The saga of the bocce balls
Way back in 2011 or so, I bought two sets of pro-quality bocce balls, paid for by work.
My group at work at the time was starting to get into occasionally playing bocce, and I thought it would be nice to have a couple of good sets. So I ordered them and expensed them.
Over the next couple of years, we played occasionally. The company started providing a few bocce courts in various places, and the balls associated with those courts were (iIrc) mostly cheap lightweight plastic, so it was nice to have our own sets.
But people came and went, and the group changed over time, and the company acquired nicer bocce balls, and ever since probably 2014 or 2015, both sets have been sitting unused under whatever desk was mine at the time.
I wasn’t sure what to do with them—the company had paid for them, so they were company property, but I didn’t know of any way to give them to the company.
Finally, around September of 2021, as I was preparing to move everything in my office to my home (after getting permission to work from home permanently), I asked someone what to do with stuff that belonged to the company but that I couldn’t see any reason for the company to want.
And they said that those things were mine, even though the company had paid for them.
So I should have taken the bocce balls home with me when I took a bunch of other stuff home, back in September or so. But I was tired, and the bocce ball sets were really heavy, and I didn’t want to carry them to my car just then, so I left them, figuring I would come back for them soon.
And then I went on leave for a while, and when I came back I kept intending to go back into the office and pick up the stuff that I had left behind, and then the company instituted return to office for most people, and I finally went in to pick stuff up—
and discovered that someone had cleared out my office.
So I filed a ticket with Facilities to ask them where my stuff was.
And it took them something like a month? Maybe two? to track down the bocce balls and the company’s two desktop computers that had also been on my desk.
I still don’t know where everything was all that time. But a couple weeks ago, they told me they had found everything.
And yesterday I finally went in to pick up the bocce balls.
The cardboard moving box that the two bagged sets were in seemed surprisingly lighter than I had expected, given how heavy I remembered the bags being. But I didn’t really think anything of it; I figured it was just easier to carry them in a box than it had been as separate bags.
So it wasn’t until last night when I opened up the bags to show Kam that I learned…
…that half of the balls in each set are missing.
Each bag was supposed to contain four red balls and four green balls. (I’m not 100% certain of that, and the research that I did was inconclusive. But I’m pretty sure.)
Whereas each bag now contains nothing in the top layer, and three red balls and one green ball in the bottom layer.
My guess is that whoever was moving the bags decided that they were too heavy, and took the top four balls out of each of them, and put those balls somewhere else.
And I suspect that they’re permanently lost now.
But I’ve dropped a note to the Facilities person to ask them to look for the rest of the balls.
We’ll see what happens.
…To further complicate matters: I now think that a few months ago when I went and looked for all this stuff in my office, I may have gone to the wrong office.
I’m really confused about that—I thought that I went to the office that we used to sit in, but it’s possible that I went to the corresponding place in a different building, or to the office that I was in before my last office move (in 2019).
Maybe this weekend I’ll drop by the correct office and see whether there’s anything still there.
