Huddled round a burning hobbit

Today the office is cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey. I am wearing 2 jumpers, a scarf, a pair of gloves and 2 pairs of socks. It’s very hard to type in gloves but I’m not taking them off in case I get frostbite. OK, so maybe a slight over exaggeration but it is feckin’ cold. We’ve been told that it’s because the building can take up to 4 hours to warm up after a weekend. So why not turn it on 4 hours before everyone’s due in? This is the 21st Century I’m sure that some fandangled system on a timer could be set up. Common sense no?

Different people have used different methods to combat this big chill. People such as Gunner and the moody NZ guy have just left their jackets on, perhaps also as an indication that they are ready to go home at any given opportunity. Ginger has phoned in sick again so she’ll be tucked up at home in the warm. CJ has been talking so much on the phone and huffing and puffing that she’s managed to create enough warm air to heat her area anyway and her stomping to and from the kitchen with her handbag must bring on a sweat too.

Andre has donned her enormous cardigan that she keeps in one of the cupboards here which looks like it took several hundred people at Laura Ashley to put together from the wool of 12 mountain sheep. Just to be extra sure she has also put her cape back on. The big velvet black one with a hood that may have at one time belonged to Robin Hood (actually more likely to be Little John) and as she walks around the office billows behind her in a dramatic fashion. Andre doesn’t deal with the cold very well which is surprising for someone of her size and considering how very English she is. I would have thought she had cherished these traditional winters and harped on about “the winter of ’62 when the Thames froze over and I had to defrost my dog’s paws from the kitchen floor!” Instead she wraps herself up in a hundred layers of clothing (both pre and post 19 century) and makes multiple complaints to the service desk about the temperature.

As most people who work in big offices know, air conditioning and heating is a law unto itself and the people who control it are also the people who used to control the heating (or lack of it) at school. Go back to school in September and they’d refuse to turn the heating on until Christmas so you’d all sit shivering round a Bunsen burner trying to get the feeling back in your fingertips. Come the summer time they’d refuse to turn it off and you’d fight for the seat next to the window in the French classroom whilst your thighs stuck to the plastic chairs. Despite knowing and experiencing all of this and the various random explanations from the building services people Andre is determined become the one woman fight against the system. She’s tightened up the air con vents in the floor or put bins over the ones she can’t get out so we’re all constantly banging into them. She walks around putting her hands over the heating vents to make sure they’re working and tutting away. She even forced them to buy her a little mini fan heater for under her desk! The woman is obsessed. More fool you if you enquire about the temperature in our building when she’s about

FB has come in at the ridiculously early time of 13.50 today (she must have got up early) and is saying she has ‘the flu’. No luv you’ve got a cold, if you had the flu you wouldn’t have ‘struggled in’ as you say, you’d be bedridden and possibly in hospital. Take a Lemsip and shut the fuck up will you?

Oh great CJ has hiccups. So she’s gaking and hiccupping while eating that apple. I’d tell her to eat a banana as that always helps hiccups for me but I couldn’t bear the noises she’d make – “gak, hic, gak, hic!” Charming.