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Dan Looks at Office Toys
Daniel Rutter writes "In a move that's made me wonder afresh whether I'm actually living this life or just dreaming it, I've just put up a review of a bunch of office toys. Two rubber band guns, a pneumatic ping-pong ball launcher, a bubble gun, some iridescent bouncing putty, a frickin' CROSSBOW that shoots sucker darts, and a couple of high-flying ring-ins that aren't really suitable for indoor play at all."
Wait, didn't all the .com's go out of business because of this crap?
I dislike work as is, do I really need someone shooting darts at me?
It's all fun and games till someone looses an eye.
(Even then you point and laugh)
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
...and in other news, the DOW is down 800 points since March.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur
What about the iMac?
A "Give-the-boss-an-Enema" (tm) voodoo doll.
how about any job? ;)
Now I see why IT is a dead industry. If only I would have had such insight when I was choosing my studies at the University. Then again, I probably would have been smart and started working right out of high school. (WANTED: Applications Programmer. 3+ years experience required.)
At least I have my vast knowledge of liberal arts to keep me warm at night and my degree in case I run out of toilet paper.
like this?
My life in the land of the rising sun.
While the things on the site were all well and good, I doubt any of them compair to the line of nerf products. These things will start wars to end all wars in many cubicle farms, and only end when all ammo has been destroyed.
Wait, they got recess after lunch at these companies now? Damn... I'm working at the wrong place, we actually have to work here.
me and my friend use to set up pillow bunkers in his room about 20 feet apart and use his 2 rubber band guns in wars. those things HURT. Especially when the main tactic was to make a fully enclosed bunker except for an eye hole...which in retrospect was not a good tactic. Ever been hit with super stretched rubber bands from 20 feet away in the eye at 5hits/sec? not fun...oh the blindness, the pain. all in all though it was good fun until one person decided "screw this" and rushed the other, ripping down his bunker and holding the gun up to whatever bare skin he could find and unloading.
does anybody know where one could find a set of mini remote control submarines? 50-galon fish tank size ones, so we can duel it out the office? i've seen pictures and some stuff about ones in japan, but cant find buying info.
Everybody denies I am a genius--but nobody ever called me one!
First, you could get more power out of each shot by looping the string around the ends of the bow. This slight modification meant that the suction cup darts would go way to fast to stick to anything, but would hurt like a muthafucka. The next step, naturally, was to replace the safe and cushy ammunition with sharpened pencils, which worked great. They would stick in the wall if aimed properly. (Of course, eye protection was important here, because occasionally shots would get flipped straight up instead of horizontally.)
Steel ball bearings didn't work as well, but that's what the slingshot was for. :)
God that thing was fun.
Cheers,
Mziliazki
Random Musings at Rum Smuggler
I fucking hated office toys at ricochet support. Some of you might have read my former comments about the company and it's culture, well here's a bad tale of office toys from the evergrowing adventures of toqer...
I got my job at ricochet right after quitting my job as a grey market motherboard salesman. Somehow I manged to convince Mike Newton that I was phone support material and subsequently landed the job. I excelled at my post to the point where some of the lackies started to ph34r m3.
One of the first things I noticed was all the "old school" staff had these nerf guns. I asked Jaqueline Schuman if I could get one of these.
"No only LEVEL 2 techs may have them"
Fucking bitch. Fuck you.
The senior techs used to love waste hours of the day just having nerf wars back and forth, unfortunately it was us level 1 techs that got caught in the crossfire. Here those jackasses would screw off all day, and on top of it make our jobs harder by pelting us with nerf balls.
On this paticular day, I had been on the phone trying to help a customer when a nerf ball hit me right in my plantronics. I knew where it came from, I looked over at Jaquelines cube to see her pretending to be innocent.
I grabbed that ball and hurled it. I wanted to hit above her head to scare her a bit, but I misjudged, held the ball too long, and it struck her right in the face. Hard.. Really hard..
Mark something a rather just saw my volley, he didn't see hers. BLAM fucking asshole picked up the ball, and I got nailed in the plantronics a second time.
Well after I got fired from there (after numerous underhanded attempts to get me to quit) I vowed never to work in an office that allowed this kind of horseplay again, and I never did.
--toq
My vote goes to the Levitron, a magnetic top that actually levitates. Awesome for parties. Just don't get it too near your CRT... (for the 3% of you who still have CRT's, that is...)
Weeks of coding saves hours of planning.
But anyway, play your games, but don't be surprised when suddenly your revenue per employee number is just not cutting it for the quarter and that's the reason they give when they 'right-size', even though your department has been trying to hire 10 people for 3 months.
I'd like to work in an office that has a fish tank of red-bellied piranhas in them, with frikkin' crossbows on their heads.
There's something about responding to pages from a cranky datacenter while reading an article like this... it just takes me back. :-)
Methinks it's time someone shot Dan from a trebuchet.
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
- Can be operated as a stand-alone unit (chair goes up! chair goes down! chair goes up!) or in a networked environment (a vigorous game of CHAIRBALL).
- Easily disguised as an "innocent" piece of furniture.
- Unlike a rubber band machine gun, your company will probably pay for you to have one.
- Marginally more comfortable to sit on than a crossbow.
Cheers,IT
Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
Well, horseplay fun yes. I like many others just get a charge out of playing with BIG iron UNIX servers and other types of servers. So, work is fun for me, but it is work. Leave the toys at home boys! Oh unless it's a PDA, Digicam or laptop! :)
Gorkman
Aftering see all these office toys on that web page, you wonder if some office cubicle workers need to be paid combat pay with those rubber band guns, "burp" shooters, and crossbow dart shooters. :-/
It might be needed in places like Google and Microsoft, where hijinks using these devices are quite common. (shrug)
I just keep repeating that over and over again in my head. $800+S/H.
I could finally discover how big a silly puddy ball can get and still bounce...
I could glue a cat to the wall by it's paws!
I could transfer an entire newspaper to puddy!
- THIS
to work...- PS2
- Wireless DSL connection
- Cable TV
- Full-sized refrigerator
- My couch
- My backyard
- My bed
Oh, wait. Do you have to be employed to answer this survey? I can't remember what toys I used to play with... they all seem so insignificant by comparison.Millions out of work, and we're making lists of office toys.
No wonder business fails to produce anything.
when were kids (no wife, I promise I don't do this anymore! :)) we used to extract the spring from a spring piston airgun (you know, every family has...erm... had one :) . Then attach it to an innocent looking thick marker pen, and Voila, you can shoot your schoolmates so accurate and with such power that you are bound to become the Borg and rest of them will be just... assimilated.... well this lasted only as long as that kid with red pimples on his face made up a good design on machine gun, based on otherwise same design, but used compressed air instead... and now you can get those guns in every little shop.
Employees running the halls with rubber-band guns while the executives stuff their pockets with options, expense accounts and investors' money, and HR refuses to hire anyone?
Or are they just thumbing their nose at everyone?
The BURP gun just looks like a glorified penis pump.
I wouldn't know...
1) twist the rubber band before let go it will fly further and straighter.
2) the ultima weapon is a telephone, it's a reloadable weapon as long as you still hold the handset
That was a +5 insightful/funny comment if I ever read one!
For you folks that haven't looked lately, the job market for computer professionals is in the toilet. Restored arcade video games, all the free soda you want, bringing your pets to work, dressing like a you're at a Grateful Dead concert, and running around the office like a kid with ADD who forgot their Ritalin is out. Companies can hire professionals that look, dress, and behave the part. If you refuse to work somewhere unless they have a shiatsu massage chair, then apply at Brookstone because you're not going to find a tech job that does anymore.
Dan is da man!! He's the geek's geek. A veritable god of the technophile.
... let's face it, Dan has a much better sense of humor.
RMS? He's got nothing on Dan
Cmdr Taco? As much as we love out beloved Commander and his anime fetish, it just doesn't stack up to Dan's love affair with LED lights, CPU coolers, and radio controlled Sherman tanks.
If you feel compelled to find out more about Dan, just visit his website: www.dansdata.com . You will not come away unenlightened.
well I guess it doesn't come much more nerd-ish than this eh? Spending lots of money on plastic office toys... me, I am saving up for skydiving lessons :-))
I had a matte black bandit crossbow and I have an older brother.. hm.. ;)
;)
Seriously, these things did hurt like a motherfucka when altered as you said. I found the best trick was to ditch the default rope that came with it and use a tighter wire, but still wrap it around the corners of the bow. Pencils were not really the best ammo since they were so thin, they sometimes got swept over and didn't fire, or fired waaaay off kilter when did. No, the best ammo when properly tightened is a fat Crayola(tm) magic marker, of course with the cap off
The best ammo I ever made for it was a small amber medicine bottle filled with ball bearing. My gullible best friend let me shoot things off the top of his head. Even when experimenting with the bottle o' bearings. Let's just say I didn't account for the weight of the bottle slightly dropping it, and my (one time) best friend didn't appreciate his hospital visit.
God, that was fun.
It's interesting that the Crazy Aaron thinking putty has the same pictures on their site of how to tear it as Thinkgeek does. It's $12.00 at Thinkgeek and $7 at Crazy Aaron's.
load "linux",8,1
www.nerfonline.com has a lot of good nerfing stuff, although it's pretty dead lately with the lack of new guns.
s ht ml
If you want to see how to make your own darts, complete with a few videos, check this out:
http://www.fperkins.com/news/archives/00000016.
Live web cams
What's the justification for that? Can you picture some guy moving down people with a crossbow, or concealing it in his pants?
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Well, considering Dan Rutter at least writes for (not sure if he works there), I'm sure that atomic magazine would be a fairly likely candidate.
For those of you in Aus, Atomic is the best computer mag I've found in Australia - hardly any ads, and interesting articles which are actually worth reading and not trivial.
Yours for the low, low price of {cough}{cough} US$799. :)
A guy can dream, can't he?
grnbrg
What about spud guns? Well, you do need kind of a large office...
I built one almost like it. but I didn't use a kit. Just some Bass wood stock/dowels, glue, large paper clips (trigger, release), and hemp cord.
Shoots quarters/nickels 30 ft. w/1 lbs. counter weight. Needs more weight so I can shoot heavy split shots though.
It's called a computer. You should see all the stuff it can do.
--What, you ain't know about them country fried sessions?