Irreverence

posted on 01 June 2008 05:15

Woof woof. Here's a puzzle. The picture below is of a dog on a roof, a picture of a dog painted on a roof.

It's taken from Google Earth and is on the roof of a building at 2840. Junction Avenue, San Jose, California 95134, USA.

What on earth is a dachsund dog's picture doing on the roof of an office building?

The picture below is of a bottle of wine called Angry Dog. Peeping out from a blanket is the nose and paw of a dog; yes, it's a dachsund again.

The dachsund in question, a wiener dog, is called Clams. Clams? Its owner takes pretty good underwater photos when he goes diving. You can see them on his office wall and in the boardroom.

The wine is made in a winery operated by the owner of Clams who has a firework assembly building in the desert and designed and built the fireworks for a show he orchestrated for Larry Ellison in 2003 at a cost of a quarter of a million dollars.

The wine is super stuff with a great big taste. The fireworks are reputed to be big stuff too. On his office desk is a set of bullet and shell cases and nearby an A10 Warthog anti-tank shell holding down the top of his humidor.

Blowing things up obviously appeals to a man who runs a small winery, takes underwater photos to a high standard, breeds dachsund dogs and, by the way, runs Pillar Data Systems. A bit of a polymath then.

He is chief executive officer Mike Workman - an appropriate given name considering how busy he is - at Pillar Data Systems and is the firm's founder. He relaxes from working hard, it seems, by working hard at something else. The picture of the dog was caused to be painted on the roof by his VP for corporate communications, Chip Woerner, as a present.

Chip showed his boss a picture of the dog on the roof using his smart mobile phone, saying it was a Google Earth picture. Mike Workman (pictured left) didn't believe it was real, saying the picture was a PhotoShop construction. Then he got out his smart phone and dialled up Google Earth and ... saw the dog. What a great idea for a present.

Who said business was dull?

^{[Chris Mellor.]}