Turkey at Noon

The Company contracted another new guy about a week ago, a general applications developer to work on my team. He's an eccentric fellow in his early thirties, a college football fanatic, and unlike almost everybody else on the team short of myself, doesn't have a wife or kids.

The new guy and I discovered that he used to work with a guy who was the twin brother of another guy that I used to work with, somehow, and we kicked off a fairly smooth start. The plan, at least from what I've been hearing, is that he'd be taking over the SSIS development and that I would move forward with services-oriented development.

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The Client sponsored a holiday luncheon for the local IT department at a fancy hotel in Town Center. The new guy and I hitched a ride with the chick consultant from San Francisco, and we convened with the rest of the team in a banquet room, tables draped in cloth with the napkins fanned out on our plates and three forks of varying sizes for each plate.

Lunch was a buffet table with two kinds of poultry, ham, leg of lamb, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, something with spinach in it, varying pastas and vegetable plates, and stromboli, the last of which seemed oddly out of place to me. Dessert was pumpkin pie, pecan pie, and key lime pie.

After the meal, the department bigwigs took over the microphone and went through their hoo-rahs, giving a run-down of status reports, praising some of the progress that had taken place through the year, and eventually trying to reassure everybody that despite the economic downturn, we were good and stable for the year ahead.

Following the speeches, most of the consultants hightailed their way back to the office. These are the folks that, you can tell, are addicted to their work -- the kind of people that have a hard time keeping a good work and life balance. I feel pretty bad for these folks, sometimes. Events like these are sponsored for by the big company dime. Even as a contractor, these hours are billable. I don't care if my work doesn't get finished on time; I like to kick back and enjoy the moments any chance I get.

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A game of white elephant kicked off at the end of lunch for those who had signed up to participate. I did not, but I stuck around to see the presents.

Our team director, who had been sitting up front and center socializing with the bigwigs, scurried to the back to the table I had been sitting, giggling. He confided that he'd wrapped up the most inane gift for the game: a Chia Pet in the shape of Shrek's head.

Coincidentally, the gift ended up in the hands of one of our business analysts, a very timid girly girl who had not been apart of the conversation when the team director told about his gift. She sat down right next to him with the box and a pout, complaining about how ugly the head was. We laughed while he bit his tongue.

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The infrastructures lead and I joked about playing hookie at the bar next door, but ultimately returned to the office to finish the workday.