Working for Uncle Ben

My other half joined the Family Lucas this week and is a producer on an upcoming blockbuster game. All that BS at his last job was a wonderful gift. Had that not happened, he may not have thought about moving on at this time, so, thanks guys!

We took a walk around the LucasArts campus last weekend and afterwards I told David it's been really nice and to write when he could. If I worked there I don't think I'd come home very often. It's a gorgeous place. Makes EA's "campus" look like a mental asylum, which it was some days, but mostly it was fun.

Our group had BBQ's in the parking lot with lots of sidewalk chalk and bizarre drawings; found giant blanket penises on chairs, courtesy of a fellow producer with an incredible gift for fabric origami; and created the [insert name here]-cam in the hallway so we could see when a particularly annoying product guy was on his way into our department; and then my favorite bit of shenanigans...

There was one guy in marketing who made it his job to ruin every day for me, to be a total pig asshole about everything, all the time. We used to call him Fred Flinstone because not only was he just as stupid as Fred, his head was just as block-shaped. One day I came back from meetings and told everyone what a total dick he'd been to me, again.

My coworkers were (and are) a fiercely loyal group, and if you mess with one of us, you've messed with all of us. They'd become as fed up as I was at how this guy was treating me and our group's role on projects. They consoled me and I felt better for having such good people around me, then I headed home.

The next day I came in and heard a wonderful story about Fred's sudden computer trouble. Fred came in that morning and fired up his machine and instead of seeing the classic Farrah Fawcett poster on his desktop, he saw a gorgeous, sweaty gay porn model wearing only a towel - over his shoulder.

And all of his desktop files had been renamed to things like NAMBLA, men_on_men, and so on. Things that would surely disturb this block-headed, homophobic, MCP.

Confounded by the state of his computer, he called IT to "fix" it. He didn't realize all the changes were cosmetic and he may have hoped IT could find out who played the prank. While IT combed through his files to see what was accessed and how, they found a certain pornographic story that had been accessed at the same time the changes were made.

When Fred realized his dirty little secret wasn't secret anymore, he backed off on the idea of lodging a complaint. But he did come by our department on the verge of tears to demand that our programmers be punished, which of course they weren't, because all they'd done is balance out the karma a little. It was one of the best days ever.

After he left we read his story - which we'll never know if he downloaded or tried to write - and it was so bad, we cried from laughing. I mean, if he wrote it, good for him for trying, but on your WORK computer? That was our Fred. If he didn't write it, whoa. Just because it's online doesn't mean it should be downloaded.