Further ramblings of a self-made pauper

I have been tired all day, but this morning I was busy, so I managed to get over it.

This afternoon I am trying to proof read the consultation paper I wrote a couple of weeks ago. Proof reading is drab at the best of times, but this subject is drier than a pharaoh's sock and reading it is a lot less involving than drafting it. It is like revising for an exam; the initial work may be interesting, but revision is dull, dull, dull.

I have managed to smear paw grease all over my glasses because I almost nodded off reading the damned thing and suddenly realised that a) I was slowly nodding ever closer to the document, b) that I couldn't remember anything that had happened fopr the past 45 minutes and c) that my glasses had ridden up my forehead and over my hand as my head slid in the opposite direction.

I. AM. BORED. BEYOND. ALL. REASON.

I have revised my view of this particular Friday. I have had three emails and two phone calls all day. One of those was a wrong number. I have barely said two dozen words to anyone in the office all day so far and none of those was to do with work.

There are very few people in today – I hope they are off doing something more interesting than me. I was not-so-surreptitiously trying and failing to do the super fiendish sudoku in The Times before lunch. I dropped the pencil at least three times because I was dozing off.

It is now one minute past three in the afternoon. I am leaving at four, when core hours finish. I may nip in to the West End on my way home, or I may just go back home, I shall while away this last hour deciding. I am guessing by the lack of posts on LJ that it is not only the US contingent who are not at work today.

Fifty-five minutes to go and then I’m off. I’ve had enough.

I am now so far beyond bored that the light from bored takes twenty minutes to reach me.

I have probably written that or something like it before. I have probably written it on a Friday afternoon.

I have just eaten a Royal Gala apple. It was very juicy and all, but the crunch was disappointing and it was sweet rather than slightly tart. Since Pink Lady apples rocketed into equal first place with Granny Smiths, I have not found anything to equal them.

I am reduced to writing about apples to pass the time. Which reminds me in a lop-sided sort of way, when did perry transmute in the public consciousness into pear cider or is there a more fundamental difference that I am missing (other than the fact that no-one ever bought perry)?

I have just failed spectacularly to complete today's super fiendish sudoku in The Times. I am leaving the merely difficult one until the journey home, which I am hoping to start earlier rather than later.

Tedious beyond belief. Severe delays going home last night, severe delays coming in to work this morning. Signal failures at Highgate and then at East Finchley. This is the service I pat over £1,300 a year to use.

To add insult to injury, the announcer at Totteridge and Whetstone had an accent: “Ladies and Geddlemen. There are sibber dillies on the Northern Line due to earlier siggal failure at East Fwishley.” It would have been amusing had it not virtually been on loop. As it was, your mild mannered correspondent simply wished to wrench the tannoy off the post and shove it down someone’s throat.

It was clear that whoever recorded the message wasn’t paying any attention to what he was reading, either. After waiting ten minutes (and still no train, crowded or otherwise), the message changed to announce “minor delays” but with the added cryptic remark at the end “…but this is irrelevant for this station closure”.

I woke up all perky and rested. Now I just want to doze off again.

If Time was an entity, I’d say it has either died or is extremely ill. It’s certainly stopped operating in the office this afternoon. It has been around a quarter past three for hours already and set to be so for some time yet.

I keep wanting to doze off in boredom, but that would be a bit obvious in an open plan office. Apart from which time is so slow today that I am not sure that it would have moved on much by the time I woke up again. And I’m not sure if that’s better: to be fully refreshed and wide-awake but still bored and with nothing to do. At least now I can sigh loudly from time to time and develop a hang-dog look that would make a stone weep.

I have already decided that I shall slope off home as soon as core hours end, but as long as it remains a quarter past three, well, that’s of no use to me.

Much to my surprise it seems that the much delayed office move will happen this weekend.

Various palettes and boxes will be arriving tomorrow and I shall have the opportunity to dispose of a number of skeletons that are currently hidden away in various niches and drawers around here (I am assuming that we will have confidential waste sacks). Quite where we are supposed to store anything in the new office, I do not know. We were pared back to the bone for local file storage a few years back. The new accommodation and furniture means that the remains of our local filing will be well and truly filleted. This is not the civil service we are used to.

I fully expect nothing to work when we arrive in the new office on Monday morning and I shall have the opportunity to admire the new view from the 14th floor of Portland House. Our window looks out between Cardinal Place and a residential block, meaning we get to see Big Ben and the London Eye as if down a tunnel, but colleagues around the corner get panoramic views of much of the rest of central London. I must remember to bring my digital camera in and record it all for posterity.

I understand that we will need an additional security pass to get into the building as it is shared with a number of other concerns (though our floor is exclusively ours). I haven’t heard any more details on that yet, but I am hoping it will require a new photo: I haven’t looked much like my current pass for about ten years now, since I started shaving my remaining hair off and sporting a goatee. Still, it still looks more like me than my Oyster Photocard which was taken on a very dishevelled day back in 1984, when I was but a nipper of 25.

Quite how long we will enjoy these new premises before being decanted unceremoniously back into this building (one floor up and at the other end of the building), Heaven only knows.

In the meantime I shall be sharing an office with my boss, so I will probably have to work more obviously and post here less during office hours. This, of course, is a bit of a swiz, but what can you do?

Just to annoy me, Hotmail will not load on MY browser today.

It loads on my colleague's, just not on mine. Still, I slept at the conference for most of the morning and in 10 minutes we have a scheduled fire drill. I'll be off home shortly after 4pm, so what the heck?

I can check my email at home.

I am in the happy position of having work to do, but being unable to do it, and as it is late on Friday afternoon, my motivation is draining away very rapidly.

I am trying to interrogate our subsidy data base for another interminable and pointless PQ. The payments team are running some arcane tests on the system, which means that anything other than their diagnostic (makes me feel right Trekkie) exercise, is progressing to geological timescales. Part of the fun, if I can ever get the data down is that the question I am answering will return virtually nothing of use to the MP (yes, the same MP I have waffled about before). For someone who aims to reform the system, he betrays a shocking lack of familiarity with the subject of his ire.

This morning I had my annual job chat which went well. I now have to go and muck about with my objectives a bit to make them look better, but apart from that…

Lunchtime saw Yours Truly wandering out to buy a Mother’s Day card. I remember when it was Mothering Sunday, which to me, sounds better. I also took the opportunity to wander into half a dozen local mobile phone shops with a view to acquiring a new battery for my V3 Razr. This turned out to be far more problematic than I think it should be. I had to wander out of two shops because they were so full, finding an assistant was not dissimilar to locating the source of the Nile. Of the rest, only Vodafone sell batteries, all the other places were either out of stock or never sell them anyway, preferring to unload new phones on people instead. Given that when I eventually purchased the new battery, it cost £40 I’m not entirely sure that a new phone might not have been cheaper.

Still, if I am to upgrade at some point (not, I hope for another 12-18 months, but I‘ve said that before), it will be to the even funkier Motorola V3i or V3x.

Tonight I shall slob around, I think, and listen to music. Then I shall watch the West Wing and maybe last night’s House. Tomorrow, NWO fans, I shall be finishing off Marsilla the Golden, and then starting on Aurelia Dandolo. Please note that I am the only person on the NWO writing team who ever spells Dandolo correctly.

I am bored.

Boredy-boredy-boredy-bored.

Bored, Bored, BORED. BORED

Bored

I should be working, we have some tight deadlines coming up – provided someone, somewhere makes the necessary decisions. We have a meeting tomorrow to (hopefully) thrash it all out. In the meantime, my motivation is pretty much bumping along the bottom of the tank.

When you are in a period of motivational under performance, the mind wanders where it will to fill the time that should be spent working, and after you have spent a certain length of time mentally pushing pins into a voodoo doll of the Minister, it scurries off in search of more entertaining fare.

Thus it was that an old memory popped into my head unbidden. Actually, it surfaced some weeks ago, but has just come back to the top now – probably displaced by the waterlogged motivation.

Some 25 years ago, in my final year at college¹ I managed to get accommodation in halls of residence on campus. I thought it wise since I was terrified of exiting the place after four years with no additional qualifications, and being in halls kept me away from the town centre and all its mystical delights² and close to the library. That it also kept me close to the subsidised student bar is another matter entirely.

I have never been sure whether the fact that there was a refectory³ on the campus was a boon or a disbenefit. At any rate it kept body and soul together for us during term time, with an array of food that would give many a twenty-first century nutritionist a heart attack just reading the menu. I was 21 at the time. What did I care?

Any road up; the refectory. The only establishment that I can recall from a vast memory for poor food served by frankly dangerous⁴ eating establishments, that responded to a request for egg and bacon by breaking out the deep-fat fryer. Bacon is generally durable enough to survive this process, although the health-conscious might want to mop up most of the resulting fat before consumption.

Eggs do not perform so well in such a cooking environment.

If you were lucky, and the fat was not too hot, or too deep, you would get something that resembled an egg fried sunny side up. Most often you would end up with a rubbery yellow power-ball attached to a crispy brown lattice of frothed and fried albumen. Nice. Some individuals, less hardy than your correspondent, have never gone near an egg since.

One morning I managed to obtain a couple of fried eggs that were reasonably close to the accepted definition of the same. It being deep midwinter and a little chilly to boot (as I recall, it was one of those increasingly rare English winters where snow settled for more than a couple of hours, and to a depth of more than six inches), I had packed up on breakfast as a means to keep warm. I found myself with an egg spare.

I was raised in a family where we were prevailed upon to clear our plates at mealtimes, so instead of doing the obvious thing and binning the egg, I cadged a saucer and took it back to my room. I thought maybe that I’d eat it later with some bread and a cup of coffee (students can be very obtuse at times; students named Bryan doubly so). In the event, it was a day and a half later before I went back to my room for one reason or another which I shall not go into here. When I came back, I didn’t think about the cold, greasy egg on its saucer.

I forgot about the egg entirely, and then when I remembered, it became something of a pet project. You see I discovered that fried eggs do not go mouldy; they do not go smelly; they do not go green. Fried eggs, left to their own devices, shrink. They get smaller and smaller until they are like little rubber M&Ms with a tiny seam around them.

And they bounce on concrete very satisfyingly.



¹It is chastening to think that I have a degree that is both old enough to vote and to stand for Parliament in its own right. Of course, my O-levels are old enough to have teenage kids, and my eleven-plus is probably a granddad.

²Anyone familiar with Wolverhampton town (now city) centre in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s will appreciate the irony of this remark.

³Honestly. We called it a refectory. I know many a greasy spoon out in the sticks that served better and more nutritious fare. But what’s the point of being a student – other than the education, of course - if you can’t be at least a little bit pretentious and up your own arse?

⁴In the sense of botulism rather than the sense of a dagger up the jacksy.