Come on in and join the celebration!

Ahh, Halloween. My most favoritest day of the year. I just competed in a pumpkin carving contest here at work. As the captain, I wanted to carve a decidedly evil looking pumpkin, but working in an office a lot of the other people were leaning toward the more cartoonish.

FUCK THAT. I don't do cute on Halloween. Sure, if I was carving a pumpkin for some kids I would definitely go with the standard triangle eyes and jagged smiley mouth. But this was different. This was a bunch of adults in an adult setting. If it were up to me, I'd have made a whole Halloween diorama complete with fire and dripping blood and Freddy Krueger, Pumpkinhead, Pennywise, and Satan disemboweling Linus on a pagan altar in The Great Pumpkin's patch. Then again, we had a 25 minute time limit, and I'm not entirely sure I could have squeezed all that in. 

So I made a compromise; we'd do a cartoon character, Jack Skellington. But we'd do his angry face. I thought that would make a decent looking jack-o'-lantern. I found a good looking pic of Jack in a particularly bad mood, Photoshopped it for maximum contrast, printed it out, cut it up to make a traceable template, brought in some leftover glow sticks from my big Halloween bash, and got to cuttin' me some pumpkin.

The guy to the right is Trevor, my carving partner. I'm loving the look on his face here; you'd think he was trying to cut through quarter inch tempered steel with that pumpkin saw. I don't know what his struggle was, but I thought the little saws were doing a damn sight better than the steak knives I usually use. These little things were awesome. Trevor dressed up as "Carl Wheezer" from Jimmy Neutron. That's me on the left dressed up as "guy who doesn't need help carving a damn pumpkin but is forced to work with others against his will due to the requirements of polite office behavior." Still, Trevor was a big help and was perfectly down with the spirit of pumpkin carving, so as partners go, he was a good one. You are still dangerous, Trevor, but you can be my wingman anytime.

There's a glimpse of things to come. My manager wanted to display that we answer phones when there are computer problems, so, without my knowing, had already decided that whatever I carved would be wearing a wireless headset and have a cartoon speech balloon written on it's face saying something "funny" about being techs. Despite the fact that this idea is beyond gay, it doesn't in the slightest bit take into account that my pumpkin was clearly not in the mood to be speaking to anyone, except maybe to tell them how he was going to kill them. Nevertheless, I offered up the idea that, since its Halloween, the jack-o'-lantern might be saying something about the blue screen of DEATH (I emphasized to him that this should be in caps; if its good enough for Terry Pratchett, its good enough for me). So after the carving was done, he strapped a headset onto the pumpkin and started writing. Unfortunately, I didn't look at what he wrote until after the pumpkins were judged. I was mortified. You have to see this to believe it:

Sreen. Sreen. WHAT THE FUCK IS A SREEN?!? Practically the whole IT division of our company was there for this event. People were there from outlying offices in different fucking states. I went to two different stores last night to find the right tools for this competition. I spent literally hours going through various online templates for carving jack-o'-lanterns, and, finding them all wanting, I eventually designed my own. Trevor, before I even got to work, had this thing cleanly gutted and ready to carve (you could clean the pumpkin out before the contest, but you couldn't do any carving whatsoever until the whistle blew). We were finely tuned on the division of labor during the carving and never really got in each other's way despite us both being very big boys carving a basketball sized pumpkin. Another guy in the office gave us a military issue glow stick from his brother in the US Army to bolster the ones I brought so we could really light this thing up. The one thing, the one goddamn motherfucking ass-raping nun-fisting Christing fucking thing the manager had to do – which should never have been done in the first place – is make this a tech-o'-lantern by putting a headset on it and writing something "witty" or "clever." And what did we get? Fucking Sreen. Thank god our manager waited for an event that was being personally attended by every single person we work with and being judged by BOTH vice presidents of IT to reveal to the world that he can't spell 'screen.' Jesus fucking Christ…

Needless to say, since our VPs presumably know how to fucking read, we didn't win the competition. But here's the pumpkin we ended up with. Not too shabby for a first attempt, a 25 minute limit, and a homemade, untested stencil. I'll be honest, I thought ours was better than the ones that won, but after seeing the demonstration of our manager's orthographic acumen, I can totally understand why we didn't. The glow sticks, incidentally, are a very disappointing light source. We were incorrectly informed that we couldn't have any live flame, so we used these. Of course, everyone else there had fucking racks of candles inside their pumpkins which were glowing like beacons from on high. Ours was a cool green color, but still far to dim for my taste. I wanted so much green light pouring out of this thing that people would be afraid of possible nuclear irradiation. But that didn't happen.

By the way, if any of our readers work for the Pentagon and are in charge of purchasing, you'll be interested in knowing that the glow sticks you get two for a dollar at any number of dollar stores this time of year are exactly as bright and long lasting as the ones you guys give to our troops in those very professional looking white mylar wrappers. Just thought you should know.

As weird as this may sound, I've fulfilled a long time goal of mine today. I finally carved a pumpkin on Halloween. I've never done that, despite always intending to. Win or lose, the pumpkin competition was great for that reason alone. I've had a great Halloween and I hope you out there did too. For all of us here at The Sci-Fi Guys, we wish you a very Happy Halloween. Now go eat some candy!