Headwounds, Facebook, & Sarge

We love Sarge.

I want to make that clear.

Past blog entries have already shined a light on his more eccentric behaviors.

Many of his unique peculiarities may be down to the fact that Sarge has suffered eleven concussions. Those are just the ones he can remember. Concussions are no laughing matter — if your eggs get scrambled, get yourself a neurological workup, toot-sweet! But just because concussions are no laughing matter, it doesn’t prevent us from laughing at Sarge’s many headwounds. Because Sarge is … well, he’s Sarge. It’s part of the package.

Most of Sarge’s concussions can be traced to his days playing rugby. Others are due to his being a size XXL Englishman in an economy-sized world. While some of his injuries are more memorable than others — like the time his old man took a hatchet to the rope that was binding down a tree, leaving the tree to whip over like a trebuchet and clobber Sarge on the noggin — every blow Sarge has suffered to his skull has contributed to a legacy of Sarge being a bit … misty … sometimes.

Sarge … kinda fuzzy around the edges …

Sarge was the first guy we hired at Appy Entertainment, and his looming presence was a key consideration in planning the layout of our Secret Worldwide Headquarters. Farzad took Em into his lap when we were torture testing office chairs at IKEA (and in a future blog we’ll tell the tale of Sarge’s demolition of a high-end office chair in the swanky headquarters of Shanghai’s foremost outsourcing studio), but mostly we were concerned about Sarge’s head, and what it might contact at the office.

For instance, here’s the staircase down from our brainstorming and planning loft:

A bad fall pending, particularly if you prang off of that fire extinguisher, or crash through the rail and crush poor Lyuba where she sits at the base of the stairs.

Smart folks that we are, we padded the beams right above the stairs:

Look closely, you can see the pads …

Right. So we’ve padded the beams, warned Sarge to be careful, and Bob’s Your Uncle.

Flash forward several months and we’re unreasonably self-satisfied that Sarge hasn’t smashed through the wall or fallen down the stairs or plunged through the floor into the pub beneath the office. We had some meeting or other … maybe KRAPPS was visiting the office, or maybe some women were coming by, and so we decided it was time to clean up this dump.

We’re a start-up, so in addition to pledging our lives and sacred honor to Appy Entertainment, we do other, more mundane things, like take out our own trash. No problem. The lot of us hit this place like a white tornado, and before long the office looked like a million bucks. Eager to help out, Sarge grabbed up a trashcan in each meaty paw and trundled off to the trash dumpster.

He didn’t come back.

From his scrambled account we were able to piece together what happened.

Our trash dumpsters look benign and even kind of attractive from the outside.

But open those doors and you’ll find a deadly trap!

Yep — check out that horizontal beam. It’s about six-and-a-half feet off the ground, which is just above the eye-line for poor old Sargie. You can imagine the rest.

Now, bubblehead though he’s become, colliding with this beam wasn’t quite enough to give Sarge his twelfth concussion, but it was enough to drop him to his knees and make him a bit woozy. After determining that I couldn’t convince Sarge that he owed me money (I was just checking his short-term memory, honest!), we sent him home to shake it off.

He was fine. And we had a laugh that we’d padded this place like a two-year-old’s playroom but that Sarge’s dome had somehow still sought out the single unpadded piece of lumber within a block of the office. But Sarge is what you call a key man … he worked himself into a bad case of pneumonia when we were finishing Appy Newz, and those few days he was home sick resulted in the rest of us reverting to savagery, like in that Saturday Night Live skit when the teleprompter malfunctions. We couldn’t take a chance on Sarge getting knocked out again, and there’s really no way we could make this place any safer … so we resorted to more extreme measures.

Made with Appy Newz

Sarge looks sharp in his new helmet, and if it doesn’t yet bear the logo of his beloved Dallas Cowboys, well, that only means that we know what to get him for his birthday.

That’s it for headwounds and Sarge — so what about Facebook? Well, we have Appy Entertainment pages on Facebook and MySpace now, so check ‘em out! Getting our videos up onto those sites has been a Sisyphean trial. At least, it’s been difficult according to Sarge. Hmm. Is the headwounds, or the ramshackle interface of Facebook and MySpace that so vexes Sarge?

What do you think?

Explore posts in the same categories: company culture

Tags: humor, startup, office, Sarge, Sarge Stories, Appy, Appy Entertainment, Em, Farzad, head wound, Secret Worldwide Headquarters, Appy Newz, KRAPPS, trebuchet, Lyuba

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