Zrbo Survives the Layoffs

I knew something was wrong at work on Monday when I sent an e-mail to Theresa requesting a file, only to get a response from her manager saying that Theresa was no longer employed here. "That's odd" I thought, usually people tend to send out farewell e-mails when they move on from the patent firm I work at. Oh well, I guess she must have decided to leave and I just missed the message.

Yesterday I was walking over to get some coffee in the other building when I heard that nice girl from Office Services got axed not an hour before. Then I went to lunch with some colleagues and that's when I heard a whole slew of people had gotten fired and that a few more were on the way. You could see the panic level rise in everyone's faces. I was a bit nervous too because, you see, I didn't exactly get the best end-of-the-year report (I spend too much time on this blog I suppose). On our way back from lunch I saw Kirsten enjoying her lunch - I had just heard that she wasn't going to be around much longer either, though she didn't know that yet. By the end of the day her name was included in the HR director's e-mail of who had been cut.

The end of the day rolls round. Okay, "Thirty minutes to go" I tell myself. Then my manager calls all of us into her office. Uh-oh, this has never happened before! She tells us that the other database department just had a bunch of cuts and that they'd be merging with our database department starting Monday. And then we were dismissed... WHEW!!

Oh yes, I forgot to add - "When they came for the database department there was no one left to speak out for me"

The Wonderful World of Patents

For those who don't know, I work in a patent firm. Surrounded by quirky lawyers following an extremely linear and boring process of bringing patents to grant, I've processed a lot of patents in my short time here. Every so often I stumble across a particularly bizarre or oddly worded patent description that I just have to jot down. Today I've decided to share some of these with you. Ladies and gentlemen, here are a few of the things you could have invented and made your millions on:

"Processing architecture having passive threads and active semaphores"

Huh?? Perhaps the inventor liked using those semaphore flags!

"Carry-skip adder having merged carry-skip cells with sum cells"

Try saying that ten times fast, er... skipper.

"Nodma Cache"

Duuude, I just got this cache of some killer nodma, wanna come over and smoke some with me?

"Detecting Virtualization"

This is one of my faves, just how is a gerund and an intangible concept a patent? This is like saying "Seeking Amalgamation" - I just don't see how this is anything tangible.

"Wound capicator with ball-and-lead configuration"

Someone must have been spending too much time at the Tokien convention, isn't this just a mace?

And finally, what inspired me to write this post, my work partner came across this one yesterday:

"Method of making a condom by blow extrusion"

Sweeeet!!