Greg :verified_gay: (@mgwalker@toot.darkcooger.net)
If you wandered over to the 18F emoji pile, you also saw the giraffe facts, and you may have wondered a few things, such as, "why?" and “I don't think that's true.” So let me tell you a story.
I mentioned before that 18F was a bunch of goobers. Laughter is a necessary part of a healthy team environment, and we loved to laugh. We had a Slack channel called #banter whose topic was, essentially, "everything is always on-topic." We talked about teeth far too often, badgers not nearly often enough, and badger teeth probably at least once.
One day, a colleague, Vicki, asked, "What are those fuzzy things on the top of a giraffe's head for?" A good question! But #banter is not a place to expect good answers. (You could get them, and often did, but you shouldn't expect it.)
Another colleague, Randy, said they were radar antennae.
That was the beginning of 18F's own private lore about giraffes. From there, we determined that giraffe tails were hammer-like weapons used to fend off bears, their natural enemy. We observed that giraffes had straws between their toes that they used to drink water, because it was too much effort to bend over. Our expert amateur giraffelology discovered that giraffes evolved from ancient birdbats and that they hate Diet Coke.
This giraffeological lore developed over the course of several weeks and then continued to expand for several more years. We collected these facts and put them into our Slackbot so if you typed “giraffe fact," you'd get one at random. For those of us who were present at the creation of the 18F giraffe mythology, the random giraffe facts were a joyful little callback to a silly shared experience. For people who came later, it was a moment of joyful absurdity to be told that giraffes hum because they don't know the words. (Giraffes do, in fact, hum!)
It was part of what made 18F great. We recognized the importance of being silly in the midst of doing important work. We took our work seriously, but ourselves? Not as much. So I'm really glad that the giraffe facts are preserved and still out there for everyone to see, and I hope you also find joy in the absurdity – and maybe even learn something, because all of the giraffe facts have been verified 100% true by 18F's crack team of amateur professional giraffeologists!
https://toot.darkcooger.net/@mgwalker/114332219446911108
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