December 2004 Edition
December 2004 Edition
OK, the post date says January, and this is supposed to be the December edition. Something's messed up here, right? Well, I'll give it to you straight. I totally forgot about this thing for a long while, and in that time, some ignorant bastard wiped all my stuff off the staff PC. So now the Work Blog is truly dead, since I'm not even going to try to remember all the stuff I wrote for the Dec. edition, I'll just give you some other crap instead. Now I present to you:
A simple pastime devised by myself, this is my favorite way to while away the long, boring hours of the evening shift. All you need is a stir stick, a waxie, and a cup of any size (depending on your skill level). First, you roll up the waxie into a ball. When that is done, take the stir stick and bend the end of it at about a 70 degree angle. you now have a stick and "puck". Place the cup on it's side somewhere in the counter, and use the stick to flick the "puck" at the cup. Get it in and score a point! Use larger cups for an easier shot, and smaller cups for a challenge!
A two-player variant of the game requires two sticks and two cups. You can either play a game similar to air hockey, or you can simply use the single player materials and take turns shooting. The one with the most points when a manager or supervisor gives you crap for fooling around wins!
This one is an idea stolen from the PC game, The Sims 2. In the intro video, it shows a crazy guy holding a cup on a stick with a face drawn on it. I was lonely and bored one day, so I drew a face on a cup, and used it as a sort of companion. The image above is not of the original cup person, but one of his many younger siblings. The girl who was working the till opposite of me that day thought it was cute and demanded I make one for her. I did, and she has asked for new ones every time we work the same shift. I often decline.
They're a proven work of genius, as I've impressed a single person with them. An added bonus is that if you talk to one of these cup people and someone sees you doing it, they'll think you're totally nuts. Well, a bonus for some, anyhow.
This one is less known among my co-workers, as he never really saw completion until I needed to take the picture. Basically, you take a handful of stir sticks, tape them together in a shape vaguely resembling a person, and then tape a plastic lid on top of it to make the head. Feel free to darw eyes or something on the lid for added character. You can't see in the picture, but mine had some mean eyes on it. I imagined my sitck man to be a villain of sorts, so I taped a waxie over his shoulders to make him a cape. You could add other accessories and stuff, and the type of stick man you could make is limited only by your imagination and how much crap you can steal without getting caught. They're not as fun or loveable as the cup people, but they do provide a nice distraction during a slow day.
I developed this game on a slow Saturday morning, with more than one goal in mind. Basically what it is is a general drinking game, but with coffee instead of booze. Feel free to use alcohol if you want to lose your job, though.
My rules are simple; when there are no customers and you look at the clock, depending on what it says, you have to drink a coffee. I played where a number ending in zero had you drink a medium, and a number ending in three had you drink a small. If all the digits were the same, you had to take a large black. It's a super-rare occurence, and has a fitting penalty. I didn't make up this game just to keep away the boredom, though. There were other reasons too. For one, it kept me from glancing at the clock all the time, and helped the day pass quicker. Secondly, I was really tired, so the coffee boosts helped me make it through. In fact, after two hours, I had downed ten cups. That's more coffee in 120 minutes than I've had in my entire life. I was fricking wired. But then it got busy, so the game had to end.
A very basic game. You simply wad up every waxie you use during the day into a giant waxie ball. The only catch is that you can't tell anyone exactly what you're doing, and you can't defend your ball against co-workers, as it's a kind of survival game. The bigger your waxie ball gets without someone throwing it in the garbage, the better you are! I once made it all the way to 12 waxies. The greatest part is that when you run out of customers, you can play catch with your waxie ball. So it's kind of like two games in one!
The last activity is a great game to play with multiple people. Basically, you just throw stir sticks at a designated target, be it a coffee pot, a cup, or the milk jug. Your goal is to get the sticks into the target. Of course, you have to designate a hrow distance, as you don't want to ruin the challenge of trying to get the stir sticks to fly the way you want them to. Each successful throw earns a point, and just like waxie hockey, the player with the most points when you catch hell from a higher-up wins the game!
I've played this multiple times with different co-workers, and we always had a good time. Even some of the bakers came and joined in on occasion. It's good fun, and possibly the best way to waste time on this list.
It's really just an evil trick, rather than a passable pastime. All the product labes on the showcase have the French names on the back, and once I turned them all over to the French sides. It was great watching customers and co-workers alike try to figure out what was going on. Of course, the ones that know French were also humoured by the little escapade. It's probably the greatest thing I've done at Tim's yet, and I'm still trying to find other, better pranks to pull.
The final thing on this list is one of my most common activities. I draw on the coffee pots all the time, even though pretty much everyone who takes their job even somewhat seriously repeatedly tells me not to. I often draw simple characters holding cups of coffee, but sometimes I go above and beyond, by writing stuff that might worry a customer like "Caution: contains T-Virus" and "For your own sake, don't drink me!". I find it quite humorous, and every once in a while a customer even comments on what's on the pot. The most common customer reaction is "What's a T-Virus?", second only to "Hey, that's kinda cute", which is a popular response to when I draw White Ninja on a pot.
Yes, so that's it. I don't know what in the hell the next Work Blog entry is going to be like, but I can certainly tell you it's not going to be anything like the first two. This Work Blog needs more blog and less journal. Actually, now that I think of it, I have an excellent idea of what to do next. So make sure you come back when I tell you to, because it'll probably be interesting!