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!

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.

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.