Return of the Turkey!

Two weeks ago, I told you about the turkey that I saw walking around by the highway next to my office. People think that he lives in the woods behind our building that people may be feeding him which is why he comes around our building.

This morning as I was coming in, he was hanging out in the walkway between our parking garage and our buildings! So I whipped out my cell phone and got a couple of shots.

So without further ado, here is the new Sabre mascot....um....okay he doesn't have a name, so we'll call him Terrell the Turkey!

Now that I think about it, how do I know its a "he"? Is it a "she"? Anyone know how to tell the sex of a turkey?

Thanksgiving already?

This morning, I was driving into work as usual. As I was about to pull onto our campus, I had to stop under the bridge at 114 to avoid an animal in the road. You're probably thinking dog, cat, maybe at weirdest some kind of livestock.....wrong. The animal that I had to avoid was a WILD TURKEY! There was a wild turkey just walking along, hanging out under the highway like it was totally normal. It didn't seem freaked out or anything. By far the oddest thing I've ever experienced in my morning commute!
I didn't have a camera with me, but this is almost exactly what it looked like.

LinkedIn - you have officially blown my mind

I love magicians. I love trying to figure out how they do an illusion, and then when I can't figure it out it makes me even happier. Today, a website did something that a lot of magicians can't....it performed a trick that I seriously cannot figure out how it did it!

I use LinkedIn as a way to keep track of my professional network and reconnect with some people outside of the Facebook world. Today I opened up Linked In and as always, it had a couple of suggestions of "People You May Know." Usually, these are people who have something in their profile that matches mine: Schools, companies, a lot of the same connections, etc. But today the first suggestion was Jeff Cameron. Turns out, I do know Jeff Cameron...but not in any way that would be visible to LinkedIn. He is the husband of the Children's Minister I interned with about 6 years ago (and that is not on my profile). He lives in Houston and owns his own company, we have no similar companies, no shared connections....there is absolutely nothing in our profiles that match in any way. But somehow LinkedIn decided I might know him. I'm stumped. I'm glad I found him, but I am definitely stumped.

The Most Frequent Conversation Today

As I said yesterday, I am on a team with a couple of interesting people. In my 4 hour meeting today, I think three hours of it were taken up by variations on the following discussion:

Me: We can't do that
Them: Why not?
Me: Because its not an option in the simulation
Them: Why not?
Me: Because the simulation writers didn't make it an option
Them: So why can't we do it?
Me: Because there is no way to put it in the system. Its not in the simulation.
Them: Well that doesn't make any sense. I want to do this!
Me: We can't do that
Them: Why not?
(loud crash as I throw myself out of the window of the third floor team room we're in)

P.S.
Thanks for the birthday wishes! And Megan, it wasn't belated. It was May 2. :) And Ty, you're just sick. haha

Thought and Quote of the Day

Thought of the day:
Why do fast food mexican restaurants ask you if you want hot sauce? They're going to give it to you anyways. They ask "Would you like Hot Sauce?" You say yes, they give you hot sauce. You say no, they give you hot sauce. You say "Do you speak English?" They give you hot sauce. I bet they could cut some overhead if they'd stop handing out so much hot sauce.

Quote of the day:
Some of you might have heard that for our Integrated Project, they broke up the team that I had formed and reassigned about half the class randomly. I get put on a team with a lady in our class who is....we'll leave it at "interesting." It hasn't been nearly as bad as I was expecting it to be (although its only been 2 days....8 to go!), but I have gotten some really funny quotes out of it, such as the following:

Today, we were talking about passwords people use on the internet. A guy in my group said, "I know a lot of people use their kids names and birthdays as passwords. So sometimes its really easy to figure out if you're not careful."

She says, totally serious: "That's why I use my kids' names and their conception dates."

Its going to be an interesting week. Please pray for my sanity.

The Promised Email Story!

What happens when you add 1 fake gas price lowering scheme, 93 TCU email distribution lists, and 8,000 undergraduate students? Mass email hysteria!

An undergraduate psychology major by the name of William Jackson got a forwarded email saying that boycotting Exxon and Mobil gas stations would lower gas prices (easily debunked by snopes.com). For some reason, he thought it would be a good idea to email this to everyone at TCU using the distribution lists for the different colleges. These lists are supposed to be available by permission only (as in I have access to use the MBA Full-Time (1st) list but not the MBA Full-Time (2nd) list), so I don't even know how he got access to them. But once the email was sent around noon, it somehow opened the lists and allowed people to reply-all.

At first the replies to all were no big deal - just a couple of people saying that the rumor wasn't true. Then it moved into people telling people not to reply to all (which is stupid because they're replying all themselves!) Pretty soon a couple of people started sending really stupid things like "Chuck Norris is responsible for the high gas prices". Then people decided it would be a good idea to say "take me off the list", prompting other idiots to say "take me off the list too" - like THAT's going to do any good! It eventually got to where the only emails being sent were people saying "Don't reply to all" and "Take me off this list", not realizing that if they would just stop saying that, the emails would stop! About 11:30pm, we had probably gotten about 85-90 emails from this thing. Thats when the real fun began.

I don't know if people were just fed up or if maybe some were starting to get a little drunk or what, but the emails started getting more and more ridiculous, eventually moving to inappropriate. Another 30 emails between 11:30 and 1:30am when I went to sleep. The emails around that time were consisting of "My cousin's best friends' uncle is chuck norris" and stupid stuff like that. I wake up the next morning, check my email around 10:30am....58 emails. About 15 of them were real emails that I needed (yes I get 15 emails between 1:30 am and 10:30 am.) The rest were more fallout from this mass email mess! By now they had proceeded into people claiming they had slept with the Chancellor and making VERY inappropriate comments. I guess that was finally the point at which administration decided they needed to do something, because all of a sudden, the emails stopped. Eventually I got an email from our MBA director apologizing for the emails and saying that IT was working on fixing the distribution lists and that Student Life was looking into actions against people who had made inappropriate comments. But all in all, we had 24 hours of mass email hysteria. Hopefully they'll figure out how to prevent this happening again.....but I do know that William Jackson has been signed up for quite a few email newsletters that he might not appreciate. :)