{"id":103173,"date":"2019-12-03T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-12-03T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/?p=103173"},"modified":"2019-12-02T21:30:41","modified_gmt":"2019-12-03T05:30:41","slug":"20191203-00","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20191203-00\/?p=103173","title":{"rendered":"The automotive emergency kit is not a toy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Back in 1992, Microsoft was small enough (<a href=\"https:\/\/channel9.msdn.com\/Series\/History\/The-History-of-Microsoft-1992\">11,542 employees<\/a>) that the entire company could get together for a meeting in one place. Mind you, that one place was <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Kingdome\"> a large multipurpose arena<\/a>, but at least we all fit in there.\u00b9<\/p>\n<p>It was customary at the time that at the end of the meeting the attendees receive a gift, customized with the Microsoft logo, of course. In 1989, the gift was a pair of very nice binoculars, suitable for your next hike or birdwatching expedition. What a lot of them ended up being used for was spying on other employees by looking into their window office from your own window office. (Note: Requires window office, not included with binoculars.)<\/p>\n<p>In 1992, the company meeting gift was a small automotive emergency kit. Inside a red bag were a few items:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Jumper cables. From personal experience as well as conversations with others, these were far and away the most-used items from the kit.<\/li>\n<li>A flashlight.<\/li>\n<li>A can of aerosol tire inflator.<\/li>\n<li>A plastic sign that said <i>SEND HELP<\/i>, for placement in your rear window. This was long before everyone had a mobile telephone.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>While the jumper cable was the most useful part of the kit, the most <i>fun<\/i> part was the <i>SEND HELP<\/i> sign, since you could hang it semi-ironically on your door or in your window.<\/p>\n<p>Shortly after the meeting, a message was sent to all employees asking them not to put the <i>SEND HELP<\/i> sign in outward-facing windows, because someone might think it was a genuine call for help and call the police.<\/p>\n<p>\u00b9 Although the stated capacity of the Kingdome was around 50,000 people, that number assumes everyone is there to watch a sporting event. For a meeting, lots of the seats become unusable because they are to the side of or behind the stage. In fact, for the 1992 meeting, we didn&#8217;t even sit in the stadium seats. We sat in folding chairs set up on the field.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Please use it only for emergencies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2],"class_list":["post-103173","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-history"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>Please use it only for emergencies.<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103173","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103173"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103173\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103173"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103173"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103173"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}