Today is my two-year work anniversary, meaning that I am coming up to having had this job longer than any other job I've ever had. And we're a pretty small company, with lots of office banter and in-jokes. Anyway, while discussing my two-year anniversary yesterday, I looked on the Internet to see what substance a two-year wedding anniversary would be, you know, as a joke. It turns out it's cotton. So today was my cotton anniversary of providing first-line IT support for a boutique data centre and web hosting company. Okay, so that's all fine so far. But as the banter and in-jokes continued, I said I should totally get a cotton-based reward for my long(ish) service, because the company used to give you a plaque if you worked there for five years.
So this morning, I cycled to work as I do every day. I showed up drenched in sweat, as I do every day, because I have
that medical problem where you sweat too much and I'm generally quite a damp and icky dude who really shouldn't be cycling anywhere. But hey, I care about the environment and saving money and avoiding traffic. My love for the environment also means that I have a towel on my desk for drying the mug I always drink from when I wash it, because there are no communal towels in our office, just gigantic rolls of those blue paper towels, and it saves trees to dry a mug with a reusable towel made of fabric. However, given the really quite nasty amount of sweating I am prone to (I read somewhere that it counts as "severe" if it actually drips off you, which it does sometimes for me but not always), I do also wipe sweat off my forehead with the towel. So in classic small-office in-joke workplace banter fashion, the towel now has a reputation as an unspeakably disgusting rag that nobody else should ever even touch. And so, on cotton-anniversary day, today, I arrived to find a brand new set of 100% cotton towels as a present from my employer, sitting on my desk to greet me and commemorate my achievement.
What an amusing extension to the in-joke about my towel! What an entertaining continuation of the whole "cotton anniversary" celebration! Good old workplace. We're such characters, and yes I am being a tad ironic there, because for real, if you don't work there, none of this will be funny or interesting in the slightest. But our marketing guys have been looking for a while for opportunities to make us seem more fun and human to our customers, using the delights of social media, and so it was suggested that we should post a picture of me with my hilariously appropriate cotton-based gifts on our various social media channels. And when I say it was suggested, I mean it sure felt mandatory as I was doing it. I owned it, with a big cheesy grin as I hugged my new towels so tightly, and we all thought the slightly uncomfortable experience was hilarious, plus I scored some hot new towels so I can't complain. I even threw away the manky old one that I have washed a grand total of once in two years.
Unfortunately, are our client base really going to relate to a story about replacing a funky towel they know nothing about? In fact, the towel story wasn't even mentioned in the official social media post. And, as was only noticed later, nor was it pointed out that a two-year anniversary is a cotton anniversary, and let's face it, that probably isn't common knowledge to most people unless they look it up like I just did. So now, out there on Facebook and LinkedIn and possibly a couple of other places, there is a solitary social media post from a small company wishing me a happy two-year work anniversary, with a photo of me beaming delightedly as I clutch a fistful of small towels in the middle of an office for no reason at all. We don't make towels; we're a datacentre. It makes absolutely no sense. And it has my name all over it. Goddamn it.