Blog Week 93: Facebooked.
Sunday 2 September 22.47
Thursday's farewell drink was fairly informative: everyone attending, especially the departing stagiaire, was quite friendly. Mockney was also there. Turns out his day had not gone quite as planned.
I recently mentioned the editing of the partners' photos in one of our other offices. Since then some of our partners have demanded something similar. So Pierre told me on Thursday to arrange for a professional photographer to do the necessary - like to make ours' headshots into something worthy of Hola!/Hello! magazines. I think he was joking about that last part.
Anyway Mockney heard about it and decided to show off his own photo-editing talents that afternoon. After downloading some special software, he copied the partners' intranet photos, cut off their heads and then began editing them. He had to first play around with the software, resulting in strange eyes, absurd noses, bizarre mouths (you get the picture). He got carried away and then started laughing hysterically. Unfortunately for him at that moment Pierre walked in to arrange the date and time of Mockney's staff evaluation. Pierre was not impressed with what he saw: Mockney's work-in-progress looked like a rogue's gallery of circus freaks rather than glamorous versions of our partners.
Pierre - not unreasonably - assumed Mockney was once again up to no good on his office computer. Mockney began pleading like mad to prove his innocence as having several bits of "previous" - here, here and here - basically switched the burden of proof in the court of office justice. As Mockney gabbled on, Pierre clicked through the edited photos and laughed and that laugh just got louder: he knew he should not, but could not help himself. One partner looked like a morph between Gollum and Angela Merkel. Mockney was let off: apart from deleting the photos nothing else would be said. Pierre even forget to arrange the evaluation.
Monday 3 September 23.56
The departing stagiaire's new firm has an induction event for its new associates at this time of year. The event itself sounds quite worthwhile - team-building, Myers-Briggs analysis, presentation and marketing development. But the event also has a certain night-time reputation. Like our last Christmas party but only more eventful. Apparently the partners know but turn a blind eye and let the senior associates lead the fun and games.
As the departing stagiaire was telling us about tales of this raucous event I wondered how much of it is true. Clearly someone at his new firm had been regaling him about the event. But like a lot of office gossip, how much does the exaggeration grow with each retelling?
Wednesday 5 September 23.39
My evaluation is on Friday. It should be straightforward. I think... The other support staff evaluations are starting on Monday. No overtly strange questions this year.
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