Life of a Lab Rat

A couple of warning messages about the new operating system from Microsoft came around on the Cage's email list last week. This list is used for everything from requests for reagents through student barbecue notifications to warnings about the bloody deionized water system. The message from our IT guys is "do not install Vista". Which is rather funny, actually, and I replied to the list suggesting that people should not boot Windows at all, because they would be more productive that way.

Fast forward to yesterday and I'd come across this website (again. It's been a while), and I thought what the heck, it's Friday, let's cheer some people up — and emailed the link to the departmental mailing list, with a covering note about how we all needed to be prepared both at home and while travelling, blah.

Oh dear. Very soon after, I got an email from someone downstairs asking to be removed from my (my) mailing list. Complete sense of humour failure and internal haemorrhaging (the phrase we're looking for here begins with "dryb" and ends in "alls"). Thing is, he managed to cc: the request to the entire department (making him look like a little bit of a fool because it's the departmental email list; there is no opt-out). So I start getting personal messages of support, and a table full of people laughing very hard at coffee. One of the IT guys said he was actually crying with laughter while reading the page.

The Deputy HoD did, reluctantly I think, say I should throttle back a bit. I should perhaps add that he was less hesitant two weeks ago when he persuaded me to send a tongue-in-cheek email to the list regarding putting the entire message in the Subject: field.

The good thing to come out of this is that said IT guy has agreed to set up a listserve for 'social' messages, and probably one each for the separate floors of the building. These will be 'opt-in', so humourless so-and-sos can continue having miserable Fridays.

I'm counting it as a 'win'.