15/12/2003 @21:37:15 ^23:05:06
"I've never seen a demo where the player runs in such straight lines"
BLAH BLAH WORK BLAH
I've been in the academic office for three months now. Nothing is that new any more so there's less incentive to write about it.
I have moved desk. It's not as bad as I feared, especially since it happened a very short time before all the students went home for Christmas. I was quite cheeky, I swiped as much stuff as I could out of the drawers to take with me. I didn't spend ten weeks putting together a huge paperclip collection to just give it away, damnit! Sparkette, also now known as Rachaelmysecretary since she seems to be everyone's, came in a couple of days later. As she was leaving on Friday she was asking me about my weekend. She said "aren't you going out? It's Friday night!" I just gave her a look and went "so?" I fell off my chair after she'd gone.
There have been increasing numbers of incursions of horrible smulchy seasonal music into the office. I've had to put up with various dreadful Christmas CDs, and also the soundtrack to Love Actually, on more than one occasion. I'm not surprised that my colleagues have shitty tastes in music - everyone I know has a shitty taste in music - but my concentration is killed by the computer opposite me blaring out White Christmas or a swing version of Silent Night or some godsawful disco thing that makes everyone go "oh I can just see Hugh Grant dancing to this" while going through the motions themselves and what's worse they've got it up really loud so people at the other end of the office can hear it.
It doesn't happen every day. There's this one woman who, well, there was a disagreement just after I started, so now they don't play music if she's in. Unfortunately, being a temp, my opinion doesn't matter and I'm not offered the same convenience. The obvious solution was to do what a lot of them do anyway, and bring in earphones. The computers all have CD drives and not less than three earphone sockets (on the drive, on the front of the processor box, and on the side of the monitor, it's really stupid, there's audio cables everywhere not to mention wasted PCI slots)
Of course I don't have any earphones though do I? Well, actually I have three pairs, but...
- I got a really nice pair of big stereo headphones for Christmas eleven years ago. They're huge, comfortable, and the bass response is fantastic. So of course after only eight months my dad had to go and tread on them. They still worked but you couldn't wear them because the headband was in several pieces.
- I got some more but they weren't as good and then the padding disintegrated, so now you wear them for five seconds and your ears hurt.
- I also have some little earphones but the left one stopped working. I guess the cable was pulled on too hard accidentally and the wire inside snapped.
- Then two or three years ago my mum brought home some old headphones from work. Though they sounded crappy compared to my original trodden-on pair I realised I could chop off the earpieces and replace them with the good ones. This worked great, I had my good headphones back! Until I took them off, whereupon I discovered that age had caused the covering of the padding to start to disintegrate. While the padding itself is okay, if you wear the headphones your skin is left with a nice layer of tiny pieces of black felt which doesn't come off easily.
I knew I had to do something lest I go mad though so when I went to town again on Saturday to get more bits and pieces for Christmas I also bought some more shitty little earphones. I spent the day today listening to a CD I made of my own records. It was good.
It paid off too. When I got in in the morning, they said, how are you getting on with checking those scans. I said, I had two boxes left and would be finished by tomorrow. Oh no, they said, the next lot have come back and we have to get rid of the old lot for the space so we need them done by today. I said, oh snap. But I did it, with time to spare.
I needed an excuse to avoid going to the Christmas lunch on Wednesday. I know I'd feel awkward and embarrassed but social people always seem to take it really personally when you tell them you're not a social person yourself. Nevertheless, I did. I don't think they were very pleased but what can you do? My brain just doesn't work that way.
I'm still not sure if I get to go back after Christmas or indeed when I get to stop working because of Christmas but oh well.
