Office Troll

High Alert

My Other Half is a compulsive DIY freak and lately he has been purchasing all sorts of tools to assist him with his latest project. He gets everything sent in my name to Rickety Properties, because at his workplace everything goes missing amongst the general confusion of hotel guests, change of shifts and general all-round lack of security.

So I’m at the office and when I sign for yet another parcel, a rather heavy but fairly small box, wrapped in black bin liner-like material. I put it behind my chair and carried on with what I was doing.

Then Darren comes in. He sees the box and freezes: “What’s in that box”? Immediately he puts his hand together in FBI-agent-pointing-at-suspicious-package-with-gun style. He takes a couple of steps sideways, gun still held up to the side of his head. “It’s some DIY tool that my other half ordered”, I explain wearily. “I thought you had already gone off being a Spook?”.  Darren shakes his head: “No it’s my training, you see. When I’m faced with danger, it’s an automatic reflex, even if I’m no longer technically a Spook.” 

“Well there’s nothing to detonate this time, I’m afraid” I tell him.

And so we go back to work.

Alternative Watercooler Conversations

After being asked yet another time by a work colleague if I have been watching Eastenders, I have decided to prepare myself with ammunition and come up with a selection of possible 'watercooler' conversations to fight back and confuse the hell ouf of my workies.

The Strategy

The idea is to intially stun the enemy with a conversation starter on a sujbject that they find pretty much incomprehensible, then go for the kill by enthusiastically going into the aforementioned unfathomable subject of conversation in great detail. When they finally start to beg for mercy, foaming at the mouth, eyeballs rotating in wildy diverging orbits, chuck-in a flippant comment such as 'Oh I know what I was going to mention, did you watch the X-Factor last night, damn I have to go back to my desk now!', which would be the office equivalent of desecrating their bodies.

This Is Where You Come In

I need your suggestions. A couple have already come in:

Catch the History of Horror Films that started last night on BBC4, and discuss why Universal horror was better than the rest [Snaptophobic]

Talk about your increasing empathy towards Reggie Perrin. [Hairydalek]

Post your comments below and may the battle begin.

The Commonwealth Games

I didn’t mention that, after he dives into the olympic-size pool, Darren, aka Donovan Marsh¹, Olympic Diving Champion, always performs a kind of rotating movements with his hands, something resembling a boxer punching an (equally imaginary) speedball.  As he punches the speedball, he bends forwards (remember: he’s plunging into the depths of the olympic-size pool) and the overall effect is that of a cartoonish figure of an unspecified, generic Arabic man, bowing and ceremoniously greeting in a sort of flamboyant and overelaborate As-Salamu Alaykum. He even then walks backwards, a little bit. This is where I always dread the possibility that Call-Me-Harry might appear right behind him, but so far, this hasn't happened.

A couple of days ago, during one of Darren's epic jumps, I asked him if he was going to take part in the Commonwealth Games. He said he wasn’t, because he wanted to give the other divers and swimmers a chance to do well and create a good team spirit - he was going to beat them at the next Olympics anyway.  I thought that was a noble idea. 

How lucky that he had decided not to go - I said to him this morning; apparently 15 swimmers have contracted a stomach bug in the not-so-clean waters of the Indian facilities.  Darren gave me a knowing look and then picked up the phone to organise yet another viewing of yet another remote industrial estate that nobody wants to take a lease on.

¹ This is the name of Darren’s diving alter ego. He came up with it, although later raised concerns over the American-sounding name. 

Spooks

Over the last few days, Darren, who is a fan of the BBC TV show ‘Spooks’, has been pretending to be a spy. I’m not quite sure as to how it started - he must have said something about working as a commercial estate agent just as a cover up - but it’s now as large a part of our daily office routine as his step-diving is.  Taking advantage of the fact that Call-me-Harry was out of the office, this week we spent a whole day behaving like spooks - which seems to consist mainly in standing behind doors holding an invisible gun, looking surreptitiously to the right and then to the left before bursting into the next room - more FBI than MI5 I guess, but you can’t be too specific.  At Darren’s mouthing of ‘Get down! Get down!’, I have to duck under my desk and seek cover - although I have taken the liberty of adding a gunfight-stile-down-and-roll-and-shoot move to my repertoire. I have been wearing trousers a lot this week primarily for this purpose.

The Spook needed a name, a nice punchy one, like Jason Bourne - and so McKenzie Grange was born. Now whenever I phone Darren from my desk, he answers ‘McKenzie Grange..?’. He signs off his dictation ‘McKenzie Grange’. And I’ve created a McKenzie Grange email account. 

So I get paid peanuts, but at least I can say that I work with a Spook.

Measuring Up

I come back from lunch to find Darren in bit of a state. Call-Me-Harry is away on a golfing trip to the Med with his buddies, and Darren has been saddled with a really complicated valuation. Basically the client handed him 4 A3 floor plans for a big office development and asked him to measure everything up and call him back that same afternoon with a price.

Only problem, Darren’s background is as a residential property estate agent and in ‘rezzie’, you don’t measure up and work out a price: you just MAKE IT UP.¹ He looks so panicked, pouring over the plans, with a scale ruler, asking me if I can help. I stare at the plans, a bit, too. I put him straight on what a centimetre is on the ruler, but neither of us is quite sure about what 1:100 stands for. My knowledge of geometry dates back to primary school. 

We need help. The two chartered surveyors from the professional department are both out of the office. Even George is out (although he would probably take great delight in humiliating Darren, so that’s for the best). 

I know. I’m going to call my Significant Other. 

S.O. - as some of you may remember - is a gym instructor. He does, however, have a degree in Marine Geography - which involved, at some point, reading maps and possibly technical drawings to scale. He also watches Mythbusters a lot, so I’m confident that he can help. 

I ring him at work, and, as expected, my S.O. delivers: there should be a key at the bottom of the drawer (yes, check), and on the key it should say what each unit stands for. (the units are 1 cm long, and it says 1m,  ergo, 1cm = 1m, so yes, check). I thank him profusely and hang up. ²

 

Darren and I then set out to measure the drawings, and twenty-or-so minutes later, we have fairly plausible figures for all floor areas and some equally plausible prices.

We then role-play Darren’s impending phone call to the client. “He’s totally going to buy it” - I reassure him.  And I mean it: he sounds absolutely confident and professional. Let’s face it - who would suspect that a senior negotiator from one of Mordor’s leading commercial estate agencies is totally out of his depth on the subject of commercial valuations and has enlisted the help of his secretary and - in turn - of her gym instructor-cum-cleaner boyfriend, and that together, the three have managed to concoct a valid proposal based on three possible rates of £ per sq ft, on a sliding scale of best to worst possible scenarios, and have just fed it to you?

Needless to say, the real phone call takes place and it goes swimmingly. Darren is very grateful for my help and I feel that I have at least done some good today by helping him. A fuzzy warm feeling pervades the office.

We both live to fight and, above all, sell commercial properties for another day.

¹ And this is why, my friends, we are now living under seriously fucked-up economic conditions, thanks to a housing marked based on joke prices conjured up by estate agents in dire need of a reality check.

² Had that option failed, Option 2 was to ring my cousin Umberto in Italy. He’s an architect, and I suspect that he still has some of my Asterix books from childhood, so let’s just say that he owes me a favour.

 

Diving

I never told you about Darren’s step-diving, which is strange, because it’s one of those regular worktime occurrences that I truly look forward to, brief flashes of happiness in my otherwise rather unsatisfying working life whereby I think, well, this can only happen in an office, and not any office, THIS office, I am so blessed and so utterly privileged for being right here, right now -

My office communicates to Call-me-Harry’s considerably smaller but considerably plusher wood panelled quarters through a door accessed via three small carpeted steps. It is on these very steps that Darren, to my constant utter delight, practices imaginary dives into an equally imaginary olympic-size pool. He stands on the middle step, bouncing slightly, arms outstretched out to his sides at 180 degrees¹, palms down, his gaze projected ahead, focused on infinity but by no means lost, in fact totally centred and mindful and gathered, in athletic contemplation. 

I watch Darren prepare for the dive and almost hold my breath when he is briefly distracted by the sound of Harry hanging up the phone (all of the above tends to happen in Harry’s absence or during one of Harry’s prolonged phone calls) - the inevitable relief follows as the sound of another telephone number being dialled signals that Harry is going to be engaged for a little while longer.

Then Darren jumps, and my office and all its rather rickety furniture shakes for a few seconds, as the athlete is catapulted towards the opposite door that leads into the corridor. The dive is over. 

Elation is brief. Sadness follows.

¹ Lately, Darren has branched out into a further category of athletic excellence, i.e, the paralympic dives. These jumps are performed by standing closer to the sides of the wall, thus preventing him from outstretching both arms. It’s a one-arm dive. I don’t know how often you will have seen one-armed swimmers diving into olympic size pools, but I get to witness this amazing athletic prodigy on most working days.  Hence the feeling of being blessed.

Grossout Of The Week

I happened to pick up the phone from Lisa's desk this morning and it reeked of fags!!! GROSS! 

And the phone in reception - which Lisa is often answering in the receptionist's abscence - also stunk of fags! And sometimes if I'm downstairs I have to answer it...totally revolting.

I took action. I snuk into reception earlier, armed with one of my antiseptic wipes, and I cleaned it. The entire phone was pretty much covered in grime. I cleaned it, if only for self-preservation. 

Mental note: do not, under any circumstances, pick up Lisa's phone ever again.

Guru Guru I.T. Guru

It’s been a long time since the last update, but things have been a little bit intense at Rickety Properties and I have made a conscious effort in the evenings to do everything in my power to avoid thinking about work. That, of course, includes writing about it. 

I’ve now been at Rickety Properties for four months and it has finally dawned on me that I’m pretty much in full-time work again. Yes, I have Fridays off. But I start at 9:00 AM every morning (by April, Call-Me-Harry realised that a 10:00 AM start was optimistic to say the least), and I finish at 16:30, which again is not exactly extravagant in terms of giving me time to do much else in the evening.

What has really been keeping me busy is the wretched switch to Google Apps* After Brainy Boffins persuaded Harry to ditch our ageing Microsoft Exchange server, it’s been one continuous headache. And because I am now officially the in-house I.T. Guru (because of my uncanny ability to learn complicated procedures such as keyboard shortcuts for Cut and Paste etc), my days often start with ‘Oh hi, you’re in, I have a problem with my computer’...you guess the rest.

Anything goes. Marilyn in Accounts, for example, has recently been given an iPod Touch for her birthday. On the two days a week when she is in the office, I am on call from the moment she arrives (before she even gets to her desk upstairs she makes a pitstop for my office) to offer her tuition on the magic of the device. She had no clue; she didn’t know how to access her own Wi-Fi network, as she didn’t know the password. She had somehow managed to get her AOL email on the Touch, but then screwed all the settings up. I gave her a few tips, which involved ringing AOL to obtain various settings, and the next day she was in the office she came over to me and looked at me as if I was some sort of Computing Messiah, fresh out of a state of the art call centre in Bangalore: “YOU WERE RIGHT!!! I RANG AOL, AND I ASKED THEM VERY NICELY IF THEY COULD HELP! AND THEY DID!!!. She then proceeded to show me how she’d managed to buy an album in iTunes - after my prior instruction session, when I’d explained the very complex procedure of going to iTunes and clicking on ‘buy’. “Look!” - she gushed - “I managed to buy Cheryl Cole’s album!” , and proceeded to show me said monstrosity, horribly stored in the iPod Touch’s memory. Cheryl fucking Cole. I didn’t have the heart to say “You didn’t learn that from me!” . She was so happy. And I remember how I felt when, back in 2005, my brother in law taught me how to use a Mac and how to copy a CD. But I can’t help thinking that I’ve created a monster.

* Thinking of switching to Google Apps? Don’t do it.

Ending on a High Note

I still haven’t told you how it ended.

After the Gaydar Failure Fiasco, I really couldn’t wait to get home. We left and as I was saying my goodbyes, I called Karen - my predecessor, who had also joined us for the evening - ‘Lisa’, when I knew damn too well that her name was Karen. Only a small faux pas, but it wasn’t going to be the last. I was going to walk to a taxi rank nearby, but Marilyn insisted that I got a lift with her and her real husband, a cab driver. She was adamant that I was not to walk anywhere on my own. So I got into the black cab - a lot of Mordor taxi are ‘black cab’ models even if they are generally white. But it was dark after all.  Will, one of the surveyors, also came along.

In a nutshell:

22:45 - The Real Husband asks me where I live. I say, I’m just off the Shire Road’. The Real Husband asked for directions. I laughed. Everybody knows ‘Shire Road’. It’s like saying Tottenham Court Road - everybody in town knows where it is. Except for him. Then Marilyn clarifies: he’s a London cabbie. In Morodor. WTF? How am I supposed to know?

23:00 - En route to Shire Road, I attempt to make polite conversation and I ask Marilyn if The Real Husband liked the very expensive Rolex she bought him three months ago and proudly displayed around the office for all to admire. It was my first week at work, so I remember. Her face freezes in a mask of horror, and as she glares at me, saucer-eyed, she repeatedly kicks me in the shins with her pointy shoes. Repeat after me: WHAT THE FUCK? I sense that I have once again put my foot in and in a panic I turn to Will and mumble something about his recent purchase of a Rolex. He goes along with it and starts discussing the watch he is wearing - clearly not a Rolex, but at that point it can’t get any worse.

23:02 - In my mind I curse the conspiracy against me that is clearly unfolding before my very yes. She has yet to give her husband the watch! How am I supposed to know??? Who buys presents for their husbands three months before? (Answer: it later turned out that she has indeed purchased the Rolex A YEAR IN ADVANCE. I didn’t stand a chance.)

23:05 - I am praying all the deities and divinities that The Real Husband didn’t hear - luckily there’s one of those screens between the driver seat and the back of the cab, and the little window thingy is only partially open. And he’s concentrating to find Shire Road, which is only one of the two main roads in and out of Mordor.

23:15 - I get home and I want to die. My other half looks alarmed.

23:30 - I swear to myself that I will never go out with the workies again.

23:35 - My other half says that ‘they are a bunch of cunts’

23:40 - I down some Xanax to regain some perspective.

23:45 - As I close my eyes and finally ‘slip into unconsciousness’, I think I see Jesus, but no, hang on a minute, it’s Michael Scott...

The Tragedy of Errors

I went out on my first Company Evening Out last week, and it was a disaster. It seemed like a good idea at the time: we would have a drink at the pub across the road, then catch a show at the Mordor Festival and finally have a meal out.  Call-me-Harry cunningly has something else to do that evening. He’s many things, but he’s certainly not stupid.

This is how the evening went for me.

18:00 - At the pub. I am sitting on a heavy, chunky wooden bench. It’s like a plank of wood resting on two wooden legs. I am chatting to Marilyn in Accounts and having a relatively good time. I lean towards the end of the table to get something from my bag, and the next thing I know, my legs are going up, up, up, and my I’m upside down. You know that scene in Titanic, when the ship sinks vertically into the sea? That’s how it looked like. I also really hurt the left side of my arse. Of course everyone’s laughing at me and making the obvious comments about me having had too much to drink (1 glass of wine). I can’t believe that Health & Safety Executive allows those benches to be sold. I will never sit at the end of a bench ever again.

18:30 - A guy called Sean turns up and Marilyn in Accounts hugs him and greets him warmly, then introduces him to me. It’s really noisy in the pub and I assume he’s the husband.

18:45 - The conversation leads me to believe that Sean watches old movies with Neil, one of the surveyors, who I’ve always suspected to be gay due to continuous references to ‘Dorothy’ and also because when he saw my Joan Crawford necklace, he knew who she was.


18:46 - It emerges that Marilyn, Neil and Sean all live on the same road. Cozy.

18:46 - When I ask Sean if he met Marilyn through Neil, he gives me a funny look and says something weird but we are all leaving to go and see the show so we are interrupted.

19:30 - During the show, Marilyn is quite drunk and very loud and embarrassing, and keeps saying how bad the show is. It’s a Fringe show. I rather liked it, in fact. Fucking philistine.

20:30 - We get to the restaurant, and I end up sitting opposite Sean. We end up talking about movies and he says how stereotypical gay it is to like the old film noir divas, but I say that I’ve met plenty of straight men at university who were totally into them too. I did read Media Studies for a reason, after all.

21:45 - I make another comment about Sean knowing Marilyn, and Lisa, who is sitting next to him, gives me a funny look and then the horror of my error is finally unmasked: SEAN IS GAY AND HE IS NEIL’S PARTNER.

21:46 - Various people comment on how could I not realise that Neil is gay. I retort that it was fairly obvious that he was from day one, but I had only known Sean for about 2 hours.

22:00 I want to dig a great big hole and let the ground swallow me forever.

22:01 - The entire table is laughing at me.

22:02 - Darren, who is sitting next to me, says that he did initially thought I’d got the wrong end of the stick, but thought he’d misheard. He looks crestfallen on my behalf.

22:03 - I still want to die.

22:30 - We leave. I am cursing the day I was born and my idiotic decision to go out with the workies.

However, there is more embarrassment on the horizon. Stay tuned for the suitably cringey finale.