The Pink Pig of Success

The WHAT?!?!?!

You read it right, you're monitor isn't malfunctioning, I said the pink pig of success. Never heard of it? Well that's because you don't work in SLAC's communications office…

Every week in our office meeting the director hands out a pink toy pig that, when turned on, walks, oinks and wiggles its tail. The award used to be a golden pig that looked rather like a Buddhist statue, but it was retired when the head kept falling off…

Anyways, I was happily surprised to receive the award this week for my general efforts in keeping a steady flow of stories coming to SLAC Today. I think the straw that tipped the scales were my two stories last Friday about Monte Carlo software and the CosmicVariance blog. The director seemed to particularly enjoy those two. But he also cited the general volume of stories I've been generating, that several days have consisted entirely of my works, and that we're getting along fine with just one intern. (I guess sometimes they have overlapping interns to share the story workload?)

But the pig is soft and nice to pet when I hit a bad spell of writer's block.

For example, I spent the past couple of days whipping out two stories in a very short amount of time. Granted, they were no brainers, just a couple of short pieces to fill in some blank spots in SLAC Today, but they turned out pretty well none-the-less. The first ran on Thursday and was about a small set of three garden boxes at the corner of a nearby building that contain corn, jalapeños, and basil.

I actually had to do some investigative reporting on that one by tracking down the employee the make-shift garden belongs to. Luckily, it belonged to the first person I asked…

The second short ran today and was about the computer help desk moving a few hundred feet to the lobby of their building. Again, nothing special, but I did whip it out in a matter of an hour or so, including interviewing, writing, and editing, which is a pretty fast turn-around time.

To bring this post to a close, just let me say I've only got two weeks left here at SLAC, and probably won't be posting much anymore. Perhaps just a few more total. So enjoy them while you can…