25 years at Microsoft? Amazing, I tell you!

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2008/05/07 03:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2008/05/07/8461372.aspx

I think that is to do with my cynical nature -- I mean at 16 you can get your license¹, at 18 you can vote or enlist², at 21 you can drink³.

And at 25 I could finally afford my auto insurance rates.and could rent cars without a corporate card⁴.

Every birthday after that, there was really nothing official⁵ to look forward to. :-)

Eventually I stopped caring about birthdays because it seems like it is an anniversary of an eviction^6,7,8.

But this blog is not meant to be about me, even though everything up until now has been.

And the fact that Michael Suignard just celebrated his 25th year working for Microsoft!

Michel is by his own report one of the most long-employed people at Microsoft, still working for Microsoft. He is like the 10th oldest or thereabouts. Cool!

John McConnell did a hilarious little speech where he researched how things were 25 years ago, and it was noted that some of the people at the party were not actually even born yet when he started working for MS.

Michel has been a part of Unicode for about as long as there has been Unicode, and he is the editor of 10646 (I think that is how I first met him, in a story not nearly as interesting as John's recollection of a failed attempt of Michel to try to train John to properly pronounce Alain LaBonté's first name!).

It isn't a bomb, it is a container for that "years of service" award many employees know and love:

I think the dinky eight incher on my shelf I got for my five year would get a real inferiority complex if he had to stand next to this bad boy!

It made me wonder if Heywood Floyd knew that Microsoft had stolen their monolith! :-)

I think in order to get the 50-year award home (one Microsoft has been around fifty years) you have to rent a truck. Or maybe they just hit you on the head with a tack hammer and tell you to take a sabbatical....

1 - though I drove before that without consent or knowledge of appropriate supervisors.
2 - though I had an ROTC scholarship turned down for medical reasons.
3 - though I had been drinking prior to that.
4 - though I had gotten a corporate card years before so I would be able to rent.
5 - though I will admit occasional unofficial gifts from girlfriends should not be entirely discounted just because they can't be described in a mostly-safe-for-work blog like this one.
6 - no wonder the baby cries -- you would too if you were comfortable in your first apartment and they evicted you three months prior to the end of the one year lease.
7 - and then having everyone talking to you like you were an idiot as soon as you are out?
8 - I'm pretty sure I did cry, although I was still tired from the move so things are a little fuzzy from back then.

Not sure, but I'd imagine this would be a rather difficult 'desk trifle' to take to a new job ...

Babies born underwater don't cry, they just swim about blissfully. It's not the eviction as such, it's the shock.

I'm looking forward to my 50th birthday this year and my 30th anniversary next year.

Great story, but what's with the compression on those photos? They look like paletted PNGs. Why not just not use JPEGs and avoid the nasty posterization?

I have an un-natural bias against JPG, preferring PNG whenever possible. :-)

In this case I did drop the colors to 32k to keep the size down....

John -- I distinctly recall feeling evicted, and I assumed it was due to them thinking me feeble-minded (which is why everyone who talked with me for years after that were clearly treating me like a baby?).

:-)

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