The Muffin Man

As I mentioned in November, one of the guys I shared a cubicle with left the company I work for to go on to bigger and better things.  To give him a name, let's call him Terrorist since that was his nickname sometimes.  T for short.  Don't worry, he knew that's what we called him and took it in stride.  I didn't name him that, somebody else did, but let's just say the nickname was a bit stereotypical.  This really has no bearing on the story other than the need for him to have a blog name.

Before T left, he left a legacy behind.  It's the legacy of the muffin.  As has become my tradition the last couple of years, I brought muffins to work one Friday in January to commemorate my birthday and anniversary working for the company.  Last year (2010), I brought muffins in (I didn't make them, they're from a local bakery), and my former cubicle mate took one.  Well, after everybody had at least one muffin and there were still leftovers, he took a second one for afternoon snack.  T put it in his overhead storage cabinet for safe keeping until snack time arrived.  He was a devoted snack timer.  However, he didn't remember he had a snack in storage until two or three weeks later when he opened the storage cabinet again.

Surprisingly, the muffin had not molded and was in "good" condition except that it would have been difficult to chew.  We thought it was funny and wondered how long it would actually last before it got really gross, so we set it on top of the freestanding storage cabinet in the center of our quad of cubes.  We periodically observed it over the coming months.   Visitors to the cubicle marveled at its robustness, and it was cause for some fear too.  As winter turned to spring and spring to summer, it stayed very well-preserved.  During the summer months when it was more humid in the building, it did get a little bit sticky on the outside as it absorbed moisture and continued to be as hard as a rock.  It survived getting a chip broken off and glued back on again.  It weathered getting thrown in the trash by our project leader, Rasper, who was unaware of the experiment we were conducting.  We had to quickly rescue it and explain the muffin's significance.  It survived so long that we dated the bottom of it, and to date it is still "on test" - we even put it on its own tiny display shelf while it undergoes its continued environmental test.

January 2010 Muffin - Aged One Year

Yesterday, the second chapter of the muffin experiment started.  Of course this remarkable muffin generates many questions.  Would all muffins behave the same?  Does it matter which bakery the muffins come from?  What about homemade muffins?  Should I bring muffins from the same bakery this year or from a different bakery?  What would happen if the test started in July instead of January (is humidity a factor)?  I'm not a total moneybags, but I figured I had enough time and money this year to go to two different bakeries so that we could put two muffins on test - one from GBB and one from DD.  The plan is to try to simulate the same conditions that occurred last year, so we are putting them in the same storage cabinet for three weeks, and then we'll review their condition.  And so begins year two of muffin testing....

New muffins put on test for 2011

The test chamber.  You can't read the note because the picture is blurry, but the sign says "Test in progress.  Do not open flipper until February 4, 2011."

That's the news from Lake Whirligan, where all the women are engineers, all the men are engineers, and all the children.....are visiting their parents at work and aspiring to be engineers.