Where’s My Hairspray?

Nothing like late night boredom in a foreign country to inspire creativity. I found myself in Wellington, New Zealand last week on St. Patrick’s Day with a host of post-conference SharePoint folks, chatting with Paul Culmsee about a song idea that he had come up with a year prior, collaborating with Ruven Gotz and Peter Serzo on lyrics sung to the Tears for Fears classic, Mad World.

After a quick lyrical refresh and a few minutes for Paul to remember the melody, we created this one-take video with my still shot and Mark Miller’s meandering and artistic recording. Randy Williams and Mark took a few photos of Paul and I, helping to capture the goofy mood of the evening. I promised to have the video live within the week, but since my morning flight was not going to allow me a full night’s sleep anyway, I decided to piece it together right then and there using Windows Live Movie Maker.

The recording is less than perfect, and my video editing won’t win me any awards, but here’s the final product:

Paul posted the lyrics on his blog, but he didn’t capture a couple of the (minor) changes. Here’s the updated version:

All around me are new interfaces
Shared workspaces, my-site places
Run by admins who can’t tie their laces
Page loads snail pace, backups no trace

Out of box is just so boring, i think its kind of sad
My dreams of coding c-sharp are the best I ever had
I find it hard to tell you, the root hive’s really toast
When coders put in SharePoint its a very very
Mad world, Mad World

Metrosexuals try to make it Facebook
Where’s my hairspray? where’s my hairspray?
Using designer to create a workflow
No-one follows, no-one follows

Out of box is just so boring, i think its kind of sad
My dreams of coding c-sharp are the best I’ve ever had
I find it hard to tell you, the root hive’s really toast
When coders put in SharePoint its a very very
Mad world, Mad World

Content database is like Godzilla
8 hour backups, 8 hour backups
Mess with settings inside web.config
Where’s my homepage? where’s my homepage?

And I think it’s kind of funny, i think its kind of sad
Code monkeys blame their admins but their memory leaks suck bad
I find it hard to tell you, the sequel’s out of space
When tech-geeks put in SharePoint its a very very
Mad world, MOSS world, SPS 2003 world, Office365 world, Exchange 2000 world

We’re talking now about performing the song live at next year’s New Zealand SharePoint Conference, using lines submitted by the community — which would be fantastic. As for future music projects, I’d like to do something similar to what I did for a prior organization at Microsoft (TPKE, created for Client Service Operations) – but this time, a trance/dance song for the SharePoint community.