My first act of the morning was to respond to the guy newly in charge of Helldesk 2.0 thus:

As a general philosophy of Helldesk 2.0, I would caution you against using Helldesk 1.x as a user-accepted baseline. Helldesk 1.x has been violently rejected by the users.

This is why I had concerns about the intended survey for Helldesk 2. Using Helldesk 1.x as a point of comparison is similar to "do you like this better than being punched in the face". Nearly anything else would be better.

The lady who's been doing bug triage on the thing for the past year replied in a state of hilarity.

I called lunch as it was after 12:30 and I was hungry. Then I headed off to the cafeteria without waiting for a response from Purple. I'd had my eye on the macaroni and cheese served from the pizza station. I regarded the salad the guy was transferring between containers with suspicion, and was "rewarded" with the sight of some bell peppers. Yay. ( Not yay. )

I have sent an email to the main cafeteria address, and also included the manager. Also also included: caps lock, swearing. I have additionally forwarded him about nine months of previous communication on the topic.

As I told Purple, the thought of how long I have been fighting this battle is an unguarded path into the depths of my anticipation of missing this beloved workplace.

I was thinking about Manager Can You Even YouTube Bro's mention of Greek cuisine, and contemplating that I was in the mood for Mediterranean as an option for dinner tonight. Then the email about the theme for beer bash crossed my watch, and I had to open the email to see what food was going to go with the somewhat ridic theme. Greek. Naturally! I was amused by the coincidence.

A previous designer stopped through. My manager still has her cat (the cat is now timeshare, apparently).

I made an appearance at beer bash. I looked at the food options but saw that everything except the pita bread and hummus was laced with bell pepper. I got a bit of two of the lovely fruit crumbles, and wound up chatting with Chicken Guy.

I let him know that it had been a pleasure working with him all these years. That's one of those phrases that heralds "and I'm leaving".

To be clear, I think the trend towards limiting the institutional memory of the groups responsible for your infrastructure to a year and a half at most is a stupid-ass move that's in the process of very slowly and methodically shooting off any organization's toes one by one before moving on to larger and more important foot bones. This is what relying on people who you can only keep for one year (or a year and a half, in rare circumstances) will do to you. I wonder if there's a suitable all-hands coming up, because people are still talking about the helpdesk question that I asked in the last round. (oh god. I am imagining my manager's look of horror.) On the gripping hand, the drawbacks are minimal and the possible benefit to other people in my boat (and there are so many) are huge.

Designer Sparkles said hi to Chicken Guy, who tried to introduce us. Designer Sparkles said that we worked together. "Assistant, hero." She'd not heard the previous topic, so her comment was illustrative.

We wandered in different directions. Purple not being visible, I settled down with teammates (Huckleberry and R, the guy who's getting married shortly). Rocky joined us. Rocky wound up telling us this amazing story about an early 80s concert a friend had let him sit in the booth for, where the main attraction guy was on serious drugs and got into a beef with a punk in the audience heckling him. The punk was climbing on stage, whereupon the guy wallops the punk with his guitar, to the detriment of both punk and instrument. (Punk here is both general and fandom-specific.)

The Chicken Guy joined the group at the table. Purple showed up, and the group cycled, so it was Chicken Guy, me, Purple, and Mr. Tux. I pulled out my crocheting. Chicken Guy mentioned that there was crocheting in his family, but he'd never quite picked it up. He thought it might be good to be able to do the thing, as he has that AD(H)D thing where he needs to be occupied with something physical in order to focus on information.

Somehow the topic of crop circles got us on to Viagra jokes, and they just kept popping up.

At length, I pulled out the other yarn and one of the other crochet hooks, and walked Chicken Guy through the process of crocheting plain old chain stitch. He made a decent start before heading off.

I laughingly suggested Greek cuisine for dinner; Purple contemplated some Mediterranean places he knew of. I looked up the place he was thinking of while he was on the phone with Ms. Antisocialest Butterfly. It turned out they were booked solid for a while, but there were other places.

I ran into the Singing PM while washing out my coffee cup, and we chatted about our breaks.

I complained to Purple about the current state of my mouth, as two taste buds had gone rogue. Apparently his mouth does not do that. We compared notes on our least favorite colds while waiting to be seated.

Dinner was lovely. I got a sip of Purple's lemonade (definitely tasty, and this was the place that had had the inch worm on the fresh mint that time) and we shared our side dishes. He took some of my carrots, and I had one of his balls. The phrase "Where have you been all of my life!" when uttered to vegetables is amusing. (Purple had said this to the cucumber and parsley dish some years ago.)

A note: if you have an object that's roughly cylindrical, except for a wider part at the base ... plastic wrap is not going to help the phallic effect. Just so you know.