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Cube Farm Ordnance?
In a humorous departure from the normal question fare, B747SP asks: "In my office, we have a healthy disrespect for the comfort and safety of our colleagues, and the accompanying arms race is strong, and competitive. We've tried everything from hurling balls of paper back and forth, to stress balls, flying torpedoes, Nerf weaponry al-la thinkgeek.com, and even Air Soft guns (I did say no respect for safety!!!).
OK, so that's my office. What about other Slashdotters? What ordnance do you use in your office to keep that sucker in the next cube on his toes? Do you build your weapons from stuff around the office, or do you buy from a store?"
- Stress test. As you're walking down the hall with a beach ball and someone comes the other way, toss it to him. If he grabs it and tosses it back, good man. If he swats at it like a fly and it goes sailing into the light fixture, he's a little stressed. If he ducks, you've found your next Nerf target.
- Testing headshape. Stand behind someone and bounce the ball off his head. See what angle it returns at. Play from a distance, and try to get it to always come back to you. (I am quite serious, we really do play this game).
- Bombardment. Named for the technique from the old high school game. Find 3 or more, then toss one at somebody. While he is reaching to catch it, fire the others at his head.
- Cube volleyball. Works best with two cubes sharing a wall, but can be played across a hallway (window between cubes optional). Players must stay in their seat.
- Distance basketball. Person in cube A sets up a net. Person in cube B attempts to get beachball in net. Works best if net cannot be seen by B.
- Plinko (named for the Price is Right game). Stand up in cube. Toss ball randomly into center of cube farm, and hope that it winds up in the cube of someone who doesn't get pissed off easily.
- William Tell. Put beach ball on your head. Allow people to shoot nerf darts at it.
- Keeping-people-awake-at-meetings game. While someone is at the whiteboard talking, toss the ball around. Don't let it hit the floor. Finds the sleeping people quickly.
Add a Razor scooter or 3 to this and you've got some real potential. Hallway jousts, anyone? Or how about the occasional driveby? (Yes, we really do have at least 4 people with scooters, and they have been known to ride them in the halls. Including the big bosses. It's funny to see your coworkers fall down.)www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
Here is the States (where party crackers aren't much of a tradition) the inner explosive can be purchased separately. I've found that tape is not usually sufficient to hold the string in place. Using a knot almost always works better. There are several good knots that any boy scout can teach you to attach regular string to invisible fish line.
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I don't want free as in beer. I just want free beer.
Take 1" pvc piping, say 3-4 foot section, and a length of pipe insulation (foam pipe, with a slit down the side) which fits over the pvc. Use about six inches of the insulation for a handguard (placed perpendicular to the pvc, at the handle end) and use the rest of the foam for the length of the sword, excepting the handle (which is just bare pvc). The foam should extend past the tip of the pvc by two inches (for soft stabs). Now duct tape the entire thing. All of it! One big, grey sword.
Lather, rinse, repeat. Swordfights generally require a space to fight it, but the best fighters can fight as effectively inside or between cubicles as they can in an open area.
Plus you can fight over design decisions.
"Sir! You insult my work when you add the paperclip to the software!"
"It makes the program easier for the users. Cower to my usability, fiend!"
"Hold thy tongue, knave! I Challenge you to a duel!"
-Adam
Let's build some for gore, bush, cheney, and leiberman... I'd like to see them go at it. For each blow they have to insult a program or policy of the other...
Motorized Ballzooka and a healthy supply of extra balls are good too, and less damaging to the arms. You can watch the Pavlovian reaction when you rack the action....
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Ditto. At my first engineering job, the company used these huge rubber bands to hold trash bags securely on the barrels. Someone grabbed a bag of them from the closet one day and we had a constant battle for the next year. I remember the day we rearranged the lab and discovered the piles of rubber bands that had accumulated under each of the benches.
Also amusing was building soda can pyramids and trying to knock them over from the other end of the lab, however, a successful shot never failed to draw managerial attention.
Well, there's always the good old rubber band gun, either purchased or improvised (the latter with pencils, pens, or fingers).
One of our clients is a large novelty wholesale company, and our boss obtained a case of those white paper snapper thingies--y'know, the ones with gravel and about two grains of gunpowder within, that you throw on the ground. That Monday the entire office became a war zone. Boss and Alpha Tech were running around throwing them at each other. Receptionist sat at her desk wearing an expression that said I am so not amused. I snuck out and requisitioned a couple packages for the Web room. Imagine Boss and Alpha Tech's surprise when one of them would try to use the Web room as a bunker. *POW!* "AAAH!" "Hee."
DISCLAIMER: Careful with these. It's all fun and games till someone loses an eye, and then it's all fun because the game's over.
This is a Chao. A Chao says "Mu."
I happen to be a SysOp at NerfOnline (http://www.nerfonline.net/), a recently re-opened unofficial Nerf site. Sadly, a lot of the people there are 13-year-old kiddie morons, but there are some good people there (a few of whome are 13 but intelligent. :)
My personal favorites:
Lock n' Load - Modified, this is *the best* pistol-style weapon out there. Great range, extremely short reload time. Cons: Discontinued, VERY difficult to find. (I got lucky in Canada.)
SuperMAXX 1500 - 4-shot sniper weapon of doom if you replace the barrels with 1/2-inch Sched. 40 PVC pipe and load micros down said barrels. Can also shoot the original SM ammo well, and megas reasonably well, also the venerable homemade Stefan dart. (Careful, tho - Stefans in a supercharged 1500 can put dents in doors. I'd stick with micros or SM darts when indoors.) Discontinued, but only recently and still relatively easy to find.
SuperMaxx 250/350 - Throw away the darts that come with it, use micros, and stretch the spring if you can. Best used as a backup weapon.
I also own:
Power Clip - Great for the fear factor, but you're fucked as soon as those 10 darts are out. Reload time is horrible. Can only shoot micros, and eats them like anything.
Splitfire - Replacing the barrels with PVC and plugging the pressure release valve (end of the plunger) with glue is a necessity. After this it can compete somewhat with the LnL. Like the 1500, can shoot a wide variety of ammo, but not nearly as far. Also, it's unreliable. A combination of a leaky pump valve and a diaphragm-style trigger system (A small loss of pressure in the air tank causes the rest of the air to be released in the barrel.) have rendered one of the two barrels of my SF inoperable.
My wishlist:
Crossbow. (Yeah, right... They're impossible to find nowadays...)
Big Bad Bow - Nearly as good as the X-bow, it looks like these are getting re-released. (They've reappeared on nerf.com) Some people on NerfOnline have come up with an excellent breech-loading barrel modification for this.
Oh, in the case of both of the bow weapons - modify them to fire darts instead of arrows.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
He promptly shot himself in the eye.
We never let him forget that.
Here in Oz we've only just got Nerf. I've purchased the Pp(l)itFire and PowerClip. One secretary has already asked to borrow the small one. The locals can't believe the PowerClip, unfortunately it makes too much noise. I've taken them both home and probably won't bring them back to work. I work for losers, sure, but I'm the only one with any sense of fun. Firing a Nerf gun in the presence of all but one of our directors will probably result in immediate dismissial, or worse -- a really long lecture full of mangled cliches and bad analogies.
I once got dared to make a working weapon out of things that could be found in the office. I wasn't allowed to use anything from outside the office at all (not the materials, nor the tools to build it), and I had to do it in an hour.
I ended up building a miniture cross-bow that shot real life arrows a distance of about 2 meters on a relatively true path.
It worked so well that Above my desk there would be a collection of about half a dozen projectiles stuck in the pinboard-like ceiling panels.
How did I make it?
Basically it was constructed out of the metal clips used to hold together reams of paper which have been punched to fit in a ring binder. You know the things that go where the rings in a ring binder would usually go.
The clip was made out of aluminium and came in 3 parts.
I had to find a way to attach the cross sectoin to the barrel. I did this by using a hammered out T-Clip. I then attached a rubber band across the cross section of the bow, cut arrow heads into the projectiles and wolla... A miniture cross bow.
...I was tempted to use a Glock 9mm on a few of my more obnoxious cow orkers. That's why I went to work at a place with real offices, with doors and windows.
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
I get up regularly to stretch, and I look out across the top of the cubes, and there's nothing... I expect, with all the times I've looked, that I would at least see someone else looking out across as well, but no! It's a barren wasteland of... productivity? Perhaps...
If you tried that at my company, you'd most likely be nailed in the head by the big brother of the flyingtorpedos mentioned above. (Sorry, no URL, the guy who orders them for us has already gone home.) We played with them so much that most of them broke so we sent in another order. Our VP of engineering matched us up to $100 worth and our Den Mother bought us another case. We're looking at ~200 rockets arriving next week.
Of course we have our fair share of Nerf guns. There's a Ping Pong Ball Burp gun a couple cubes down. My solution for self defense has been camoflage netting over the top of my cube. At least that keeps out the indirect fire. Not much you can do about a WildFire firing squad.
We're currently trying to come up with a design for a belt-fed Nerf gun. And somehow we still manage to bring our projects in on schedule.
Yes, that's right. Choclate. Get Hershey's miniatures, Kisses, or Chunks. Wait until your target is intent on the monitor, and heave one full bore at the monitor, not his or her head. You can often induce heart failure, and your little gift is either eaten, or returned, the next time you're intently looking for a bug in some chunk of code...
It was Judge Woodlock, in the US District Court for Massachusetts, with a gavel.
Instead of weapons, we use words. A Nerf arrow to the head may surprise you for a moment, but a series of well-placed demeaning cracks can cripple one's self worth for weeks.
Other than that, we go into the Pine Barrens each year and shoot one another with paintballs. About a year ago, a colleague and myself each had windowless offices. Somebody with a window had just left the company and we were both asking if we could have it. Our president suggested that we fight it out with paintball guns. Luckily, a more senior person came to the firm and got the office, so no one had to get bruised.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
Where I work, we just use rubber bands. They don't cost anything, ammunition is unlimited (supply closet) and they're quiet enough not to disturb anyone talking on the phone or (god forbid) trying to get some work done. If you use the thick ones, or several smaller ones tied together you can inflict some decent damage too.
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
I've found that the vortex guns by koosh are the best (safe) weapon for cube fights. The vortex may take longer to load, but you can't beet the accuracy or distance you get out of one.
/ZL
I was impressed, however, at the ingenuity some of the guys had worked up. One individual had run a compressed air line up from the shop and attached it to the back of a Nerfball gun. The other favorite was frozen Nerf, where a Nerf (or other foam) whatever was soaked down in freeze spray and then launched, slipped, stuffed, dropped, or otherwise planted on unsuspecting victims.
*whup* "Get along, little electrons. Heeyah!"
If you are lucky enuff to be stuck with a bunch of other contractors who are as bored as you are in a maddening computer room full of noisy fans, and if the false floor is not carpeted and you have chairs with wheels... Then a certain endorphin related to the neuropeptides might kick in and get you to grab the nearest screwdriver and challenge your friends in a screwdriver joust. I know it sounds barbaric and completely stupid, but the chairs rarely go to where you want them to go in the first place and seldom with enuff momentum to cause major injuries on the opponent. It kinda hurts, but the exitment this game brings make you unaware of this. But I guess you need a couple of years of exposure to HP-UX or VMS to get to that desperate stage. HP-9000 front panels make excellent shields, but beware when you push them back in the servers as you might push the power button with it and draw the attention of 200 other employees.
You can use plastic rulers in the first weeks if the screwdriver thing scares you.
I remember the boss told us "After 5pm only." Then the very next day I heard the unmistakable sounds of gunfire at about 2pm. I yelled from the office "After 5, guys!" It continued. "I thought we were going to wait until after 5!" Still, continued. I walk out of my office and into the arsenal cube to see that the boss himself has brought his 7yr old son to work today and he is now shooting every gun in sight with great glee.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
As mentioned in an earlier Slashdot article, the Mattel Agent Zero M 5530 Sonic Blaster is my weapon of choice for silencing my critics. From the Consumer Reports page, The Mattel Agent Zero M Sonic Blaster 5530 fires compressed air with a deafening blast. Our measurements top out at 157 dB-above a level that can do permanent damage to the hearing of an adult.