Here was me all worried about the Muppet’s, it’s amazing how quick things change. When I left for the office this morning, it was like some ghost town outside. There was no one to be seen, the road to the office was almost devoid of traffic and I was there about 10 minutes quicker than the normal journey time. Only once I arrived did I realise that the Muppet’s were lying in ambush for me, what’s more there were two of them.
I arrived to find the large gates closed and the two security guards sitting in the gatehouse impassively, I waived my pass at them and smiled disarmingly. Only to be answered with two heads shaking from side to side, after a few moments one of the guards came out and spoke to me through the still shut gate. The conversation went something like this;
Guard : Hello, what do you want?
Me : In to my office, I have a lot of work to do!
Guard : We’ve been told that no one gets in on a Sunday.
Me : Well I’m supposed to be doing an upgrade to some systems.
Guard : Do you have permission to work?
Me : Yes, the company even pays me to do it!
Guard : We’ll have to call your manager, whats his number?
I had already called my manager, however the call went straight to his voice mail. In fact he was able to repeat the conversation that I’d had with the security guard when he called back later, this is actually quite an achievement as normally he can’t remember a thing.
At this point sanity prevailed, the guards relented after a few minutes of discussions and let me in. After having me sit on the naughty step for a few minutes, I drove into the car park and stomped up to the rear door. My next surprise was when the door handle came off in my hand, as the handel is six feet long two inches in diameter and made of some alloy. I did consider walking back to the gate house, just to resume our earlier conversation. But decided that I should just go to my desk and get on with things, pausing only to repair the door – still it didn’t take too long to fix.
The only other incident of note during the day was a very short conversation with a security muppet, he wanted to know what antivirus precautions we took with our unix systems. I informed him that we normally just followed the advice of our “Yiddisher Mama”, which was “Chicken Soup and plenty of rest.”