At some point, he decided that in order to promote successful builds, he would email a Chuck Norris fact to the team for every successful run. It tells you something about the quality of the builds that he went several weeks without feeling the need to write a script for the purpose. After a while, though, it took off, and we were getting semi-regular doses of Chuck in our mailboxes.

The stylistic appeal of the Chuck Norris facts quickly became infectious, and became a preferred method of self-expression. One time Al, expressing frustration with our XML authoring tool, wondered if he ought to get Chuck Norris to roundhouse kick it into shape. Geoff replied, "Chuck Norris once kicked that editor so hard, the DTDs turned into a pile of unstructured CDATA." When that team had another release, they got T-shirts with Chuck's roundhouse-kicking profile on them.

When my new team had a release soon after, we got T-shirts too. Ours were bright yellow with the letters "MW" on them in big bold letters, and a drawing of a shopping cart beneath it. "They look like Charlie Brown shirts," Geoff remarked, and he wasn't entirely wrong -- between the color and the zigzag that the "MW" made across the chest, there was a certain resemblance. It was not as cool as Chuck, but we were mostly glad that they were at least obscure, so it was possible to wear them in public without looking like you were wearing company swag.

The day we got them, a bunch of us went out for lunch. We were all wearing our Charlie Brown shirts except for Gunn; peer pressure had turned not wearing the dorky shirts into the riskier proposition, but Gunn was confident enough to go it on his own.

At the restaurant, the waitress asked us what the MW stood for. No one knew what to say -- we all wanted it to be cooler than what it really was. "Mega Women," Gunn finally said.

"Mega Women," the waitress repeated. The "huh" was silent.

"Not really," we said, and then fessed up to the more mundane explanation.

"Oh," she said.

On our way out if the restaurant, Gunn tried to come up with alternatives. "Mystery Women? Mellifluous Women?" It was pointed out that in addition to Vera, Kate, and Me, there was Julian with us, who wasn't exactly a woman, so we dismissed this line of thought. Someone else passed the bunch of us all walking together, and asked us what MW meant. It was clear that we needed a better answer to the question.

About a block from the office, we decided on "Majorly Wasted," but no one outside the office asked us again.

ALSO AT THAT LUNCH, Gunn had brought along a promotional card, the kind where they scratch off a patch to reveal what you win. The promotion had already ended, but he wanted to see what it would have won had he cashed it in on time.

He asked the waitress to scratch it off for him, to make it "official." "It says every card is a winner, but that's not true," he said. "This one's not a winner."

It turned out that it would have been 10% off his meal, so he felt better that he hadn't missed out on much.

The other day, I was in the elevator on the way in to work. Two of the other passengers, both female, were talking; one had a large iced coffee thing from Dunkin' Donuts. "You should peel your thing," her friend said, pointing at the peel-off prize decal on her cup.

"You know what, I never do."

"Oh my god, you totally should! I think every one's a winner."

The one with the coffee dutifully peeled the thing, and read aloud, "Free flatbread. Hey, that's pretty good."

The elevator stopped at their floor. "You know," explained the free-flatbread winner as they got off, "I think I always wait too long before taking it off, and by the time I do, it doesn't open anymore."

"Oh, I always throw mine away," I heard the other say as the door closed.

KATE, UNTIL RECENTLY, had a nifty smartphone with a touchscreen and a full QWERTY keyboard that slid out. That was, until mere weeks after the warranty ran out, and the screen flaked out so that it glowed blankly at her and she was unable to access most of the controls. She couldn't change ring tones or put it on silent. She couldn't make calls. The only thing she could do was answer it, which she had to do since she couldn't get to her voice mail. At some point she managed to put it on vibrate, which was better than having the ring tone go off in meetings, but she could no longer tell if it was vibrating because of an incoming call, text message, or something else.

I heard her telling Geoff about it one morning. "And," she continued, "I can't tell who's calling me when it rings."

"That's OK," said Geoff in his calm, reassuring way. "That's the way all phones used to work."