The Software Development Center (SDC), while being in a prime location, was far from an ideal office environment. But then, lasting friendships are probably more often forged in a foxhole than in a corner office. On first inspection, we would now be working in a clean, well-lit, open-plan form office, complete with a dinette. There was plenty of natural light from the windows facing the main and side streets. We were on the second floor, conveniently located above a Bruegger's bagel shop. Parking was on-street, but free and not too hard to find in the surrounding blocks, a definite improvement over downtown. Next door was Fat Head's, our favorite bar and official hot wing vendor of the Rock Ridge development team. What could be better?
A number of months after the move, another seismic event forever changed the office. It started like any other day. C$ was up to his usual antics, as he held court at the meeting table. This meant everyone within 50 feet was in his meeting whether they wanted to be or not. I can't remember the trigger, but J-Pax must have had his fill of being harassed by C$. It seemed like the office suddenly got quiet when I heard J-Pax say, "Fuck you, C$… I'm tired of this shit…and here's your fucking pen back." I may not have remembered the quote exactly, but I clearly remember the first office-launched F-bomb. I don't know what was holding us back to that point. J-Pax had seemingly opened some sort of Pandora's Box of swearing. Overnight, the standard office chat went completely blue.
The insanity of having one phone, located centrally but not conveniently, for everyone proved to be an interesting social experiment. It would ring, and heads would begin popping above cube walls like prairie dogs to see who would be forced to answer it. Eyes would swivel back and forth, head fakes and false starts followed, before someone would finally cave. It was as though some evil genius had studied the book Peopleware and applied the opposite of all that was learned to create the ultimate productivity killer. When it wasn't disrupting "the flow" (a state of greatly heightened productivity that comes after approximately 45 minutes of uninterrupted effort) of almost everyone in the office, it served as a convenient petri dish for whatever cold or flu variant was in circulation.
Spending a few more minutes surveying the 50 x 50-foot office, you'd quickly realize that the 20 or so half-height cubicles were densely packed and were unlikely to provide much peace and quiet when fully populated. Who was going to get the two tall cubes, one on either side of the office? And that solitary cordless phone sitting in the middle of the office might seem a little worrisome. This is when you would finally take notice of the two doors on the far wall. One was a utility closet, and the other was the toilet. One toilet, with no vestibule or hallway. One closet-size toilet in full view of the office. Twenty people, living on a diet consisting chiefly of hot wings and coffee, relying on one toilet. This was going to get ugly.
The daily unpleasant reminders of our limited sanitation facilities, combined with the office demographics, led to many scatological discussions. There were even meta-scatological discussions. The most infamous, after a particularly late programming session, led to some groundbreaking work in theoretical scatology. I believe the eureka moment was inspired by JDog, our technical writing manager, and the sole female employee willing to endure direct exposure to some of our more eccentric topics of debate. Exasperated, she noted that when there were enough guys in a conversation, sooner or later it invariably turned to the topic of poo. I had dreams of becoming a theoretical physicist, before my adviser at Carnegie Mellon University noted that my lack of academic rigor made me more suited to a career in computer science. Using Stan as a sounding board, I noticed striking similarities in the observed phenomenon to the implications of the Chandrasekhar and Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limits in stellar astrophysics. The TOV limit is upper bound in the mass of neutron stars, beyond which the force of gravity will exceed the neutron degeneracy pressure with a subsequent collapse into a black hole. Similarly, I proposed that any conversation involving enough men will soon collapse under its own weight, forming a super-dense discussion from which no non-scatological discussion could escape, dubbed a brown hole. The theory has agreed well with considerable observational data. Possible refinements include factors to account for the apparent increased speed of the collapse in the presence of alcohol. Also, collapse may be prevented by having enough women in the conversation, but we have been unable to collect the necessary observational data to support the hypothesis.