Bizarre
I've just come out of the kitchen (at the client I'm at today) where I stumbled in bleary eyed to make a cup of tea to go with my extremely healthy breakfast of an orange and a bun, and I was greeted by the sight of one of the client staff washing himself in the sink.
Not just his hands. Top off, soap suds everywhere, and some very enthusiastic singing accompanied a full upper body scrub down. Right there in the communal kitchen. Put me right off the idea of breakfast - the people quickest to get their kit off in public are usually the ones who should be forced by law to keep it on at all times, and the gentleman (and I use that term in its loosest sense) in question today was no exception.
Ick. It is cold and raining, the wind is howling and I've just seen a semi naked man in the kitchen. I hope the day improves soon.
Five minutes late.....and the day isn't improving.
Raindrops keep falling on my head.
I am indoors, which makes the above statement that much more annoying. I have moved out of the kitchen, which is a start, and I am in an open plan office at a desk. It's warm in here. It's a nice promotion. Where's the catch?
It is a mobile unit. The rain is drumming down on the roof. It makes a nice soothing background and partially masks out the drone of office life:
"Where is the folder with the blue post it note gone? I had it a minute ago!"
"It's not my turn to make the tea. I made it last time."
"Who didn't fill the paper up in the photocopier?"
The rain allows me the chance to indulge in my favourite workday fantasy of sunshine, heat, a good book, a never-ending bacardi and coke and the Baron rubbing my suntan lotion in.
But every now and then my rain-induced reverie is interrupted by the rude sploshing of a big cold raindrop down the back of my neck. And I am jerked back to the real world of ringing telephones, the smell of ozone drifting out of the photocopier and client staff bustling around with huge piles of paper trying to look busy and therefore very very important. And the most uncomfortable sensation of being seated in a chair whose normal occupant has a much larger bottom than I do. I feel like I've been let loose to sea - the chair has suffered under the previous weight and wobbles precariously, and there are actual buttock imprints in the padding that I do not fit into in the slightest and so I join the chair in its wobbling. Not the best start to another morning in the big bad Working World.
Today's review is a short one, and is just a check that the recommendations made at the last review, and were agreed by management have actually been implemented. I had a meeting with the Financial Controller (I was trying not to wonder about his underwear, I swear. I wish I had never seen that survey), and since every question was met with increasingly nervous giggles and paper shuffling, I think I can safely send him last years report again with a memo saying "Do This Now" and go home.
So in the interest of generating Value For Money - after all the client is paying for my services, even if they choose not to act on anything I say, I am sat here with my open laptop also trying to look busy and very important. It gets very boring after a while.
The lights have started to flicker on and off and the rain is seeping through at an alarming rate. There are mutterings of mutiny amongst the staff. They won't do anything but complain though - no-one ever does anything but moan. The only thing that is guaranteed to get the staff up and actually doing something is running out of milk. Leaking roof? People will sit and moan that their hair and/or papers are getting wet, but no-one will make the supreme effort to call maintenance and get it sorted - it isn't their responsibility. Broken light? Those same people will sit in the dark and moan that they work for a useless company that can't even fix a light, without stopping to think that they can't fix something if they don't know that it is broken. And no-one will call, because it isn't their responsibility, and if they do, someone will fix it and they will have to go back to work.
I know not everyone is that lazy. But sometimes it really does seem that way. The ultimate in lazy, and this really pisses me off, are the people who can't be bothered to put out a new roll of toilet paper when they finish it and instead leave the last two squares attached to the roll. I mean, odds are they have been hiding in there for the last twenty minutes to avoid working anyway, so why not take another thirty minutes to track down the toilet roll and put it on? No, at that point they get a conscience and have to rush back to work, leaving it to the poor sod who comes in next, uses the toilet and then realises that there is no toilet paper and that they don't have a tissue on them.
And the irony of me bemoaning all those who are lazy at work, whilst writing my Blog and not actually doing anything that I am paid for has not escaped me.
A little later............
Unbelievably it is quarter to one already. Where did the morning go? The rain has died away, my pile of paper has grown and my blood caffeine level is slowly rising. My mobile phone is almost out of battery, which should stem the tide of inane phone-calls I have had this morning quite nicely. I don't want a brand new cable TV package, I don't want more insurance to cover my boring life and I am not a sandwich bar taking orders for a large party of vegetarians (very wrong number).
My file is coming on quite nicely. I am one of those sad individuals who gets very excited by highlighters, coloured gel pens and pretty little post-it notes, so in actual fact, I am very suited to the life of an auditor. My file is a work of art; a veritable explosion of colour and post it notes. It's just a shame that the actual commentary consists only of:
"Recommendation not carried out"
"This constitutes a significant weakness that needs to be addressed immediately"
"Sort it out, you twat". Ok, the last one is what I want to put in my file and report, as an example of my feelings towards the FC, and as what I overheard the blunt speaking Director saying on the phone to the FC when I just walked past his desk in search of another caffeine hit, but as I quite like my job, I will probably try to find a more diplomatic phrasing.
The rest of the afternoon will be dedicated to getting even more paper with which to pad out my file, and then the systematic colouring in of the above mentioned so that it bears a striking resemblance to a rainbow. Or a piece of work brought home by a small child - I've been told (more than a few times actually, but my mother's moaning doesn't count here) that my handwriting is about as legible as a scribble.
I admit that it is messy. Sometimes even I have trouble reading what I have written, but that isn't too often. Some people have no problems reading it - my best friend in Uni had no problems reading even my hyperactive middle of lecture scrawl, and she could do that upside down too (the paper was upside down, not her, just in case you were wondering), but some, and unfortunately these are all the people closest to me, cannot read a word I have written. Namely my mother, and the Baron. If I ever leave a suicide note, it will be typed just so they don’t misread it and assume I have gone fly fishing with a lion tamer from North Wales.
Even later........
It is now twenty past two. The day is flying by, and my work is getting done just as quickly. In the words of one of the greatest songwriters of our time:
"Don’t stop me now! I'm having such a good time, I'm having a ball!"
And if you don’t know where that is from, you should be deeply ashamed of yourself.
posted by DMouse007 @ 1/13/2004 04:03:00 PM
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