“Ladyfingers” by Luscious Jackson plays on top of the newly resized 1280×1024 resolution desktop… “I bet you didn’t know that I could treat you right. That underneath the armour, there’s another girl. She’s standing with a suitcase ready to run, in case you’re wondering why she’s so quick to come and go…”
Whenever I watch my brother asleep, it always reminds me of those times I used to watch him sleep when he was younger. For some reason, watching him sleep tears the fabric of time right underneath me and throws me out at the other end, when he was still only 4 years old. It gets that way not only when he is asleep, but sometimes when he’s sitiing still, watching TV or playing games. When he notices me watching him, he always tells me to stop it, but the part of me that clings onto my youth with clenched hands tells me otherwise. It’s been exam season and he’s been studying into the early hours of the morning. Whenever I walk past his door after 3am and see his light on, I always check to see if he’s awake. More often than not, he’ll have his head on the pillow with his hands still holding the sheet of notes or a book. Eyes closed.
Given the opportunity, I usually choose to relive my youth and relive those carefree days of abandoned childish hedonism. There are times of course, when I am glad to have shed my naivety and sometimes presumptuous skin from youth. Take for means of comparison, some of the clientele we have to deal with at my work place. There are upsides and downsides to dealing with people over the phone. The obvious downside is that anything can go and you can be reprimanded for all the sins of the world over the phone without ever seeing the complainee on the other end. This is the sort of conversation I’d be having over the phone on my last day at my workplace:
Random client: I’m glad you finally called me because I’m having problems.
Me: When did you contact customer services regarding that?
RC: I haven’t contacted them.
Me: So what do you think we are, psychic? If you don’t report a problem we can’t stare into a crystal ball and find all the answers within.
RC: Oh, I am having problems with the billing for my account.
Me: You have to speak to someone in the accounts department. I am in marketing so cannot help you with that.
RC: I have to speak to someone else?
Me: Sir, have you heard of the term “You are what you eat?”
RC: Hmmm, yes.
Me: So tell me, are you a fan of fruitcake?
RC: What do you mean?
Click. Dial tone.
One of my work colleagues has recently decided to give up smoking. He’d been in an intimate 11 year relationship with nicotine since a very early age, so I asked him what brought it on. Most smokers quit due to constant nagging from a significant other, deteriorating health, repugnant and chronic bad breath, etc. but his reason was simple… he couldn’t afford it. It seems that health scares (or even death scares) and the detailing of removing a part of their trachea serves as less of a deterrent than the inability to pay off a loan. Money is a powerful thing indeed. It works in mysterious ways.
He was telling me that he had been undergoing detoxifcation procedures by sticking to an organic and natural soup diet. Seems to be working because he’s looking much healthier and less like a personification of lethargy. He’s also been making delicious blended beverages with his smoothie machine. Now, if there was any contraption on the planet to help pick someone back up, it would contain the letters: s, m, o, o, t, h, i, e, m, a, c, h, i, n, e (in that order). You can make a smoothie with almost anything, be it fruit or vegetable. He was saying how he’d made potato smoothies, but declined on the taste test. All I know is that if I had a smoothie machine, it would be Smooth Saturday everyday, even if it is because I’d be pimping it to make blended Boba fruit drinks (some recipes here).
There seems to be an ongoing intra-office e-mail relationship with H, who let me in on some juicy personal gossip. Having read the e-mails between them I was surprised at the high level of sexual innuendo; a level that would certainly call for disciplinary procedures in my own office. At times it was blatant, but at others it read on the same level as a Carry On movie. It’s good to see she’s happy though, as she says this flirtatious game of ping pong is the only thing that makes her look forward to going into work. A vast improvement over hanging her head with an upturned smile prior to Christmas. As I said before, office dynamics are a very strange and interesting phenomenon because it forces a diverse range of individuals to coexist. The office is almost like a delusional goldfish bowl where there is no life outside of its glass walls, so anything goes. In H’s case where the number of men in the office outweigh the women, it’s not hard to see imaginations running wild and conclusions being jumped all over. It must be like a repressed little aquarium in there.
The other thing that amuses me in the office are the ocassional errors in memos sent around via e-mail or posted on the bulletin board. H had a great example where her office has stopped advertising vacancies for “graduates” (because she seems to be the only graduate there looking at other positions, so it would be like advertising for the attraction of one person in the entire office — her). So to get around this they use different wording. One of the latest memos advertised a position for someone of “graduate caliber.” What a gem! The last time I checked, she wasn’t working for an American company or one that conducted business using American-English. Quite frankly, in a professional office environment, this kind of error is disacceptible!
