Monday 26 March 2007

You've got to have a system

Neil has got a job which is just a highlighted area which says “easement”. He goes and sees Carl to see if he it’s something he would deal with. Neil comes back and tries to find any more parts which may have come with it. Then he shows it to Karen.
Meanwhile Carl comes down to the coffee machine to get a round of drinks in.
Carl: “Did you manage to find any more to it?”
Neil: “No.”
Carl: “Do what I do then, just chuck it in the bin. They don’t know they’ve sent it up here. If they can’t be bothered to use the right system...”
Steve: “Is that the right system then? Chucking them in the bin?”
Carl: “I’ve got a few of them up there that are incomplete, that I just put to one side in a pile. I do that generally when I want to avoid doing something anyway, if it looks too hard.”

Karen comes over and catches Carl while he’s at the coffee machine.
Karen:” I’ve got this job which I think should have gone to you, but came up with the wrong cover sheet.”
Steve: “Don’t bother giving it to him, he’s just told us that he’s only going to chuck it in the bin.”

Friday 16 March 2007

Comic Relief 2

There’s not much happening today. Half of my guys are out on training for the second day running, so it’s quite quiet. It’s a dress down day for Comic Relief. My lot are quite boring and haven't actually dressed up as anything, even though there was all the talk of Batman and robin a couple of days ago.
I’m not looking forward to the usual people coming round collecting and wanting you to buy raffle tickets for crap prizes. On the good side – last time round some of the younger ladies from the floors below did come round wanting you to buy their cakes, dressed as very sexy nurses or a couple were dressed as cowgirls, with the shortest of skirts. Anyway, they’re probably old enough to be my niece if not daughters. With not much going on so far I’ll tell you some old stories to do with smut and innuendo which happens in the office a lot.

Alan is showing me the handwriting recognition function on his PDA. It works quite well. He writes Hello this is a test. Then I have a go and write “I’ve just bost Alan’s machine”. It translates this as “I’ve just bust Alanis machine”, which isn’t bad. Alan then points it towards Jen thinking she wants a go. She’s actually eating an orange and has juice all over her fingers. “Not right now,” she says, “I’m all sticky”.
It’s only a matter of who’s fastest to come back with saying “And you’ve got orange juice all over your hands.” This is the level of smut that we enjoy in the office.
Eventually Jen finishes her orange and goes to the toilets to wash her hands.
When she comes back I have to say “Have you got rid of the stickiness?”
She replies with “And I’ve washed my hands”. To which Alan and I erupt into laughter.

This reminds me of young Andy from the other end of the office. He’s best described as the office slacker in his twenties (he gets away with doing as little as possible, keeps his mp3 player on all day, even if he’s talking to you he’ll only take one ear-piece out). If he comes down to use the coffee machine he chats to everyone while he gets his round in. Sarah is heading towards fifty and has worked for the company since she left school. She shows the new recruits all the software packages we use and has to try and keep the lazy sods from falling asleep at their desks (which happens, we took a photo of fat Dave asleep the other afternoon. Then when he went for his performance review the next day – it was bought up as an issue. He denied being asleep, although he probably wouldn’t realize it was happening. In fact the guy who took his photo got into trouble for doing it. The boss said that it would look like everyone was ganging up on Fat Dave to get rid of him if he produced the photo. This is insane – The guy was asleep at his desk, and we have photographic evidence - & this could work in Fat Dave’s favour?)
Anyway I’m moving away from the point. You wouldn’t imagine that Sarah would be up for a bit of smutty innuendo, and you would think she wouldn’t get on with the office slacker, which makes it all the more funny.
They get to the coffee machine at the same time and Andy is polite and lets her in first, but then says “Can I press your buttons?” To which she replies “You can press my buttons anytime.”
Now every time they meet at the coffee machine he will ask if he can press her buttons for her. Or she will ask him “Aren’t you going to press my buttons for me today?” if he doesn’t say something first.

Bob and Clive are in the print room. Both of them could give Fat Dave a run for his money.
Bob: “Why do Russians wear tight underpants?”
Clive: “I’ve got no idea”.
Bob: “ Because they’re scared Chernob‘ll fall out”.
Clive: “That’s very poor you need some new material”
Bob: “That’s what I thought when I saw that shirt. It is bulging a bit.”

Bob then goes on to call Clive Sausage fingers as he’s trying to fix one of the printers.

Wednesday 14 March 2007

Comic Relief

Helen arrives at 9.40. We’re curious to see what time she puts on her timesheet.
Neil reckons that she came in on Friday at 10.30 but only put 10.10 on her timesheet.

Yesterday in the canteen, queueing up for breakfast, we were discussing what we should dress up as for comic relief day. Dan wanted to dress up as Batman. I suggested he get Fat Dave to dress up as Robin. (We laugh at the idea of the fat idiot in a green skin-tight costume, with all the rolls of fat hanging down over his utility belt).
Me: "It’s got to be the old sixties TV series version. All you would need is an oversized green leotard with a red vest."
Dan: “Robin was supposed to be yellow wasn’t he?”
Me: “ No his cape was yellow.” (later we have to go on the internet to prove what Robin’s suit from the old Sixties series was like. We also have a look on some sites that you can buy the costumes from, but they don’t do Xtra Large)

They’d already started coming round with raffles and stuff for Comic Relief last week. There was a constant flow of people from other floors we’d never seen before. Almost as if the company employed a separate department just for bringing raffles and other hair-brained schemes round the rest of the staff that actually did some work. I know I couldn’t spare the time to walk round six floors asking if people wanted a raffle ticket.

“Have you seen Dave’s belt?” Dan continues. “He has it sooo tight. It looks really uncomfortable.”

“It’s better than having his trousers falling down. It’s bad enough when his shirt becomes un-tucked and you get a flash of the side of his enormous gut. Can you imagine what he must look like with his trousers down? It doesn’t bear thinking about. Are you thinking about it? I bet that’s put you off your breakfast.”
Linda is a couple of places further up in the queue, and she smirks as she looks round, obviously having overheard the conversation.

Me: “We could all dress up as each other. We could all get oversize shirts and stuff them with pillows and come as Dave.”
Mick: “Yeah, but I can’t dress up, I’m going to the doctors first thing on Friday.”Me: “That would be good for you to go to the doctors with your shirt stuffed with pillows. You walk in and say “I’m feeling a bit bloated””.

Saturday 3 March 2007

Juniors Eyesight

Junior comes over to talk to Neil and points his fan in a different direction. Don’t ask me why they’ve got fans switched on in February. Anyway, Junior has this thing about the force from the fans hurting his eyes. We tell him his eyes are too sensitive, and that he should get a free eye test sorted. “I can see fine mate” he tells us. “No,” I tell him. “You could have pressure building up in your eyes, I think it’s called Glaucoma. They do a special test for it at the opticians. Get yourself a free eye test. You should be due one, free from the company.”
Ginge backs me up “That’s right, because you spend all day on VDUs the company should give you a free eye test by law. They do that weird test where they blow air into your eye. I don’t know how that measures the pressure. They must have some sensitive equipment to do it.”
“I’m useless with that test”, I carry on, “I keep on blinking at the wrong moment. I think last time I had mine tested they must have tried about five times, then gave up.”
Anyway, he became more and more worried that he had got a terrible eye disease and was going to go blind.
He phoned HR and asked about a free eye test. They told him to keep a receipt and claim it back in expenses. He ended up with an opticians appointment at 3.45 that afternoon.
I left work about 4.30. On the drive home my mobile rang. It was Junior telling me that his eyes were fine, he wasn’t going blind. He’d just got dry eyes from “not blinking enough” (that’s apparently what the optician had told him). I asked if he needed eye drops. He said no, the optician had told him to put a warm damp flannel against his eyes every so often.
Surely he’s going to get bugs on a flannel and get an eye infection?
We were just glad that he’d got it all sorted out, and we could all relax over the weekend. He can get so wound up about nothing.
x