Thursday, December 10, 2009

Mythbusters

Anyone living with their head under a rock might not have noticed that there's a climate change conference going on in Copenhagen at the moment. In honour of this fact - or maybe not in honour, but rather coincidentally - my office has sent around an email to explain what the company is doing to improve on our environmental performance.

There were all the usual things you'd expect; changing from the bottled water that used to get delivered weekly to filtered mains water, recycling bins around the office, advice to turn off computers when we leave for extended periods of time and to unplug any chargers left lying around. So far, so ordinary, and easily put into practice. In fact, most of these things, except perhaps the water, have been accepted practice for the entire time I've been at the company. It's the final aspect that has been most difficult to accept.

We have been advised to cut back our printing levels. Just to be clear, the paperless office concept has been around for a long time now. It has never made so much as a dint in the world of architecture though, unless you count the zeal with which young architects throw marked up drawings, criss-crossed with the red pen of their superiors, into the recycle bins bound to be scattered around offices. It only takes a moment to realise that it's not even our fault. While we design buildings that can run off the power of a sneeze, it takes thousands and thousands of trees dying to generate the documentation to get them built. Firstly, we have to supply the authorities with three sets of everything at A3, and often one at full size A1 as well (take your average A4 sheet, double that to get A3, double that to get A2...you get the picture, right?). The client always demands at least one set. Every contractor that tenders for the project gets their own set. There's a copy kept on file. Every time there is a change to a drawing, it has to be sent out again. Then, on the really big projects, there's the mother of all tree killers: the A0 set of drawings. 40 to 50 sheets, enough paper to keep New York's homeless warm and dry for a year. Paperless office? Yeah, we wish. We could issue all of this in electronic format, as PDFs. But twits ask us to print it. In fact, they require it.

The result could be seen as I wandered to the door tonight on my way out. One of the side effects of our new hours is a much closer relationship with the office cleaners. The directors have to lock up themselves, now, instead of employing security staff to do the job for them. So they can get home at a reasonable hour, the cleaners come around bang on our official finishing time. Where before they were faceless smokers outside, chatting to each other in Polish as they waited to come inside, now they are people. We talk to them, we are aware of the way they work. Seeing one woman going around the top floor with a squirty bottle and a rage, trying desperately to find a clear space to be wiped - and failing, for the most part to manage more than one squirt per pod - it occur ed to me to wonder just how much paper was being generated by the climate change conference in Copenhagen, and whether they'd come up with a solution to bureaucratic red tape. Somehow, I doubt it.

Monday, December 07, 2009

Weekend Wreckage

I'm feeling the effects of hosting a party on Saturday night. Sure, there wasn't anything in the flat broken. The guests were better behaved than last time I hosted a dinner, and ended up cleaning up after a wasabi pea fight for a couple of weeks afterwards. Did you have any idea just how far those things can roll? And I'm sure some of them were playing a game with me and jumping out of the bin, back under the couch, because no matter how many times I moved it, there was always at least one pea underneath. In fact, there's probably still one there now. But no, the carnage wreaked wasn't on my flat.

Nor was it on my flatmate. She recovered brilliantly, as far as I'm aware. She was certainly fit enough to be seen in public yesterday, darting around the west end in a frenzy to try and get her Christmas shopping done and so avoid the worst of the seasonal retail binge. I stayed at home, afraid that leaving the house would make small children cry. Because the damage caused was very much a visible problem. And it had nothing to do with a hangover.

I was out on Friday night as well, so I had every right to be feeling the effects of a little partying. At the very least I should have been tired. But I wasn't. Instead, I was ashamed to show myself in public because of a problem I've had from time to time over the years. It seems that not only liver, kidneys, stomach and head are effected by a night of partying. The beautifying process takes a severe toll on my hair as well.

It's trivial, I know. To anyone not blessed with the horrendous mass of fur that grows from my head, it would be nothing. But, after years of attempting - and generally failing - to control my wig, on Saturday I let it have its way. In fact, I encouraged its worst tendencies. I scrunched. I teased. I fluffed. I sprayed with so much hairspray that I had to leave my room or risk suffocation. In short, I worked very hard to get myself into the correct frame of hair for an 80s party, like we were having. Then I made a token gesture at control by tying a leftover piece of my bright yellow t-shirt dress around my head in a big floppy bow.

But now my hair has tasted freedom. It has experienced the thrill of flying free, and it liked it. This morning, even smothering it with a close fitting hat did little to bring it down to earth - or at least to my scalp. Because each individual strand was making a stand, being an individual, and pulling in a slightly different direction to its neighbour. This morning, it was bigger than it was on Saturday night. And where the air went out of it over the course of the party, today, in spite of pins and elastics acting as restraints, its only gotten bigger.

I guess you need to have big hair to appreciate it. My balding brother, for instance, gets a bitter twist to his face every time I bitch about having too much and how hot it gets on my neck if I leave it down. But he's not the one who has to wrestle it under control. I'm like a lion tamer cracking the whip; half an hour with a hair dryer here, 20 minutes with irons there. I can split it into two braids and each of those will still be thicker than the average person's allowance. It's not even curly, so there's no excuse for it. That it's naturally the colour of rope doesn't help. If I grew it longer, I could do a fair Rapunzel. All I'd need is the Prince. Oh, and the tower. And loads of anaesthetic to numb my scalp, given that self-weight of my ponytail can bring on a headache if I club it up too high.

I know, I know. Somewhere out there, people are telling me that the grass is always greener. And it is. After all, I could at least sleep on my soft, billowing cushion of locks and hairspray. One friend would have spent several hours trying to get her hair down from the punkish spikes she was sporting, complete with an entire pot of wax holding it in place. So at least there's that, I guess. Oh who am I kidding. I'd shave it off in a second if I didn't think it was just grow back thicker. And probably curly, just for that extra bit of oomph. I've learned one lesson, though. Never, ever, give it a taste of what it would have been like to be running wild and free in the days of big hair. Because it will takes weeks to recover from the hangover.

Wednesday, December 02, 2009

Well good, innit

For a city that experiences such vile weather, London is seriously poorly equipped to handle it. Tonight, the rain has come down in sheets, the kind that you wrestle to get into the washing machine and then discover that you don't have enough space to dry them once they're done. Much the same way that the gutters, downpipes, awnings, footpaths and roads can't get rid of the sheer volume of water that has built up in them.

As I dodged the deepest puddles and clung to the furthest point from the cars on the road, which were carelessly offering a free shower to any pedestrians foolish enough to stray near the edge, I wondered why it was, exactly, that I'd decided against "borrowing" one of the golf umbrellas leaning nonchalantly by the desk of the office klepto. Especially given that he wasn't even in the office to keep me by his desk with an entertaining (i.e. nauseating) sound and light display, a combination of his poor eating habits (he's yet to close his mouth once during a meal and offers a comprehensive range of chomping, slurping and gulping noises) and semi-pornographic comic book style illustrations he's done and pinned around his desk, giving it the look of teenage-boy-meets-Hyde-Park-flasher.

As a case study of a Londoner, he's an interesting specimen. He sounds like someone who just stepped off the set of a Guy Ritchie film and would probably lay claim to knowing some of the genuine geezer-types Ritchie loves to bring to life on the screen. He is a proud son of East London, speaks with the classic inflections and drops "innit" onto the end of every second sentence. He turns up to work wearing silky tracksuit pants which announce his arrival long before he appears, the psht-psht noise acting more effectively than an air raid siren to clear whatever space he is approaching. Because once you get trapped by him, there is no escape. Snoopy, as one former colleague dubbed him, knows all the goings on in the office and has few greater pleasures than sharing them with victims - er, an audience. That his stories aren't always true is irrelevant to him. It wasn't so irrelevant to the person who got back from leave last year to find an inbox full of condolences about being made redundant; he hadn't been, but the panic attack almost made him go to the directors and resign instead.

When he's not discussing what may or may not be going on at work, he tells detailed stories about his home life. Mind you, none of us actually know the names of his wife and daughter, even if we do know an infinite number of other details. He always just describes them as "mar wahfe" or "m'dor-er". Read them out loud, it will help you figure it out. Dor-er is about 6, an intelligent pretty little girl who in no way takes after her father; I figure she'll outgrow him by age 10. Wahfe is a quiet Vietnamese woman, arguably married by mail order (or sold into slavery, depending on which version you listen to), who works hard keeping her family together. the only time she has ever been known to speak up was when Snoopy appeared to be straying with Screechy, the man-eating, drug addled office psychopath. Wahfe cornered Screechy and warned her in no uncertain terms to keep away from Snoopy. Unfortunately, the person she should have been talking to was her husband. Not that he would have listened to her, women being, in his mind at least, there for cooking, cleaning and serving.

The time he's been happiest was during and of the redundancy periods. He would loiter by the stairs going into the boardroom, where the meetings were held with the unfortunate ones, and then race to email the latest name around the office. The behaviour was enough to get him a warning from the board, but somehow he's clung to his job. We're all wondering what dirt he has on them, because so many people were let got when he stayed. Of course, the new streamlined office has given him fewer places to hide. Where once the only place you wouldn't find him was at his desk, now he has no excuse for wandering; there's nobody left for him to visit.

This is the man I now sit next to. I think I'll ask if I can go back to being a leper in the back room. The company was better out there.