Otaku No Zoku

Somehow I always manage to dine with the weirdos. I am sure if you dine out regularly you will recognise many of the traits that follow in other people you dine with.

Take this post as it is written, a tongue-in-cheek poke at all of those people who have dined with me over the years. You know who you are.

1. Chew with your mouth closed.
2. Don’t speak with your mouth full of food.
3. Brush your teeth at least once in the 12 hours previous to being in my company.
4. Do not masticate louder than my pets.
5. Learn to use a knife & fork properly. “American Style” merely suggests you should consider having your next dinner date at McDonald’s.
6. Do not endlessly fidget by bouncing your leg, drumming your fingers, tapping your eating utensils.
7. Do not ask me a question, or begin a topic of conversation, only to answer your cell phone half-way through, and do this at least 5 times within an hour.
8. Do not take an hour to decide what to eat, if when entering the restaurant it is announced that they will close in 15 minutes and the restaurateur who is a personal friend has allowed us to be seated.
9. Taking longer to decide what to order — even though you have ate at the restaurant on more than one occasion and you always order the same thing every time — than it does for me to order my meal, consume it at a leisurely pace and wonder what is for desert. It is a sure sign you probably need therapy.
10. The above rule applies doubly so when we visit a “fast food” place such as “In’n'Out Burger” that contains precisely four items on the menu* (not including soft drinks) and I have time to finish the thick shake, my burger and warm the engine up on the car before you have decided precisely what kind of burger you want (burger, burger with cheese, double burger, double burger with cheese, how hard can it be people?)
11. Do not host a 30-minute phone conversation with your boss/significant other/OBGYN during the meal. Any phone conversation that is not a justifiable emergency or lasts longer than 20 seconds is not suitable for the dinner table.
12. Do not make “fingernails on black board” noises with your knife when cutting food every time you use it.
13. Do not analyse the contents or ingredients of our meals. I’m a better cook than you and I already know what’s in my food. Showing your cleverness by masticating thoughtfully then declaring the list of ingredients is like listening to someone describe their Yu-Gi-Oh card deck in exquisite detail.
14. Please belch after the meal is over, and not in my direction.
15. Learn to eat spaghetti and noodles correctly. I don’t appreciate your food on my shirt, plate, etc.
16. The amount of saliva in your mouth should be less than the amount of water in your glass so that I don’t wind up with my food having a watery texture every time you talk to me.
17. You are permitted to breathe during your sixty minute monologue without fear of interruption.
18. Bathe! If your aroma is stronger than the Italian food that uses lots of garlic it is a sure sign of a personal hygiene problem.

And I’ll mention these again because I think they are really important:

1. Learn to use a knife and fork properly.
2. Chew with your mouth closed.
3. Bathe!

* Except for their secret menu, which contains another six items.

I can finally talk about our latest project — “Shrek The Third” for Microsoft Windows. I’m happy with the way the game turned out and made me realise that perhaps there is a market for casual “platformer” games after all.

The game has been approved by Microsoft and Activision and all of those people that matter and we’ve added it to our portfolio of titles. The movie is out on May 18th so we will all be attending a screening of it as a company outing.

With our current office expansion underway and the year not even half over we are planning on having two more projects out the door by the time that Christmas rolls around. I’ll post more when I am able to talk about them.

I bet your company has an employee handbook and I bet you have never read it.

I’ll bet some don’t even know that the company they work for has an employee handbook.

And if you have read the handbook, I’ll bet it was only because you were made too.

That’s quite a few bets.

Am I right on at least one of them?

Infinite Monkey Factory, my game development company, is growing up and expanding. With our new projects currently going in to production we’ll hit fifteen full-time employees within two months and with future planned projects for the rest of this year, by the end of 2007 that number could well double.

I’ve been contemplating writing some guidelines for new hires and to ensure that our current employees remember what we are trying to achieve as a company.

One of the tenets of IMF is “Act different.”

I keep reminding people that IMF exists in a bizarro opposite world where we try to do everything differently to almost every other company. I’m trying to give every production position a private office with a door that closes, five weeks of vacation time a year in addition to the regular Federal holidays that everyone gets, required vacation time (IMF shuts down completely between the 24th December of 2nd of January and an entire week at the height of the Summer), employee profit sharing, a democratic company, completely open information, in addition to all of the best hardware and software we can lay our hands on.

So when it comes to the employee handbook we’re going to do it differently to everyone else too.

We’re going to create a philosophy manual instead. I want something like a “Zen and the Art of Game Development” or “Sun Tzu’s Art of Development.” We want the philosophy manual to be something you want to read, and we want it to impart the philosophy of what it is to work at IMF.

And we want it all told in comic strip format.

Maybe Dilbert’s Scott Adams is looking for a new job…

Almost every day I come home from work and invariably there is a door hang menu or flier for a local fast food restaurant attached to the door of the apartment where I live.

Why do managers of fast food places do this?

The flier goes straight in the rubbish and I can almost guarantee that ninety-eight to ninety-nine percent of the people who also receive the flier throw it straight in the trash and it is never seen again. Something stuck on my apartment door makes me feel like my abode has been violated in some way. Some business had the audacity to plaster their graffiti over my door. And now I’ve got some image of some shady immigrant being paid less than minimum wage sneaking around the complex tagging door handles with their impersonal mark.

Don’t even get me started on the fact the person doing the distribution hang these useless marketing gimicks on the door handles of the storage rooms (when the rooms are clearly marked as storage and non-residential) and so after a few weeks the storage room doors become festooned with so much garish (and pulpy if it has rained) advertising it looks like it belongs on the Las Vegas strip.

How do I know less than two percent of the people who receive the flier ever make use of it? Because those are the statistics from every study I’ve read and from personal experience of using it as a marketing method in year’s past that have shown that the response rate for this kind of marketing is usually around 1% to 2%. And that’s if you have a good flier.

Why do fast food restaurants persist ondoing the same tired marketing? O.K. Let’s assume you didn’t start a fast food business because you had an original thought but in a commodity market the only way to sell more or sell at a higher price is differentiate yourself and your product.

Here’s a thought…

I have to walk through the lobby to get to my car. I have to walk through the lobby to return from my car. I have to walk through the lobby (twice!) to collect the post. So in an average week, assuming I collect the post from the box when I come home and also once on Saturday, I pass through the lobby eleven times in a week. That’s just an average week.

I could get to see an advertisement for your restaurant eleven times in a week.

In advertising, repetition is the key.

So rather than putting menus on doors why not place them in the lobby in an attractive display stand?

Putting two dozen menus in to a fold-up cardboard stand in the lobby has got to be cheaper than paying someone to sneak in to the building and run around placing door hang menus on the hundred or more apartments in the complex.

Apartment manager won’t let you leave behind your fliers in the lobby? Ever thought of bribing them with free food? Just about every resident apartment manager works for remuneration far below minimum wage. Why not print up some free meal coupons and give the apartment manager three of them. In a month’s time, send that same apartment manager a thank you note and another three free meal coupons.

Why three?

Because one just shows how cheap you are, two is just right, but three? Three is generous and unless the guy is single will probably be taking a friend or significant other out for a meal and he’ll either never use the third voucher or have ti buy a meal to go along with the last remaining free voucher on his second trip.