Which One of You is Bob?

 

When it comes to life experiences that are tough to prepare for, the whole “meet your freshman year college roommate” deal has to be at or near the top of the the list. Start with the overall anxiety associated with moving out of your home into a whole new environment. Combine it with the the uncertainty associated with the pot-luck draw that is the roommate selection process and you have a pretty volatile mixture. Forest Gump’s proverbial box of chocolates indeed!

Today many colleges leverage sophisticated dorm and roommate management systems that match up interests of the prospective students and run various compatibility algorithms against those interests. In the late 70s, roommate selection was a tad less advanced, I recall filling out a very rudimentary application for student housing at Pitt and I am pretty sure that survey only covered basics such as Smoking/Non-Smoking and maybe religious preferences.

Wear Whatever You Want

In the old days of product development in IBM, the release of a new version of the product to manufacturing was a big deal and would often be greeted with some extra financial rewards of some types for the product developers. The rewards would typically be cash bonuses and awards for the key engineers that contributed to the release. Now times are tough though, and those traditions are long gone. Since 2005, the team I am working on currently has released roughly six major versions of our product – the milestones come and go.

Run, rabbit run. 
Dig that hole, forget the sun,
And when at last the work is done
Don't sit down it's time to dig another one.

Breathe: Waters, Gilmour, Wright