Work is tricked out today. It’s pretty ridiculous. There’s your standard decorate-the-office / costume contest, and the offices (most of the floors in this building) have your standard dress-up: lots of spiderwebs, inflatable witches, light-up pumpkins and general knickknackery.

Over here in the software division, though, we have Duygu. Duygu is a competitive swimmer (and recently married to Sevket), and she likes to win contests, so she arranged to organize the decoration of our quadrant…

All our cubes and the entire hallway between cube floor and office walls are swathed in black plastic sheeting, top to bottom (I had to stand on a ladder and tuck it under ceiling tiles). The hallway is festooned with the most glorious fire hazard I’ve ever seen–vertical green and black streamers about every two feet, lit by Christmas lights (all the ceiling panels have been turned off), and neon green spiderwebs in the “entrances” and “exits” to our “world of scary computer bugs.” You have to find doors cut into this sheeting if you want into an office or cube, or in or out of our division. There’s a fairly strong Matrix theme kind of mooshed in (thus the green streamers–they’re lines of code), and one of the walls is covered with printouts of REAL Matrix code, colored with green highlighter and illuminated by a large blacklight so they fluoresce. Everybody’s dressed in all black, and we have white masks and glowstick mouth-lights so we glow inside them. At each corner of the rectangle that this all covers, there are two “scary computers,” one a posterboard “keyboard” and “screen” (also blacklit and covered in Matrix code), the other a cardboard triptych covered in green rope lights and with circuit boards from dead peripherals taped all over it.

I really meant to bring my camera, but I forgot it–I’ll try to get duplicates if anyone else gets pics. I want to be able to prove I’m not making this up.

Update 1454 hrs: We won!