Entries Tagged 'Work' ↓

Today The Mister received a delivery at work, from He-Man! Our Tweet4yourtee wardrobe increased by 2 more items as a ‘Master of the Twitterverse’ set was delivered to him at his desk – he had no idea and I had to keep the secret that the delivery was coming and that one of the Masters of the Universe characters was doing the delivery! I’d gone around work and got various people organised to video it, including me, and Tweet4yourtee are using it as part of their social marketing … with me giggling in the background and all.

The Mister was very surprised and was a great sport! I giggle every time I watch it!

What is it about a large group of people that makes it harder to keep a kitchen as clean as you would at home? In the last few days at work a growing number of those ‘corporate’ kitchen-type signs have appeared in our work kitchen … ’scrub your coffee cups’, ‘dishwasher is on’, ‘empty when done’, ‘keep bench tidy’ … I know I’m at the clean-freak end of the scale but really, are there that many people in an office-full of people who don’t or haven’t lived with someone else and know what it’s like to share filth, or don’t have or don’t have the observation skills to figure out if dishes in a dishwasher are clean or dirty? I guess in an individual family people might let dishes pile up on the bench and clear them away all at once at night, and this doesn’t work when 50 people are doing the same thing or leaving their cups and bowls soaking in the sink preventing others from easily using the tap. I only go in there for the cold water tap.

It’s just a social behaviour pattern than fascinates me – that individually people may have common sense but in a crowd perhaps not so much.

The room my team and I are in at work is often referred to as the Orange Room … for obvious reasons … my desk for starters. Other than my team of 2-3 as it has grown to in the last year, an extra can fit – and we’ve had a stream of them in that time. I’ve collected up a few Room Rules as we’ve cycled through people and got a reputation for being quite upfront about communicating them on someone’s first day sitting in the room! One poor guy ended up changing his eating habits to salad for fear of breaking the ’smelly lunch’ rule … much to his partner’s delight.

So another new person arrived in the room this week – a Xero old-timer but has never shared a workspace with me. By now there were rumours of the rules being documented and the person vacating the desk next to me said he couldn’t get away fast enough. So I welcomed our new room buddy with an emailed copy of the rules, which I circulated around the whole office to show just how real they were, and so far so good. He’s been a very quiet and well-behaved neighbour and he’s had rather a lot of visitors and sympathy – people coming to see him to make sure he’s OK!

This morning I got to work and after him telling me yesterday that he could only abide by 2 of the 11 rules, I found that he’d printed them and stuck them up on the wall. Good man!

They are fairly unreasonable:

And a joke of course!!

The Mister lost a bet at work and had to provide a cheesecake. He reckoned he’d build a feature with 10 bugs or less but Susanne from the Quality Assurance team had her doubts – 10 bugs or less and she would provide a cheesecake, more than 10 bugs, The Mister would. There were 11 bugs.

So we made cheesecake on Sunday. The Mister unveiled it for a dev team afternoon tea yesterday.  Susanne was thrilled with it and The Mister received many compliments on how wonderful it was.

There were a couple of requests for the recipe so here you go.

10-12 plain digestive biscuits (of if you’re in the States, 15 graham crackers)
3 TBSP melted butter
900g cream cheese
1.5 cups white sugar
3/4 cup milk
4 eggs
1 cup sour cream
1 TBSP vanilla essence
1/4 cup all purpose flour

Preheat the oven to 175C (or 350F). Grease a 24cm (9in) spring form tin

Crush the digestives finely in a food processor and mix with melted butter until they look like wet crumbs, but not clumping together. Press into the bottom of the tin with the back of a spoon.

In a large bowl (if your hand-held blender can cope with it!) or a food processor/mixer, beat cream cheese and sugar until smooth. Blend in milk and then mix in the eggs one at a time, mixing just enough to incorporate. (It’s at this time I pour everything out of the food processor into a bowl and use the hand-mixer because the processor is getting rather full and leaving unbeaten cream cheese on the bottom.) Mix in sour cream, vanilla and flour (I sprinkle it from a little sieve) until smooth.

Pour filling onto the crust and bake in preheated oven for 1 hour.

After an hour turn the oven off and leave the cheese cake to cool in the oven without opening the door for 5 to 6 hours to prevent the top from cracking. Store in the fridge.

Got summoned with a week’s notice to head up to Rod’s place in Hawke’s Bay with a couple of the guys from our marketing team to meet with Andy, our Advisor to the Board who was visiting from the States. We met him a couple of times while in New York, and being the ex CEO of dell.com he’s rather famous in tech circles and when put together with our CEO and marketing guys, they spoke a whole other language of marketing jargon that I struggled to keep up with at times.

However, I was chuffed to be invited and really enjoyed the experience of a business retreat to the boss’s beach house. Had to drive a giant Ford Falcon, automatic, to get up and back, rather a monster to drive for my first time out behind the wheel in 5 months!

Rod & Andy served up a great meal of beef, roast vegetables & salad.

Andy & I rode on the back of Rod’s quad bike to the shop – via the beach!

We spent the morning drinking coffee (from a machine like ours), eating Rod’s banana choc chip muffins and talking strategy.

Have been back in the Wellington office a couple of weeks now and I think I’m suffering from motivation sickness. I know your office space can impact on how you feel at work but I’m believing that there can be a physical impact itself, beyond sitting at a badly arranged chair and desk. That part of my set up is good.

I just don’t recall when working in New York that I ever had such stinging dry eyes and dog tiredness and often times feeling totally deflated. We’re getting way more sleep here than we did in New York and we’re not working stupid long hours, probably the same length days as New York. Perhaps it’s a winter thing, that our bodies and minds are in hibernation mode. Or perhaps it’s the fluorescent lights and too warm dry air from the air-conditioning. Perhaps it’s being in the office again getting interrupted and dragged into meetings and conversations, which sometimes I missed while being away, but most of the time just enjoyed doing my own stuff in my own time at least being able to recognise something achieved at the end of the day.

Hmmm, have to figure it out before my productivity slips.

Have really enjoyed getting to know another Community Manager over here – Karen’s from Harvest, a company that Xero knows about as many of each others customers want us to integrate. It turned out that the Harvest office is just around the corner from the office we were in so we’ve had a couple of lady lunches and other meetings. Nice to chat about common quirks of our jobs, things we do the same and things we do differently. I’m not sure that I have an easier job; other Community Managers I’ve met here seem to be the conduit for all customer queries where as I’m really just at our social media doorway. However, have picked up a few good tips and will miss having Karen so close by.

This week, our international product team launched Xero Answers – a site for questions & answers for our new product Xero Personal. Rather than have a massive customer base flood our email support queue, we’re going to try this largely user-based approach to helping our customers, the aim being that people can see questions previously asked & answered, saving them having to do it, & also to give an opportunity for people to help each other out as they build up their own product knowledge & learn their own ways of using the product that they want to share.

It’s still orange & it’s had a few questions posted to it already; I’m nervously keeping watch over it trying to answer the questions as best I can but I am further removed from this product than Xero Business that I wrote most of the Help Centre for. I really hope it grows into a big community site like some others I’ve seen where eventually we can hook up a blog, the @XeroPersonal Twitter feed & stuff like that. And maybe even extend it to our business product. Early days!

Planes make me think. I guess you’re always going some place new or some place old that can make you look forward to new things or think about old things you want to leave behind, in either case, you’re going somewhere.

I’ve been thinking a lot about working remotely, in a different geographical location and timezone from the main office, and after weeks of this filling space in my head I’m going to attempt to get some of it out – after all that’s what I started my blog for even though since we’ve been away it’s become a glorified travel diary. Time for it to return to its routes as an outlet and store of my random thoughts! However I have to be careful this doesn’t cross a line – in this age of social media and people being fired for airing their grievances online and acting in a way out of line in the eyes of the company I will likely have to watch what I say, which kind of defeats the point of a personal blog! I don’t hate my job and this isn’t a precursor to any major decisions, just supposed to be random stuff about working remotely!

So why is this topic filling my head? I don’t think it’s one thing, I think it’s a collection of little things. I think if I was to pick one thing, or have one thing to sum it all up, it’s that change thing. I thought that being out of the office would open up a new way of working for me, give me some new and different things to do, stimulate new thoughts or ideas and above all, give me some freedom to change bad work habits for ones I actually want. However, due to my own need for routine, the office not really being set up for remote workers and the new way of communication that’s required for remote working, I’ve been unable to bring about new work habits.

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Laughed and laughed and laughed like no Twilight groupie should at a screening of New Moon at The Knitting Factory in Brooklyn on Sunday night. It was shown on a screen out the back of the club, attended by a mix of people wanting to see a comedy show and some true die-hard Twilight fans in their Twilight t-shirts – the difference being the alternate script via voice-over from comedians The Raspberry Brothers.

I wrote a bit about it on the Xero blog so please read that to save me re-typing everything here!

Letter from New York – records & film night