Thursday 9 August 2007

Crowding into the lift

The Quality Assurance manager is in the lift, coming down from the sixth floor when we are going down for breakfast. We all pile into the lift (about six of us) so he is wedged up the corner.
“Going down for breakfast?” I ask him.
“Yeah, is that where all of you are going?”
“Yeah, and you’ll be the back of the queue.”
“Can I make a request?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m conducting an interview at 9.00, so can I jump the queue and go straight to the front?”
“Yes, that’s fine”.

I don’t know if it’s just a story because he doesn’t want to queue, or not.

“What’s with your departments new uniforms?” he asks. (They are mostly wearing black shirts, except for me. There’ve been big increases in black shirt wearing lately, which I thought was just a backlash against Pink shirt Thursdays”, but it seems to be a common colour throughout the week now.)
“I think it’s because they can’t be bothered to wash their shirts, so the black shows the dirt up a lot less.”
“…either that or they’re all working in Starbucks in the evenings.”

Tony from the third floor comes up looking for our latest recruit, Russell. I am always asked, because I’ve been here longest and I’m known by most people.
“Which one is Russell…….?” He asks me.
“He’s over there towards the middle. Black shirt and glasses.”
It’s only when he wonders off that I realise that a couple of them wear glasses for working on the VDUs and there is a good 70% black shirt coverage.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

My lot started wearing black and grey. It got so bad that it was a kind of uniform. Lately there's ben a backlash, and they've started dressing in lots of white for the summer. It is very funny when they spill their coffee down their shirts in the morning and have to walk around in a stained shirt for the rest of the day.

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