13 June, 2006

Too hot

I have been sitting in my chair at work, the sweat dripping down my neck, my hands too slippery to type properly, my brain too addled to think straight. On the hottest two days of the year so far, the air conditioning in our building has broken and the place is like a tropical greenhouse on fire.

Absolutely nothing has been done to fix the problem, and absolutely no-one has offered an apology. All that's happened is that an email has come round, noting how, in exceptionally hot weather, it is "suggested" that you "drink water" and "go for a walk". No explanation as to the malfunction. No acknowledgement of the situation. And above all not one word on when it will be put right.

Every time I think my employers have so excelled themselves by way of their crass stupidity they cannot possibly get any worse, a few days later my assumptions prove groundless and another, even more spectacular, gaffe occurs. I always knew the management lived in some kind of ivory tower, but I never dreamed it was so high up as to be served by mountain air as opposed to the stuff the rest of the human race has to live off.

People have been slumping onto their desks. People have been continually rushing off to the toilets to wash their faces. People have been walking out and not coming back. The luckiest of all have relocated themselves back to a place that has an environment they could control: their own home.

It is a ludicrous, yet also a pathetic, scene. How stupid and feeble a body of employees we must have look, moping and lolling about the place, to anybody visiting the premises. Yet how hopeless and incompetent an organisation to let its employees get themselves into such a state in the first place.

I dreamt last night of being in ownership of a customised portable thermostat which I could carry about my person and which, upon manipulation, could alter the weather of my immediate surroundings however I liked. I imagined walking down a street, lowering the temperature by one degree with every step, seeing passers by strolling around in summerwear slowly start to shiver and shake in complete confusion. I dreamt of walking across a bridge over the Thames, and seeing the river freeze by the time I reached the other side.

I also dreamt of being anywhere else but in this godforsaken steaming hellhole of a city, where the sun never stops burning its way through your eyes, where the noise and smog and dust and stink never cease, and where the thunder and rain and the sweet fresh air seem never to dare show their face.

And we're only in June. What the fuck is still to come?

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