{"id":94245,"date":"2016-09-05T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-09-05T21:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/?p=94245"},"modified":"2019-03-13T11:06:27","modified_gmt":"2019-03-13T18:06:27","slug":"20160905-00","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20160905-00\/?p=94245","title":{"rendered":"The complicated engineering behind an ice cream social"},"content":{"rendered":"

Moving offices is a time-honored tradition at Microsoft<\/a>. Some time ago, several teams (including my own) moved into a new building, and my local team had an ice cream social as a housewarming party. <\/p>\n

This ice cream social was not a fancy affair. It consisted of two one-gallon tubs of vanilla ice cream, complemented by a bottle of chocolate sauce, a can of whipped cream, and a jar of maraschino cherries. Two of us did the scooping, and everybody got two scoops. <\/p>\n

(The administrative assistant explained that it goes much faster and is much less messy if you have a dedicated scooping-person rather than letting everyone scoop their own ice cream.) <\/p>\n

The following Monday, another team thought of having their own ice cream social. The administrative assistant told them, “Oh, the XYZ team did that last Friday. I have a cart you can borrow. We took a shelf from a bookshelf and put it on the cart to use as a table. It worked out really well. Just the right size, nice and stable. You can borrow the entire set-up if you like.” <\/p>\n

The other team accepted the generous offer, but something must have gotten lost in the translation, because we saw the following in the kitchen refrigerator: <\/p>\n

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On the shelf is a sticky-note that says “Do not remove.” <\/p>\n

We may be software engineers, but that doesn’t mean that we’re smart. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lost in translation.<\/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":[103],"class_list":["post-94245","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-non-computer"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"

Lost in translation.<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94245","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=94245"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94245\/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=94245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}