Fantasy

Avaya 8434 Birthday Cake!

clickfo

Your humble curator turned 30 last month. As a result of the big deal, I had requested to have a special birthday cake. This year, I wanted something to resemble a office telephone. I had turned 25 at the time when the Cake Boss had built for Avaya, an actual cake casing of their IP Office 500 Control Unit and one of the 16 or 9600 sets. The phones and control unit really worked with all the cake covering it.

Mine was a little simple (or complex)

So my mother got a special order at Frederick’s Pastries (a well known baker North of Boston/Suburban NH), of a two layer, gold cake, with strawberry filling, with, white frosting mimicking the “Misty Cream” set color, and the various elements the signature telset. You’ll also notice the side where they made the groove edges of the set. They got the Avaya logo right on too. The handset resembles the 9400 Series DCP terminals (the ones sold during the same time as the 8400 for non domestic customers that looked kinda like 6400s, some have made its away towards America in third hand markets.)  They never made such thing before and they were kinda nervous at first. My mother never ordered a special order cake from scratch.

 

Albeit belated, when we picked it up on the 31st, they were excited and in fact the owner was on site that day when we picked it up. Given a misspelling on my name, it was great!

My gawd how filling was the cake! Took a week to finish it!

Avaya Windstar Van – Lego Edition – 2008

clickfo

I have not shared my Lego creations or my passion on this site, but because it blends into this subject, I’m posting this.

I built this around 2008, about the time I finished school and had some time on my hands.  In my grandmother’s basement (where I used to live) was where my Lego stuff was at that point in time. As with any bustling little Lego community, fire trucks, police cruisers, news gathering vehicles and street sweepers, construction vehicles and interconnect vehicles. (I own at least a hundred kits, at least a couple dozen “bulk” buckets and/or storage containers featuring Lego pieces and not to mention buying bulk pieces at the Lego Store – read below and acquiring early American pieces on eBay or thrift shops.)

This vehicle represented Avaya at that time. Most of Avaya’s support fleet were white colored Ford Windstars with the Avaya logo located on the side and back. Using Avery labeling, I printed them out that way. (I strongly suggest printing in photo paper on a photo printer for better results.

When I was about twelve, I broke a in house rule of keeping kits seperate to any other bricks I acquired separately. As a result many kits that I had as a preteen were already wrecked and rebuilt into other things. The reason was there was no Lego Store at that time and there was no such thing as Pick a Brick where you could fill up a cup that could look like candy and getting random Lego pieces. (Its not the bricks that matter, its the special pieces.

IMG_0544 IMG_0545

No foot long boards or Merlins living in the back of this truck sadly, mostly was driven empty.

IMG_0546

As you could tell, the back were just regular 1×2 stud bricks attached on a hinge piece that I didn’t have many spares to. The vehicle is not even remotely close to a Windstar. But talking to professional Lego people, and employees of a local indoor Legoland, the “minfigure” scale is very difficult as they are by default 6 feet tall. (In recent years, they made petite size figures – ones with no moving legs, and finally other figures like infants have come to the world of Lego.)

The van has since been wrecked because a) Avaya has changed their decals shown here; and b) most minifigs in my little world don’t use Avaya or even Cisco, they have their own little vendor called Clicktel. They had already given up on Avaya way before the real world finally cried “surrender!”