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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1136 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 31, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Swung by my company's IT desk today, because they offered me a laptop upgrade after I submitted a ticket complaining about a weird issue I was having (several times a day my taskbar would disappear, and, when it reappeared, my file explorer and MS Teams would close).

Anyway, I got to the IT guy's desk and he had fighter jets printed out on paper and hung up around his desk. He had miniature models of Star Wars fighter-craft that hadn't even appeared in the movies, only videogames (he had to tell me this). He had 1-foot-tall models of anime characters I didn't recognize, and he complained about how Intel refused to compete with AMD and Nvidia in some consumer market (I think GPU). He bragged about his several-terabyte storage system that would take 23 hours or something to back up. I heard something about how Nvidia's latest GPUs don't have the hardware to process quite everything and they fill the gaps with AI.

I was at this man's desk for about an hour, listening to the things that interest him, and halfway through I felt this...rush of affection towards him. It wasn't unlike being emotionally drunk. He was talking about all the things I read so much about online, that no one I know irl ever talks or cares about. He was here, before me! There's a nonzero chance he's on this website, reading this.

I noticed he had no wedding band on his left ringfinger. I'd bet his apartment is a bachelor pad with even more impressive models of stuff than what he brought to work. Idk man. I have a kid now, and all my social life comes through my church. I don't run into too many guys like this anymore, and I was very impressed by how unabashed he was in his interests, or how undaunted he was by the fact that I could barely keep up with what he was talking about.

I'll be back at his desk on Monday to get my BIOS updated.

My boss told me to decorate my cubicle, so I strewed it with items—modular origami, house designs, a reorganization of the New York–Washington corridor, a guide to organizing your email account, etc. But nobody in my civil-engineering office was ever interested in any of them. >:-(

Years ago HR demanded that I decorate my cubicle as well. I papered the entire thing with printouts of the most egregious bug reports in our system along with our most embarrassing sections of code. The diktat was rescinded soon after.

Cowards! I see it as a very good laugh.

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