So I'm in this high-level meeting today, and during a bit of a lull the Director across the table from me says, "So what does your shirt say, anyway?"
"Uh... it says 'I am a strange foreigner...'" is about all I could manage. Apparently the (caucasian) Director can read a little Japanese. "Ah... yes, that one means 'Gaijin'... Heh heh". So after that it was class clown time. Might as well; the damage was done. And the meeting was mostly over anyway.
I didn't know that the meeting this afternoon was going to be filled with brass. This was the third in a series about this one particular project, and without looking at the meeting details, there was nothing special to set it apart from the others -- which only had four people attending. There were a dozen of us in there today.
Point is, I wasn't thinking about my work-wear, any more than usual. I don't really care if what I'm wearing meets someone's definition of fashionable. That's not how get I dressed -- unless some non-normal occassion warrants extra thought in the clothes department. I mean to say that I merely used my semi-autonomic, base criteria method for selecting clothing this morning:
- No obvious bleach/grease/bodily fluid stains
- Not too many holes or tears
- Odors not detectable from more than two feet away
- On the top of the pile
Had I known, I would have worn something less skater-dude. I mean, I like the shirt. It's comfortable and roomy, and hardly anyone can tell what it means. So if it's handy when I'm coming out of the shower, I'll put it on without worrying about what it looks like, per se. It's not that I wasn't thinking this morning, it was that I just didn't know to bother with it.
But that's second time I've gotten a reaction from the shirt. The first was when Kumiko (the really cool Japanese translation lady who is working with officemate Jim) came by the office. She was in there talking to us for a full 15 minutes before she even noticed that I was wearing something with Kanji on it. And she thought it was hilarious. "Well, yes. Every foreigner is weird. To Japanese. But it is funny to see you wearing it."
Not sure how to take that.
So we had to do this corporate ethics online training thing a while back. I ignored it since it's utter bullshit. "Beth decides to award the big contract to her husband's company. Would this be against the code of ethics?" Ugh.
I got a nag email today telling me to do it or else. So I logged on to the third-party training website, went through all the steps, read the examples (I opted out of the audio-enhanced version without even having heard it first) and took their quiz. I almost just did the quiz first without reading anything, but I had a sneaky suspicion that they log what pages you see. It was banal. "Kim Wong has joined the sale force. Ted says Kim should come over to his place after work, as he 'likes to eat Asian...'". I couldn't make stuff like that up. One page was so comical I printed it out.
Jim walks over to my desk as I'm reading this nonsense and I mention that I'm doing the online ethics training. He says that he has it scheduled for later in the day, and asks about it. And I unwittingly violate the code of ethics, right there in the middle of the test. Our conversation went like:
"Is that it? The website we have to go to?""Yeah. Annoying, too. Resizes the window for you, uses Flash, opens new pop-ups all over the place, real basic common sense busy-work."
"Huh. Looks really boring."
"Yeah, but you know, the Beth chick in the tutorials is actually kinda hot..."
But I passed the quiz, in spite of myself!
I think I got extra points because there are, in fact, two rodents in the room. Not my rodents, mind you, but there was no way to qualify the answer, so I had to go with it.
Well, it took a few weeks, but after seeing about two dozen houses for sale (and having had an offer on one be rejected), we found a house we like and put in an offer which got accepted. Well, that's not exactly true; our counter-offer got accepted. There was a competing offer alongside ours, but the owners liked us and so they said if matched the other offer they'd sell the house to us. We had met the owners on Saturday, when we stopped by with our realtor. They took us on a tour of the place, showing us this and that, and they were very proud of their home. I guess we made it clear that we wanted to live in that particular house because of what it was, not simply because it was a good deal (the house had been on the market before, and had the price reduced by $50,000 this time around, making it far and away the cheapest house in the neighborhood). The owners are pretty cool people.
We went back to get another view last Sunday during the open house. Tracy took some photos while there. I made some notes on them so they make sense.
It's a funky place, for sure. It's definitely not an avergage tract home, and has an interesting sort of history as well. Apparently, it was designed and built by a company called Anshen and Allen (who are still around, by the way). They built 20 of these space-age, modern homes in 1956 in Sunnyvale, CA as a sort of test of the open floor plan design they came up with. I could almost hear the Martin Denny soundtrack coming out of the place when I first walked in.
Anshen & Allen were later hired by Joseph Eichler to design homes for his company. It's from A & A that Eichler got his famous atrium design, though the house we bought doesn't have the central atrium Echlers are famous for (nor does it have an Eichler's infamous radiant heating: galvanized steel water pipes cast right into the concrete floor, which are famous for leaking).
Though I've never heard the name before moving to the Bay Area, Eichlers are pretty well-known up here, and special enough that they have their own website devoted to them. There are even realtors who specialize in selling Eichlers. I read that there are something like 11,000 of them in the Bay Area, with 10% of them in Sunnyvale. I'm glad our home isn't an Eichler.
Our realtor made a little bit of a face when showed him the listing of the house we'd found. He said "Well, this is probably an Eichler..." and I think he was waiting for our reaction. When we had none, he asked us if we'd heard of them. After saying no, he explained what they were: a modern, open floor plan home, designed to be built cheaply. Aside from the leak-prone hydronic heating (you never want to hear the phrase "then you have to jackhammer the floor" from your realtor), Eichlers also feature inside and out wood paneling and a lack of adequate insulation in the roof. The atria and multitude of windows, when combined with the R8-ish value of the ceiling's half inch of fibreglass insulation, made for a very hot/cold/drafty house. Further, the lack of drywall inside made for a less than fire-resistent house. Dave the realtor said that Ecihlers were known as "eight minute wonders". He explained that this was the approximate time is took an Eichler to burn to the ground should it catch fire.
The house we bought has raised hardwood floors, drywall, and a decent roof. I'm glad about the floors, especially. I want to replace the electric cooktop with a gas one. That means running a gas line from the fireplace to where the stove is. While not impossible in a concrete slab home, it's way easier with a raised floor. Running ethernet and speaker wires is easier, too. I think our floorplan is a better deisgn than the layouts of the Eichlers I've seen online. I think we'll have more useable space in this one.
There's a lot of work to be done on the new house, but there was with the last one, so nothing new there. Tracy came up with the idea of putting up panels in the vaulted ceiling. We can't decide what color the beams should be painted, but the baby blue and green have got to go. Covering them both up with wood is a good idea. I foresee a sore shoulder in my future.
Anyway, we move in October first. Can't wait to get out of this apartment we're in.