Your Gift Bag

Welcome to your new cubicle.

Here is your DVD copy of "Office Space"

Here is your Big Fat Book of Dilbert. You will come to realise it is not a funny cartoon, but a serious reference manual.

Here is your copy of Coding Slave, your copy of MicroSerfs and your very own Bastard Operator From Hell.

Here is your plaque that says "You don't have to be mad to work here but... no, wait a minute, you do."

Here is a box of blank CD's. We are aware that they will all be used for piracy.

Here is a stapler. Guard it with your life. It is far more likely to be stolen than your laptop.

Your laptop is not ready. The sysAdmins are still putting evil spells and voodoo curses on it.

You chair has been designed by a specialist sect of sadistic carpenters, with large investments in the back-pain industry.

Here is the flaky piece of network cable that will cause your LAN connection to drop out during check-in of critical source-code.

And of course, here is your copy of "Coder To Developer" your copy of Programming .net Components, your copy of Windows Forms Programming in Visual Basic.Net (Or C#...), your copy of Code Complete (2nd Edition), your copy of The Pragmatic Programmer, your copy of the Gang of Four's "Design Patterns", your copy of Fred Brooks' "The Mythical Man-Month", your copy of PeopleWare your copy of Writing Solid Code your copy of Spolsky's Interface Design book and Don Box's "Essential XML", and something by Jakob Nielsen. Apparently a lot can be learnt from these books, though mostly they get used as foot stools.

Finally, here is a shot of caffeine. Kindly roll up your sleeve...