Team brief and later

At 2.00pm we all go down to the meeting room on the first floor. Junior gets a mention in Team brief for his promotion, for which he gets a cheer. He looks a bit embarrassed.
There are two sets of stairs at either end of the building. After the meeting most of the team went up the stairs at the canteen end. I go up the other set with Eric and a couple of stragglers. On the way up he asks about Neil.. I tell him that he came in Monday drunk and got sent home and advised to take the day as a holiday. Since then we haven’t heard a word from him. Except for Tuesday when his mom phoned to ask if he’d got into work yet. I explained that I wasn’t sure if his mom was covering for him, saying that he left for work, when all the time he was probably sitting there in front of her. As we get to the office we are just finishing off our conversation when Alan gets to where we are.
“What are you talking about?” he asks.
I don’t want to tell him we’ve been gossiping about Neil, so I tell him-
“Team brief. Eric was just asking about some of the statistics.” (I am out of breath because I’ve been talking as I’ve been walking up.
Alan -“Out of breath, just coming up the stairs?”
“Maybe.”
“I came up the stairs too, I’m not out of breath.”
“They’re steeper on that side.”

Breakfast

We’re all frustrated in our jobs this morning, for some reason. Waiting in the queue for breakfast we ended up looking at the birthday cards, with very poorly drawn cartoons and even worse jokes on them. The one which Steve wanted to know the ending too was:
“Two old women were walking down the street when a naked man ran past. One of them had a stroke…”
Steve asks: “Have I got to buy the card to find out the ending of the joke?”
Junior: “No, it’ll tell you on the back.”
He picks it up and reads on:
“…but the other one missed.”
“That’s very poor.”
“It is. That really pisses me off. Someone gets paid for thinking up that kind of crap. I could think up better stuff than that.”
“Yes, you are good at thinking up crap.” (grinning)
“And some bastard gets away with drawing really crappy cartoons like that.”
“No, that pisses me off.”
He points to a card with stick men drawn on it.
“Some bastard can get away with drawing stick men on the front of birthday cards. Then someone else thinks they’re going to sell and they get distributed all over the country.”

Standing by the lift we’re waiting for Junior and Chris to pay at the counter. The lift comes and Junior gets to the lift and we hold it for Chris. Then Junior is in a peculiar mood and gestures to Chris to hurry up. Then when he sees that Chris has paid he jumps in the lift and hits the button as Chris is walking to the lift. Then when we get off on our floor he hits the buttons for the floors above us, so Chris is going to have to wait for the lift to go all the way up, before it comes back down for him.
Then when Chris does eventually turn up with his sandwich, Junior apologises for doing it.

Helen sweep

Occasionally when the boss is out, and Helen knows the boss is going to be out she will come in late. Even later than usual. Even pushing it to 11.30 some days. Lately we’ve grown wise to this and have started doing a sweepstake on what time she will come in. The first couple of times we did it we just wrote the times that everyone was going for on a post-it, the one closest to the time she turns up claiming the money (everyone putting in £1). It just makes the Friday morning more interesting. Plus Helen doesn’t have a clue what’s going on. We manage to control our cheering or disappointment when she walks through the door. Junior is very competitive and the one Friday he was fighting over the lift with Clive, who was trying to make her a few minutes later so he would win. That day we were watching out the window for her taxi to pull up. Another day I hadn’t been round everyone with the sweep before she arrived. There was only Andy left, and I had to explain what was going on. Junior wasn’t happy (I had won on that day) and he wanted it declaring void, because Andy hadn’t chosen a time.
Junior wasn’t too happy with me being in control of the scrap of paper, so he drew up an excel sheet ready for the next time with rows with five minute intervals from 9.30 to 11.30. So today was the first time we had used his sheet, and we had to decide what to do in the unlikely event she came in before 9.30, or after 11.30, because that’s as far as Junior’s sheet went. Also, we had to decide that the sweep was void if she either phoned in for a days holiday or phoned in sick. I tried to get them to agree to a roll-over under such circumstances to be a bit more exciting, but Junior wanted to void it.
Because we had stuck to the nearest time being the winner, and Junior had started his sheet at 9.30, he sneakily picked 9.30 so that he could have any time up to that, or even 9.35, because Chris had picked 9.40. This made him even more annoyed when she rolled in earlier than usual, for a Friday, at 9.45, making Chris the winner.

Neil's mom phones

At about 11 o’clock Neil’s mom rings up, to ask if he is in work. She sounded concerned that he wasn’t in yet The boss was half expecting him not to show anyway, because someone else from the same place who comes in on the same train had phoned with flooding on the track. His mom said that he had gone early to catch an earlier train, or get the bus if they had replaced the train service with a bus. She did seem concerned so I played along and just said that we hadn’t heard from him. She also slipped in that he hadn’t got any credit on his mobile, and that his mobile was charging up anyway (which seemed suspicious). She mentioned that he couldn’t remember if he’d “done everything right” the previous day. He had remembered that he’s got to work, showed his photos of the stag night to some people, then he got a lift back to the train station from Junior. Then according to his mom , when he got home he fell asleep on the sofa and slept all afternoon. She mentioned he seemed a bit quiet and she was worried he might do something. On top of this, one of his fish had died that morning as well. I told her I would get him to ring if he got in touch.
I was wondering if she was laying it all on thick to make us sorry when he did turn up. Or if he was still at home with her, and he’d got her to phone in so he’d got some excuse for not phoning us himself.

I mentioned the call to my boss, who hadn’t had a phone call and was unhappy that they’d had to send him home yesterday for turning up drunk.

Signs in the toilets 1 (should have posted this yesterday)

I love it when there are new signs in the toilets. This latest one is stuck on the mirror and is a finger pointing outwards, with the sign reading:
“You are looking at the person responsible for your health and safety.”
Obviously it’s telling you that you are responsible for your own safety, but we would like to imagine lots of disembodied hands (like Thing and the Addams Family) all crawling around looking for flaws in the health and safety of the building. We’re going to have to find somewhere on the internet that we can get false hands, so we can tap people on the shoulder and wag their fingers at them when they are not being safe.

Signs in the toilets 2

It wasn’t me, honest. I don’t understand why either, but the sign reading:
“You are looking at the person responsible for your health and safety,”
has now got a picture of David Hasselhoff in his Baywatch costume stuck over the picture of the hand.

Due to the fact that we don’t like setting foot on the sixth floor when it is full of zombies, we are now taking any drawings from the previous day up to cut and fold as soon as we get in in the morning. Early on there are only one or two wondering around, which are easy to avoid.

World of Warcraft

Alan comes in late. Junior says to him “Another late night on the World of Warcraft?”
Alan smiles, but says “No”, but because he’s given him a smirk Junior reckons he’s right.
They get onto talking about World of Warcraft and Alan explains his ordeal that he’s been through to get his “cloak of second sight” in World of Warcraft. Junior also plays World of Warcraft and tells us how much of a telling off his missus gives him if he spends all night on the computer playing it. Alan doesn’t get so much grief because his girlfriend plays it too.

It brings back to mind the time when Alan was off sick unexpectedly (yes it does happen) and he left a post-it note on his desk with a note scribbled on it saying how much silver or gold he needs to buy some “spell pants”. The day he came back we had to ask if he got his magic pants, and every time he mentions playing World of Warcraft I visualise him having to wear his magic pants before he can play.

Neil gets in to work late and drunk

About 11 o’clock Neil turns up, I’m not sure if he’d phoned the boss to say he was going to be late, but he came past me and said “Morning, I’m not stopping”. He smelt of alcohol, and we couldn’t figure out if he’d actually been to bed. His eyes looked like they weren’t focused. He stayed for a while talking to the boss, and at one stage looked like he was showing him photos of his brother’s stag night. Then Junior put on his coat and helped him out of the office.
“I advised him to go home, and book the day off as holiday because he’s down on his flexi-time.”
No mention of the drunkenness. Alan comes over and confirms that he must have been pissed. Junior had offered to take him home because he’d never get to the station in one piece. (This is the guy that catches the train into work because he’s been banned from driving for 18 months).

Undead on 6th floor

As I explained in an earlier blog, “Abuse of office equipment”, someone has been messing about with the machines and apparatus in the print-room until now; the large plan trimmer has been broken completely. They are now waiting for one to be imported or made within two to four weeks. So any copies of large drawings that we have to send have to be trimmed off on the sixth floor, on their trimmer which has a very small blade and will only do one print at a time.
The sixth floor has a reputation for being quiet, even though there are the same number of people working up there. I had to go up on Thursday afternoon and it was so quiet, the trimmer squeaked every time I trimmed a drawing and everyone looked up to see where the noise was coming from. It wasn’t as bad this morning because I went up early there were some people who hadn’t arrived, and there was even a bit of talking. People saying good morning to each other and even discussing if they had had a pleasant weekend.
I was complaining about this to Steve when I returned to the fourth floor and likened it to the “Body snatchers”, when the aliens realise that there is someone human about… “and they point and open their mouth and let out a high pitched scream.”
He knew the exact bit of the film I meant.
So we discussed what is behind the phenomena of the quiet sixth floor.
“Maybe there is someone up there that has fallen out with everyone, and no one is talking to them. Or there’s someone up there that they all fear and he tells them all to be quiet.”
“That would make sense, because there was some talking going on this morning. Maybe whoever it is doesn’t come in until later.”
“Maybe the guy comes in every morning and shouts at everyone to be quiet.”