And now for the real horror

Rounding out the week’s Halloween report, horror and terror would not be complete without an update on the saga of the ladies room. If you need, ah, refreshing, look here.

Anyhow, Tuesday morning I barreled into the loo to find this sitting on the shelf at the mirror:

But then, later in the morning, a couple of additions were made, to the stall that was the scene of what some of my colleagues apparently referred to as “looking like a crime scene”. (I won’t go into details.)

Whew—and with that, I’m closing out Halloween 2017.

Probably.

A higher form of scary

Continuing the Halloween theme, this year our colleagues on the executive floor decided to step up to the challenge thrown down by IT. Their schtick was 22 rooms/occupants tricked out to look (to a greater or lesser extent) like horror films. Visitors to the floor got a list of 22 horror films, and we had to match the numbered room against a movie title to win a (low value) prize.

Their definition of horror was fairly loose, as witnessed by the titles:

2001: A Space Odyssey

Addams Family

Batman

Beetlejuice

Cheetah

Coraline

Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde

Harry Potter

IT

Jurassic Park

Sneak Preview: Justice League

Little Shop of Horrors

Lord of the Rings

Lumberjanes Sneak Preview

Monty Python’s Meaning of Life

Mummy Returns

Rocky Horror Picture Show

Stranger Things Special Showing

The Birds

The Day the Earth Stood Still

The Dolls

The Nightmare Before Christmas

The Ring

The Shining

And here are a few of the rooms:

I totally tanked, tbh, because I’ve actually seen seven of those movies, although I could guess a couple more just from having been alive for the past decade or so.

I will say that some of the motifs were very well executed. I wonder how people got all that stuff to the downtown DC office? I should think that schlepping it in via Metro would be a challenge.

A surfeit of scariness

Oh, my ears and whiskers, I believe that my colleagues in IT have absolutely outdone themselves this year. I mean—where do I even start?

Okay, well, just a sampling of the additions since my last post.

And then there was a spooky sound machine and fog (although of course you can’t hear the former, and the latter had dissipated some by the time I fetched my camera).

I’m not really counting the pumpkins—they’re part of HR’s attempt to look with-it; a company-wide carving competition. There were only 11, which isn’t a good turnout for an organization of 450 or thereabouts. Even so, there were a couple that struck my fancy:

This was really impressive.

This whimsical.

And this—well, yes.

However, my personal favorites were the tombstones that appeared along the corridors, speaking to IT technologies that came and, er, went. They range from practically the telegraph to an early next-big-thing startup; some of the hardware memories are evocative. (Samsung Note 7?) And I’m so old, I’ve used most of them (except for the applications that were specific to this place before my time). How many do you recognize?

This one was particularly poignant:

Massacre on the 9th floor

Okay, the big day is here, and the folks in IT carried on their tradition of splashing blood around the area.

First, I’m relieved to note that the bat deployers finally got to work:

And the door to the server room was redecorated, with more bats to help;

Moreover, the door to the department got the bat treatment as well:

The windows to the server room got more interesting that usual, too:

Here’s the close-up detail:

Ooo-er.