Today has been more than a little strange, even for me.

As I walked out of my building this morning and headed up the block towards Oak street for ye olde carpool pick-up, I was confronted by the sight of a what I'm forced to assume was a homeless man walking towards me, urinating on the sidewalk. Now, I don't mean he was standing on the sidewalk peeing against a wall or something: I mean he was walking along, pretty as you please, with his dick out, as if he was watering the lawn. This was just too outrageous to ignore. I charged at him, firmly intent on drop kicking him into next week, but thought better of it when I decided I didn't want pee all over me. I screamed at him and threatened to call the cops. He was unperturbed by this, but I kept on yelling at him and berating him for behaving like a miserable excuse for a human being. I must have made an impression because he apologized. Whether he meant it or not I can't say.

Later on, I was working in my office when I heard a hissing sound, and I suddenly felt moisture spraying onto my arm. I looked behind me and the only culprit that caught my eye eight away was the fire sprinkler in the ceiling. I stuck my chair against the desk behind me and climbed up to get a closer look, and that's when I realized what had really happened.

Before coming to Wind River, I worked for BSDi. Actually, I worked for what used to be Walnut Creek CD-ROM, which had been bought by BSDi. When Wind River acquired BSDi and we left the old WC CD-ROM offices, I ended up inheriting various unclaimed office tchotchkes that nobody really wanted, but nobody had the heart to throw away either. (Sadly, my favorite of these, a tangled bundle of magtape with a post-it on it that read "FREEBSD BACKUP ARCHIVE," has disappeared.) One of these items was a can of Dole pineapple chunks. Supposedly this can once belonged to Mike Smith, and there was a story of some kind associated with it which I can no longer remember. The can has been sitting on top of a wall-mounted storage cabinet in my office ever since I started working at Wind River. It's been there so long I pretty much phased it out of my conscious mind.

Today, it burst.

When I climbed up on the chair, I saw that the can had bulged and sprung a leak at the bottom. Luckily, most of the fluid that came out ended up on one of the open cabinet doors rather than on the various target boards sitting on the table below it. Some time was spent cleaning up the mess and tossing the now-defunct artifact in the trash. (The "best if used by" date on the can was in 2002.)

In the afternoon, everyone received an e-mail from our illustrious CEO. Apparently the forced one-week furlough last quarter, a cost-cutting measure designed to force people to burn up vacation time, worked so well that they want to do it again next quarter. It seems to me there's something fundamentally wrong somewhere when a company can make money by not having its employees work.

So how was _your_ day?