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Spinning Muppets Add a Little Danger & Excitement to the Office

With Office Offspring Numbers Projected to Rise Again in 2010

There have been many new additions to our extended employee family over the last couple of years. By my informal count, there have been at least seven (7) office babies born since 2008, with that number expected to rise in 2010. The recent increase in productivity makes for hearty office family gatherings (such as our company trip to the Dell Diamond last Summer), and also means young children sightings have been steadily on the rise. For instance, yesterday I had the pleasure of spending the lunch hour with my toddler son while Mommy was at the dentist.

There were plenty of things for me to keep my son and his inseparable counterpart, Tickle Me Elmo Extreme, entertained after we finished eating our lunches. Some of the fun office toys we found included:

• Leftover birthday Play-Doh
• Dry erase markers (which I hope are machine washable for my pants' sake)
• A novelty-sized fortune cookie found under Kathy's desk
• The overstuffed Danby mini fridge in the marketing department
• A miniature replica of the Ecto 1 from Ghostbusters

His favorite toy of all? The swivel desk chairs in the conference room. We hid out in there for much of the lunch break so as not to disturb our office friends. I think we went relatively unnoticed except for two incidents where a head was bonked while trying to spin Elmo in the executive chair. However, some briefly intense sobbing and a few crocodile tears later, we were back in business as you can see here:

[I didn't realize the phone's camera was still recording!]

The boy and I had a grand old time. Hopefully, it was an unobtrusive and mildly amusing deviation to the lunchtime routine for everyone else in the office.

Happy Friday,
Aaron

p.s. I am shocked to discover that internet retailers are asking $100 for their remaining inventory of this robotic laughing muppet from 2006.