A ball-anced life
Saturday October 10th 2009, 3:47 pm
Filed under: Friends,Life

Slinkys and Lanafactrix’s comment reminded me of someone my husband worked with when we first moved here, back when our children were quite little.

Call the co-worker Tim.

Tim put a quarter in a gumball machine on a whim in some random grocery store–do any of them still have such things on the premises?–wanting to buy a superball just like the ones he’d gotten as a kid those times when his mom had given in. A nostalgic impulse.

Turn the knob.

No dice.

Turn again. Nope.  Dang. The thing had ripped off his quarter.

Well, hey, that’s no good.  While trying to figure out the thing and if there were still some way to make it work, he noticed the very fine print at the bottom of the machine: if you have any problems please call 1-800-xxx-xxxx.

So he did. Turns out it was the number for ordering more superballs for refills. Hey! Cool! What’s the minimum order?

A gross gross.  144 balls to a bag, 144 bags.

Coooooooool….

So next thing you know, some co-worker is typing away, engrossed (sorry) in their work, and Tim leaps into their office and yells, “Bouncy bounce!”  ripping open one of those bags, arms held high. Superballs!  Then in the next guy’s office.

Their then-employer was trying to be Silicon Valley-er than thou, with a pool table for break times and a yoga instructor coming in: Ohmmmmm… Playtime was taken very seriously.  It feeds one’s creative juices around other electronically-creative types, good for the employees, good for business.

There was a three-story indoor atrium in that building.  Look out below…!  Superball!  Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound!

As long as they were careful, management pretended not to know about that last part.

Bouncy bounce!


12 Comments so far
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COOL!!!!

Comment by sherry in idaho 10.10.09 @ 5:50 pm

That sounds like SO much fun!
I love those balls too :-}
I do have a few finger puppets I play with, Kali, Ganesh, and a few others.

Comment by Diana Troldahl 10.10.09 @ 6:02 pm

Chanced on your blog. You had me laughing right out loud. I’ll be back!

Comment by Karen 10.10.09 @ 6:17 pm

Maybe the military could drop some over the Taliban. They’d be chasing ’em for months!

Humor –

Two Mexican detectives were investigating the murder of Juan Gonzalez.. 
‘How was he killed?’ asked one detective. 
‘With a golf gun,’ the other detective replied. 
‘A golf gun! What is a golf gun?’ 
‘I don’t know. But it sure made a hole in Juan.’

Comment by Don Meyer 10.10.09 @ 7:08 pm

No more superballs, not with Jack Russells… that would spell emergency vet…

Comment by Channon 10.10.09 @ 9:59 pm

A bored geek is a dangerous geek, it seems.

Comment by Barbara-Kay 10.10.09 @ 10:33 pm

Hey Don, I mentioned to Alison that my uncle works at the pentagon. A gross gross would just about cover every employee there, too. Not sure they have to same attitude to play time as workers on the west coast.

Comment by LynnM 10.11.09 @ 1:29 am

SUpermarkets still have those. A few years back, a couple of my friends got as many as they could carry, and then went downtown and gave them to people. Just gave them away. It was when that Free Hugs video was so popular (search it on YouTube if you don’t know what I’m talking about), and they said it was an amazing experience.

Comment by Kristine 10.11.09 @ 4:45 am

And then there was the day that there was whole bag of those dropped down the stairs of a three story junior high school. I was nowhere near the episode. Nope. Nope. Nope. Just working in my office on the third floor.

Comment by afton 10.11.09 @ 5:50 am

Oh yes, I remember those days of working in Silicon Valley — the fun, the creative “juice”

{boing, boing, boing!}

Comment by Bev 10.11.09 @ 8:55 am

Heeheeheeheehee! That is awesome! Thank you for sharing. 🙂

Comment by Amy 10.11.09 @ 12:07 pm

What fun!

Comment by karin maag-tanchak 10.11.09 @ 6:44 pm



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