We’ve been incredibly lucky this summer to have the lovely and talented Mary McCaw with us as a marketing, publicity, and editorial intern. We adore having her on staff, but we wondered…does she adore us? Instead of doing something professional, like a review, we decided to give her a Q&A and post her answers on the blog…
Number of Days I Have Been with Coliloquy: 19
Average Number of Beverages on My Desk at a Given Time: 3
Minimum Number of Times Per Day Other People in our Co-Working Space Give Me the Evil Eye for Laughing Out Loud at Our Group Hipchat: 2
Favorite HipChat:
“I am listening to the most ridiculous conversation on the train. Must live chat: YA girl to YA Boyfriend: ‘I met this guy named Running Cloud at the mall. He goes to Sequoia and is straight up Native American. For real. I thought he was gonna rape me. Everybody wants to. But I’d only let one person. You.’ At which point, she starts foot fondling YA boyfriend” (Overheard on the Caltrain via Hipchat via Lisa)
Favorite Lunch Place:
Darwin. Why? The honey-cheddar-baguette sandwich. If this sandwich were on regular bread? It would be for 5-year-olds. But on a baguette? Classy. French. Totally un-embarrassing and picky-eater-friendly. Yum. Fringe benefit? It has nothing spicy or foreign on it so my chances of having an allergic reaction to a previously unknown herb are pretty much zero.
Strangest Out-of-Context Conversation I’ve Overheard:
“Waynn, there is a huge difference between a horse dildo and a horse.”
If I Were the Heroine in each of Coliloquy’s YA Series, I Would Pick:
- Arcania: Grey
- Witch’s Brew: Chance
- Parish Mail: Sloan
- Getting Dumped: Pete. No, Collin. No, Pete. Wait–I want to change my answer. I pick both.
Position on the Ongoing Coliloquy HQ Debate:
SF vs Palo Alto. Pros for Palo Alto: Weather + patio furniture. Pros for SF: Everything else. Verdict? Undecided.
The One Thing We Can All Agree On:
We will never each lunch at O-zone. Even if Lisa brings plates.
Things I’m Still Adjusting to:
- The Star Wars-themed conference rooms in our co-working space. Stopping someone on my way to a 10:30am Monday meeting to ask, “Excuse me? Where is Tatooine?” just feels… weird.
- Start up hours. I woke up Wednesday morning, a few minutes behind schedule, and left my apartment to see the bus pulling away from my stop. I opted to chase it 4 blocks rather than wait 30 minutes for the next one and be shamed for sleeping in. I was still the first member of team Coliloquy to arrive in the office. By at least a 1 hour margin. Then I opened hipchat to find out that Waynn only logged out to go to sleep 2 hours prior.
- Reading erotica. He placed his hand on her–tee hee hee (blush)
My Favorite Thing About Working at Coliloquy:
It doesn’t feel like work. I guess it is work, because I’m always doing something, but I never get the feeling of looking at the clock and wanting it to be five o’clock like a lot of people seem to. The days fly by. Plus, everyone on team Coliloquy is happy and laid back, which makes for a really pleasant work environment. It always seems like we’re having way more fun than anyone else in our shared office space. And I’m working on a huge range of things here, so I’m never bored. Some days I feel like reading, some days I feel like writing, and other times I prefer doing marketing research, and so on. So it’s nice having the flexibility to bounce around between a couple projects at once. That way I can be productive and work on something that suits my mood at any given time instead of being locked into one specific task until it’s finished.
Waynn used to wear sweat pants to work every day at Google. And Lisa used to wear jorts to Twofish. They’ve both cleaned up a bit, but if you were to dress each of us in a designer’s style, who would you pick?
This question reminds me of those infomercials for sweatpants that look like jeans. But I don’t think I can endorse those, so… next question.
If you wrote a book for Coliloquy, what would be the 3-sentence synopsis?
Writing a book for Coliloquy would be awesome because I’m a really indecisive person. It would be so liberating to be able to put choice points in the story whenever it doesn’t feel right to force a character to make a choice. But if I tried to do this it would probably backfire, since I’d overuse it and the final text would probably have something like 59 choice points and 203,545 different endings. Which is fine, unless you’re the one editing the book.
I think it’d be funny to write a story (the actual plot is irrelevant) with a ton of branching parts where, in all but one path, the character dies in some absurd, hilarious, ridiculous way. Then, it’s kind of like a game, and if you’re part of the tiny percentage of people that picks the right path, you win. But maybe you don’t even realize it. There’d be all these people walking around who would have read the book but they’d have no idea what they hadn’t read.
…I think maybe I find things funny that other people don’t.
College vs. the Real World
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College |
Real World |
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Having blocks of free time in the middle of the day |
Having blocks of free time at night |
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I can sleep in until 9! |
I can sleep in until whenever I want. Wait a second–really? |
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Going to college parties |
Not going to college parties |
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Warm beer |
I get ice in my drink! But I have to pay for it… |
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Things (like food!) feel like they’re free! But that’s probably just because they’ve been paid for in advance by Stanford’s $40,000-a-year college tuition… |
Everything costs money. Food, going out, riding the bus… everything. I was vaguely aware that real people pay for their own water and electricity, but I was genuinely surprised to hear that you even have to pay the city to pick up your garbage. |
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I have no idea what that something-nasty is in the communal sink when I go to make breakfast on a Saturday morning. But I do know that no one will ever come to clean it up. |
There is no mess in the sink when I wake up on Saturday morning, but there is also no food in the fridge. Or in any of the cabinets. I guess its Diet Coke for breakfast again. |
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People look at me funny for “dressing up” and looking “too professional” for class |
People look at me funny for dressing “like a college student” or “inappropriately” for work… Same outfit. |
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No one expects me to act like an adult |
Everyone I know still refuses to act like an adult, expectations be damned |
Most Recent Pie-Related Mishap: I have never made my own pie, but I did recently make my own pizza. (Close enough, right?) I made it from scratch. Even the crust. It was delicious. But since I am a broke college student, I’m roughing it in a very poorly-stocked kitchen. As in, I don’t own measuring cups. So I had to do some guesswork. I estimated poorly and added too much water, which turned my “dough” into a big, gooey, gloppy, amorphous, sticky blob. With my hands stuck inside. Efforts to extract them only made things messier. So I was trapped until boyfriend could return from Safeway and rescue me with a big bag of flour.