I love office toys. I have a shelf or two reserved specifically for my fun toys.
I just received my latest addition today: Euler’s Disk. It’s a bit bigger than I expected (although its exact dimensions are given). The disk itself feels like a steel hockey puck. It does spin for quite a long time – a couple of minutes. I think that the noise may annoy my colleagues.
A co-worker gave me a Geomags starter set (actually a cheap knockoff of them, but it’s still cool).
I have two six-inch-tall machined-aluminum chess pieces – a king and queen. They are take-apart puzzles. I have no idea where my mom bought them. Here’s a similar piece.
I keep a matched set of Efron’s Nontransitive Dice that I fashioned out of cocobolo wood one Sunday afternoon.
I also have some of the more common metal untangling puzzles and so forth.
My next acquisition will likely be one of these kits
Please, do share your own!
I always am on the lookout for something cool that my co-workers will pick up off of my desk and twiddle with as we discuss boring technical stuff.
There’s plenty of that stuff down the hall in the labs, but they don’t let folks like me sully it with our unschooled hands. Pity… it would be kind of fun I suspect.
A bizzare machine from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles which will: slowly approach an object, snatch it into its large pincers, lift it, quickly rotate 180 degrees, and race away in the opposite direction. (object == roughly the size of an action figure) I also have a “Shredder” action figure which drives it.
An anatomically accurate Cow in a space suit (complete with helmet, nasa patches, etc.). Don’t know why someone constructed this toy, but it was so weird I had to have it.
I have:
-A diecast model of a 1967 Ford Mustang
-a complete set of Bullwinkle plush figures
-a rubber Godzilla
-clean, unused paint can with a homemade label that says, “VunderBob’s Big Can of Whup-Ass”
-a flowerpot that danced to the tune of “California Sun”
Geez, all I have are fingerpaints, play-dough, crayons and puzzles.
And Legos, lots of Legos. And dress-ups.
And I get to play on the playground everyday. But I’m too big for the trikes.
Oh, and a laminator. That’s pretty cool. I love laminating stuff
I have a circular slide rule that my father (an electrical engineer back in the '40s) gave me when I went off to college. I never used it in school (this was 1975, and calculators had just become cheap enough to be widely available), but I can multiply two numbers if I work at it long enough. It’s still in its original leather case and has the original manual.
A real relic of the Dark Ages.
[aside]A couple of years later, Dad gave me a decent scientific calculator. For the fun of it, we set up a couple of problems, and solved them side-by-side, me with the calculator and Dad with his old slide rule.
He picked up the slide rule, and started to work. The stick never stopped, it just paused momentarily so he could take a reading, or when he wrote down a partial result. Absolutely fascinating to watch.
We’ve got those magnetic balls and rods thingies. They’re kind of cool, but they are so strong that they tend to stick together in ways you don’t want them to.
I also have the complete set of Homestar Runner figurines, but I don’t think they count as an Executive Toy.
The only “office toy” I’ve ever owned is a stress ball formed in the shape of a human brain. Light gray in color. I keep it at my cubicle to inspire me. If I accidentally drop it on the floor, the guy across from me goes, “Don’t lose your head!” I’ve been known to crawl on the floor after it, saying aloud, “Where’s my BRAIN???”
Toys I have (not including various pictures, wacky postcards and bumperstickers):
Six wind-up walking Smurfs
Smurfette driving a red VW Bug
Yoda Magic 8-ball
A Smiling Buddha statue
Executive Decision making dart board
A Pez Pineapple head dispenser
David from Lilo and Stitch bobble-head
Wanda and Cosmo paper dolls.
Nametag, I just might have to get one of those electric Pez dispensors myself. Problem is, I’d have to fill it every single day.
BrotherCadfael: There was a drafstman at a machine shop I once worked at who had a really huge drum-shaped slide rule (Look at the top picture on this page). He kept it in a custom-made Plexiglas showcase. I always looked at with envy.
I’m glad to hear that those magnets and balls stick with force GuanoLad – considering how serious their warnings are about the larger rare-earth magnets, I’m looking forward to playing with the smaller ones. Some day I may find the courage to get a big one (they say that a 1" rare-earth magnet can easily break a finger if improperly handled).
Eve, I have fond memories of my lava lamp. It was one of the real ones, made back when they knew how to make them. My mom gave it to me when I was a teenager.
Sadly, several years ago it slipped out of my wife’s hands and hit the floor. The bottle was so strong that it didn’t suffer any damage, but some sort of hydrostatic shockwave slammed into the top, popping it right off. It was an amazing sight to behold.
I’ve got a couple of the Skifkas(sp?), a plush Chthulu, a gigantic silver robotic spider, vibrating pillow, various toys my company gives away with our logo.
On my desk proper I have this little blue plastic figure with a magnet in his head (for keeping his mop of paperclips on his head).
Office toys
2 small ghosts (one of them glows in the dark.)
a Lego catapault and accessories
a Bendy dinosaur
a wooden painted egg
the strangest looking small plant I could find (Imagine a green egg, on a 1 inch stock, with inch long spikes sticking out of it, and long narrow leaves on the top)
and everyone’s favorite -
a capacitor, 8" tall, 3.5" across and weighing about a pound. One of these days I WILL put a small charge on it. Teach people not to touch both leads of a capacitor.
I’m thinking about adding a set of magnetic poetry.
I have one of those too! My supervisor brought it bac k from a trade show. It’s evidently from the Pasadena Convention Bureau, as it says “PASADENA: It’s a no brainer!” across the top.
Otherwise, my cubicle contains a Hot Wheels Corvette (green metal flake), some animal figurines from Red Rose tea (giraffe, sea turtle, boar, camel, elephant), a plastic turtle, two Pez dispensers (Yosemite Sam and Garfield in a nightcap), a beanbag monkey, a red metal slinky (another trade show item), three squeezy fish with our logo on them, and a Beatles trading card in a little stand-up frame. Not really toys, but the walls are decorated with old Fillmore postcards: Otis Rush/the Mothers, Cream, Jefferson Airplane/Grateful Dead, Love, Iron Butterfly, Procol Harum.
