The (Geek) Suite Life

As Geek In Charge at CurrentMarketing, I’m a tough boss — a veritable taskmaster.
For the past few months in our new suite upstairs, I’ve denied the other geeks a conference table to meet at next to our monolithic white board. They’ve been forced to huddle near it standing!  I know, I’m horrible, but at least it amused me for a time.
However, even I tired of their incessant whining and mewing, so I finally bought our new table.  I tried to find one that would be as ugly, uncomfortable and torturous as possible.  I think I succeeded:

Pay no attention to the whiteboard, that is our secret programming language. It might look like:
A skull
A submarine
E=MC2 —> Web 2.0
But don’t ask, your mind couldn’t even handle it.  Seriously.
Other than the new table, I’ve also forced upon them two hideously devious chores:
First of all, once every few weeks, someone in the Geek Suite needs to give a post-lunch presentation.  It can be on anything they’ve learned, discovered, taught, read or so on.  In a few weeks, I’ll be hosting an advanced SQL presentation to talk about some neat tricks I’ve been using in a recent project.  And just today we had our first volunteer.  Jonathan brought in his Arduino/Flex/Nintendo Nunchuck kit he’s been hacking on and shared his code and app via a projector onto the whiteboard (and using our new table!)
Secondly, everyone can use a small part of every week to work on their own personal project that benefits CurrentMarketing.  If it is personal, how does it benefit CurrentMarketing?  Well, there are lots of cool ideas floating around that we don’t always have time to work on, or that are necessarily billable work.  Flash/Flex apps we want to make.  Widgets for websites that are drop-ins.  Process automators that we’ve always meant to do, but haven’t.  Without deadline, without a project manager hanging over you, bounded only by their imagination.
Sickening right?  I know I’m evil …
… but sometimes when I’m not looking, I think they might be enjoying all this.
Masochists I say.