Sleeping on the job

There was a particularly late night (/early morning) at work after which I couldn't recover. It compounded a week(/quarter), and, having not set a sustainable pace, I floundered the next day. Being in the office on so little sleep felt a lot like being hungover (which, I would guess is no coincidence. Hangovers & Sleep deprivation go hand in hand).

At 5:30pm on the dot, I decided to mitigate this problem by going for a nap in one of our cave-like meeting rooms. No windows, no natural light, one sofa, lots of cushions. Perfect. At the time I didn't think I was asleep. I remember being annoyed when a telephone rang outside and no one answered it. I recall a vague concern at the idea that the floor might get locked up with me inside. I batted the thought away  - if you start to give in to little worries you'll never get any rest.

When I woke I found that it was quite dark and this was exactly what had happened and it seemed a lot more important now that I wasn't asleep. Worse still I had no idea where the burglar alarm sensors were and so I didn't feel I could safely get up and walk about, which unfortunately means staying exactly where I was, re-ruffling my hair (to look more presentable) and requesting someone should come and rescue me.

That's one good thing about my office. It turns out that you can wake up in a meeting room at almost any time of the day, safe in the knowledge that at least one person will be available to free you. Never before have I seen this fact with such a rosy glow!

The least relaxing massage

One of the things my office does to try to convince you that they care about your wellbeing (other than increase headcount of course - you can't have the one thing you need) is to invite a masseuse in every month and offer us all subsidised massages. I was really looking forwards to this when I learnt that head massages were on offer and this is probably my biggest weakness in life (and when you consider the stiff competition for that title, it's clearly a big deal!) Nothing could be more relaxing. Done right, I just lie limp and grin happily. Like a cat.

At first as she began I wondered if I ought to practice mindfulness (I can never usually find the time) then I decided that was too much of a chore and instead proceeded to be entertained by my own thoughts, which is ironic, as I'm pretty sure that an observation of your own thoughts is what mindfulness is.

At the beginning the masseuse worked on my neck and my most prominent thought was; if she had it in for me I would be very quickly dispatched. I took this to be a clear sign that the relaxing effect wasn't working yet. Then she started massaging the back of my head and everything changed. I wondered if I should give some sort of positive feedback, but it was no good, I was feeling too limp to talk. My thoughts got progressively more silly (I shan't document them here, it's probably for the best!) until it dawned on me that she'd made my hair quite knotty. Not that I minded (there's little a tough hairbrush can't solve), but she was trying to run her fingers through it and they kept getting stuck. She was gently trying to tug them out again while pretending it was intentional. I snapped right out of my reflective daze. There's nothing therapeutic about this any more. Suddenly I was wide awake trying very hard not to laugh (as I thought this would be disheartening!) There is nothing unfunny about a perfect stranger who is trying to pretend she hadn't got her hand stuck in your hair!

Passive aggression like I've never seen it before

There comes a time when the girls have to leave the office, go get pizzas and  let off some steam. It's for the good of our health and stops things getting bottled up. It's fair to say that morale is pretty low in the office at the moment - we've put our hearts and souls in and now there's nothing left. What interested me was the extent to which this was beginning to show in ridiculously trivial ways, none more so than Jade, (the type of  hard working person who was probably top of every class at school). She was about to go into a [somewhat tyrannical] management meeting and so, in a kind of advance retaliation she resolved to eat as much garlic as she could. Pizza express were only too happy to oblige. We had garlic bread, garlic oil and garlic butter on our dough balls - it was great!

As anticipated, what wasn't so great was the management meeting itself. It alarmed me to hear that both of them had spent the meeting crying! Jade, because she'd been been criticised for an hour. And Martha (the boss), in case her unborn child grew up to be like Jade!

The garlic was fine, but now everyone's crying, this is getting ridiculous.

I'm ready to start a culinary revolution

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This evening I stayed extremely late at work. This is not because I was actually working. Granted I did have meetings until 7.30pm but then our charming receptionist had sorted me food, so I took it up to my desk and found that Rachel was still in the office. She was the only one there. I think we may have spent the next two hours ranting at length about the world (and that was before work started!) I did learn something great though. At the time I was totally failing to eat spiralized courgette (the difficulty being that each thread is a minimum of 10km long. It is therefore significantly less dainty to eat than spaghetti) Rachel commented that she uses scissors at home. Horay for office stationary! So I gave it a go, with a fork in one hand and scissors in the other I could cut tendrils short right before putting them in my mouth and this new method worked rather well. If anything I would class it as an 'extreme success' having made the whole process much more dignified, or so I thought, until I realised that this was not what Rachel had meant to recommend at all. She was surveying the (possibly barbaric) scene with an air of horrified politeness (imagine watching someone eat spaghetti with a pair of scissors!) All she'd meant to say was that it ought to be chopped before serving. Nevertheless, at this point I was so thrilled with my own efficiency that I carried on regardless (well, if she is going to be polite about it...) But it made me think - we should introduce scissors to the standard cutlery set! Just think how it would revolutionise noodles, stake and unwieldy burgers if people could eat them with scissors.

Surprised by my drunken self

I got an email at work today from a chap I don't know called Mark. Apparently I'd given him my company email address (not sure why!) on Saturday night while quite drunk and he also appeared to be under the impression I'd instructed him to use it in order to start a game of noughts and crosses. Better still, he clearly felt some need to tell me that his name wasn't Hector (I didn't like to ask why!) It's just not the sort of thing you expect to catch up with you at work on a Tuesday afternoon! I think maybe I put 'noughts and crosses' next to my name in his phone as a reminder of who I was as we had just played a game on a big toy set in a children's playground (which is where the (now not so literally located) house party had ended up). Looking back, the fact that I then asked to borrow his jeans in order to climb a large plastic palm tree, before magnanimously giving him my dress in exchange when he agreed, probably made me a little more memorable still. I hadn't thought of that. Remembering this, I put my cross in bottom left. It's the least I could do.