St�phane the golden boy broke a barrier this afternoon, pulling me into the fold when he asked if I was noticing the effect that I was having on people with my tie. "They're all staring at you! It's awesome!" I stood there with a golden-boy staring at me with wonder in his eyes and wondered when I ever stopped being the invisible girl.
The big boss even had lunch with us and joined in on the Qu�b�cois jokes.
We've been having actual conversations (not just polite discours) and they've started taking the piss outta me like they do with everyone else.
This afternoon when JF came running in to find out WHO DID THAT to his server, everyone joined in on the attempts to turn me a bright beet red.
It worked of course, and that's when Andre-Marc turned around and congratulated me on passing the hazing ritual. I've made my first big SNAFU. I'm one of the guys.
We spent the rest of the afternoon furiously working and singing along to Louise Attaque at the same time. Cedric in his off-key tenor, Stephane in his shy-golden-boy baritone.
I've been running into various Qu�b�cois all over the place and catching up on gossip and my ex-roommates are all doing fine and the littlest one is still a virgin and seems to think he's the only one who's ever had problems finding someone. Conversations you don't expect to have in a cafeteria line-up, but I've got me my gumption back and I'm making strangers in the halls smile.
Even the SysAdmin got over his fury after he sat down and had a good stare at my chest and my linux tie. Twenty minutes later we were all outside laughing our heads off and he was promising to spend monday catering to my every FileSystem related whim.
Boy is he going to regret that when he realizes just how many problems I've found on their production server... Mouahahaha.
He also invited me to hang out in the SysAdmin room and watch downloaded movies. Awwwww. Woulda been sweeter if he weren't drooling.
Amazing how much magic happens just cuz I got boobies, eh? ;)
In the meantime I'm preparing hypotheses based on what I *think* I will find in the logs on the new machine, I'm wrestling with the wrong c compiler to make it act like the right c compiler which it refuses to do even on the working machine and I'm stuck with the wrong debugger and a stdout that refuses to out.
And all the conclusions we came to about the scripts yesterday suddenly don't apply since they were on the wrong machine.
Essentially I've been here three days doing massive amounts of busywork to the point of dragging my feet home exhausted, but I haven't actually learned anything useful.
I've just been preparing.
In the meantime, I'm still standing on a chair singing Irish Drinking songs with Cedric and goading Stephane into bringing whisky to work tomorrow.
Amazing. Andre-Marc was right when he said "you work better in a tie".
I sure did.
And I learned. I learned that bankers smile and that eight of my months here were unnecessarily painful at work.
I learned that in a roomful of tall men sporting perfectly knotted ties, there is as much laughter as among any other group.
I learned that even goldenboys just laugh when I mess up a joke and allow me to get away with it.
Dammit. I wonder how I'm going to justify hating the briefcase army now.
My childhood delusions are shattering again. I can hear them.