davidn: (Jam)
[personal profile] davidn
Among the really enjoyable bits of writing the new versions of our system for various clients at work, I've somehow landed myself with the task of trawling through a giant 800-line-long colour-coded Excel list and accompanying 36-page 100MB PDF with handwritten notes scrawled across it to attempt to decipher the changes that one of the divisions need to their immense tree of locations. Even ignoring the unintentionally ironic cases like "Quallity Control", I think that the writer of the spreadsheet was going as mad as I was near the end - I felt a compulsion to look over my shoulder before clicking on one called "Heaving Oil Pumper Tankage". I suspect it was meant to be "Heavy" but he got distracted and accidentally made it even more Freudian than the name already was.

I began to suspect that they were making things up when they started throwing in names like "Dehexenizer" and "Wet Gas Scrubber", but fairly late on there was also one labelled "Tank Farm", which put an image in my mind of someone pouring a sack of grain into a trough and a herd of little M4 Shermans trundling frantically over and pushing each other out the way in the rush to snort it up through their barrels. It was at about that moment that I realized I had been looking at the location tree for six straight hours and needed to go and get some fresh air.

Here, by the way, are the collected responses from the question that I posted a few days ago. The replies were in general less definite than my own preference, which made collecting them together a little more difficult than I had imagined, but if I didn't make some sort of effort, then I would have just asked everyone what they wear in bed and it would be weird.



I was actually very surprised when I went through the posts and tried to sort them into two general areas (preference for nothing/minimal against wearing real sort of nightclothing), because even though I thought there was no pattern when they came in, you can tell from that quick Excel job that there's a definite split in the replies - though it may possibly be bias in my categorizing as I skimmed through them. (I was also surprised that so few people wanted to respond anonymously - perhaps I overcompensated for my perceived strangeness of the question.)

In general, from the wider descriptions in the replies, I think that women just tend to feel the cold more. Whether there's any biological reason for this is something I really can't tell you.

Date: 2008-11-12 06:54 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] starfishchris.livejournal.com
Could it be the increased surface area of females compared to males? I'm clutching at straws here. Ooh, how about this one? As we all know, women do more laundry than men*, presumably men avoid laundry where possible, thus they wear less in bed (and generally). Either that, or there's a special body-warming gene that exists only in the Y chromosome. It definitely disproves that urban legend that girls can multi-task, though, since they can't sleep and stay warm at the same time!

Fact or facetious? You decide!

* Because they wear pyjamas and we don't, of course. Isn't circular reasoning obvious enough for you?

Date: 2008-11-12 07:25 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] dr-dos.livejournal.com
Oh hey I forgot to reply to that.

Although I guess i don't really fit in either category since it all depends on the weather.

Date: 2008-11-12 12:19 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] diarytypething.livejournal.com
I once spent the summer holidays doing data input in the accounts department of an oil company, and there were a lot of weird looking invoices that went across my desk because oil rigs are made up of components with ridiculous-sounding names like "Christmas trees" and "vertical pigs" (the only reason I knew what these were was because there was a labelled diagram on the wall). They also got a lot of bills for "nipple grease" and "tiger gloves", which everyone swore were completely innocent hardware supplies, but when you have a job as boring as data input you need something to have the occasional immature giggle at.

Date: 2008-11-12 11:51 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] starfishchris.livejournal.com
The question is, what came first - the names for all these things or the innuendo?

Date: 2008-11-13 12:31 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] pami-zee.livejournal.com
Have you heard Richard talk about the Oil and Gas presentation they went to? Apparently the lecturer had a particularly bad accent for the subject. He was talking about "seemen (cement) in the bore holes"...

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