip AP and MP were also in Las Vegas so we spent a lot of time palling around with them. We had a lot of fun. They were a bit tired out though from having been there all week and so they didn’t want to check out everything for a second time! They did talk us into going to Jubilee, at Bally’s; a classic Vegas show girls type show. It was a ton of fun – it would have to be with a tag line like Thousands of Jewels covering almost nothing – and we were really glad we went. Let’s just say it was a great show. Though none of the acts really seemed to tell much of a story I don’t think anyone minded.

Also in town while we were in Vegas were about 60 people from work. A lot of people who I went to training with in Florida decided to get together for a fun weekend. This included a couple of guys from my office. We tried several times to meet up with them but never seemed to be in the same place at the same time. Three times wee missed them by fewer than ten minutes. That’s ok though because we doing the crazy tourist things while they were more interested in partying, drinking, and gambling. Maybe next time though.

The one surprise – at least for me – on the trip was the Star Trek casino in the Hilton. I avoided it before because I assumed it would be really corny and nerdy, but we ended going to the Hilton to catch the monorail back to our hotel. I was actually a lot nicer than I thought it was going to be. We did not do the live adventure / ride I think that may have been over the top. The casino though was made to look like a space station and was actually kind of fun to walk around and see. My nerdy side did come out though when I had to go and look at the statues they had in glass of characters from several different Star Trek franchises. Dad or Dave if your reading you would have loved it.