and Words
Hey, where did we go?
Days when the rains came
Down in the hollow
Playin’ a new game
Laughin’ and a-runnin’, hey, hey
Skippin’ and a-jumpin’
In the misty mornin’ fog with
Our, our hearts a-thumpin’ and you
Lyric excerpts from Musixmatch.
I adhere to a particular routine on each Friday morning. They revolve around two tasks. First, I focus on publishing any scheduled blog posts, such as this one. Mechanically, it’s just pushing one button, but then comes the details of cross-posting into Facebook, resolving the preview so that it looks pretty, etc. I alternate between two blogs, so on average you’ll see an update on a particular blog every other week.
Second, I put on a Hawaiian Shirt and take a selfie; those pictures automatically save onto OneDrive. After waiting a couple minutes for the image to propagate, I’ll fire up Corel Painter. I copy two different images: the aforementioned selfie and a picture of a tropical setting from past travels. Next, I carefully edit my image wearing said Hawaiian Shirt and set it into the tropical scene. Finally, I save it back onto OneDrive for the moment.
This is a placeholder for a tradition that started many years ago. In a subtle way, it’s a tongue-in-cheek reference to Office Space.
I enjoy the tradition because it reminds me of my Puerto Rican and Floridian roots from warmer climates. I still remember the warm breezes off the Atlantic waters as they embrace you. The whispers of the wind subtly rustled the leaves off the palms. The tropical sun-baked into my skin during my humble island beginnings. It persisted as I grew older in Florida. It even continues now as I reminisce about my origins every time I sit in the sun.
“Brown Eyed Girl” by Van Morrison embodies the essence of that spirit. The music itself is an upbeat playful jaunt into what will be yet another sunny day among countless summer days. I can remember day after day of doing nothing in particular. Sure, the summers were precisely this way, but living in Florida, most days still qualified. You simply needed to pay the ‘attending school’ tax. 😎
I conducted my life precisely this way. Honestly, mostly I’d forget. Meanwhile, I’d drive onto University of Miami campus and not notice the majestic palm trees that covered the campus and even separated the flows of traffic on the medians on US-1. Every great once in a while, I would tune out and abruptly tune back in. For a split moment, I’d understand that I’m living in a tropical paradise. That thought quickly supplanted by whatever task I had at hand. On most days, I took it for granted.
Years after I arrived at Microsoft, I noticed that a particular group of people consistently wore Hawaiian shirts on Fridays. This is independent of weather; on colder days, they wore that shirt over a long-sleeved shirt. It started subtly for me, I’d participate on the occasional day, and more as I accumulated more shirts. I’m sure we had similar routines, as Friday approached, we’d earmark a particular shirt to wear that week.
It became a cultural imperative. I’d walk to teammates’ office and declare that it was Hawaiian Shirt Fridays. One perplexed teammate responded with, “I don’t own a Hawaiian shirt”. My simple response? I reached into my pocket to fetch a $20 bill and placed it on his desk. “You can get one from Amazon for $20.” He took it and got a shirt. Subsequently, he would smile as he quietly put on the shirt as I walked by on Fridays.
On one team we had a point of conflict. They had a tradition of dressing up on a particular Friday each month. I participated in both by getting a tropical-themed tie and wearing the two together. I haven’t been in that team for years, but I still have that tie. It’s a print with either pink flamingos or pineapples. Every time I see that tie; I remember that group.
Every year Microsoft had a week, called ‘One Week’, that we may dedicate towards a hackathon project. On one year, I teamed up with a dear friend and colleague. We knew precisely what we wanted to do; we even divided up the pieces we needed to accomplish in order to get our project working. For instance, this list included:
- Programmatically posting on a Teams group.
- Taking pictures using a webcam.
- Putting up a UI with a countdown.
- Saving pictures into Azure.
- Launching a program using “Cortana”.
A week sounds like a long time, but while working on a project like this, it runs much faster than what you’d expect. By the end of that week, we managed to get it all working. Our project was as follows:
- We configured a computer (in an empty office).
- You could wake up the computer by simply uttering, “Hey Cortana, open Aloha”.
- The program would launch, with a preview of the image from the webcam and a 10 second countdown.
- Upon counting down, it took the picture and posted it in a Teams group called “Hawaiian Shirt Fridays”.
That was the extent of our Hackathon project. It wasn’t especially useful, but it was fun and whimsical. We outfitted that empty office with a couple of Hawaiian shirts and even a tropical (cardboard) photo frame. It made me happy.
Years ago, I left Microsoft and arrived at TPCi. I started during 2020, when everything was still shut down. It’d be at least a year before I got my own desk and started coming into the office. Like Microsoft, we had a messaging system as well, where you may define groups with a unified purpose. It astonished me to find that one such group called “Hawaiian Shirt Fridays” didn’t already exist. Naturally, I created it and invited a few key people to seed it; it was a cultural imperative.
On Fridays, we don our brightly colored Aloha shirts as we take a selfie. I go through the additional step of putting myself on a tropical setting; it amuses me. Then as the day progresses, we post our pictures on this group. Some Fridays, the number of posts is modest, but other days there’s quite the chatter. While the tradition continues to be strictly optional, silly, and whimsical, it’s still a way that brings us together.
We continued this tradition, even on the week when we discovered one of our teammates passed away. The pictures were sadder, of course, but it became a healing message of perseverance.
‘Brown Eyed Girl’ continues anchor me to my humble beginnings and a much simpler life. However, the one wrinkle to this song (and the way it reminds me of my days in the tropics)? The love of my life, also a warm weather enthusiast, has sparkling blue eyes.