NSFW

Oh bloody hell

I'm not entirely sure this makes the spending cuts bearable, but it helps. The tail twitch at 0:25! The reverse! The joy.

Shiny happy person

When I mounted the downward escalator (not sure about mounted, but bear with me) this morning and prepared to continue my brisk descent to the tube, the man in front of me stopped abruptly and, in an unusual move, turned to face the moving handrail on the right hand side. I paused to look at him more closely and saw that he had extended his leg and was holding his battered, black, leather lace-up underneath the coarse bristles at the edge of the step, giving himself a free shoeshine. The seamlessness of his actions suggested this was a well-rehearsed routine. As a fellow follower of precision rituals, I rather admired his panache. Pleasing.

I found this photograph in the Guardian this morning and emailed it to Laura. We both agreed that our working lives would be significantly improved with the addition of a baby lemur, especially one who uses a wide-eyed teddy bear as a surrogate mother. I have read that pet cafes are becoming increasingly popular in urban areas of Asia - they are full of cats and other furry friends, and you pay somewhere between £5 and £10 per hour to sit and mingle with the various animals. Sounds like a bargain to me. And if the cafe could supply a few kittens and puppies, rather than cats and dogs, I think they could up their rates rather dramatically. Hmmm. I feel a career move coming on...

Hasta La Vista

Those who know me in Real Life may be aware of my boss. He is Swiss German and I absolutely adore him in a way that is completely and utterly platonic. We both have varying levels of OCD and I find working for him about as pleasant as I could expect working for any human to be. Far and away my favourite thing about him is his accent, which is identical to Arnold Schwarzenegger's in both tone and vocabulary. Like Arnie, my boss seems to prefer to use as few words as possible when communicating with others. To this end, we have developed a series of acronyms to help us label the people who come to visit him - he was calling everyone a 'pain in the ass'; eventually this became shortened to PITA and, inevitably, super PITAs became SPITAs. A personal highlight was when he walked into my office after a meeting, handed me a pile of papers and said only, 'Shred.' It was like The Terminator meets David Brent.

But today was an absolute gem. I went into his office to ask him something, and he was emailing. There was an open jar of macadamia nuts on his desk.
'Can I have one of these, please?' I asked. He didn't respond. 'I'll take that as a yes then,' I said, taking a nut and popping it in my mouth. A few seconds later, he pressed send on his email and his attention refocused.
'What was that you asked me?' he said.
'Whether I could have a nut,' I said. And in classic Arnie voice, he drawled,
'You have already taken one. Obsolete question. Inefficient use of resources.'
Honestly, it's moments like those that make me want to work for him forever.

I had to do an internal online training course about money laundering today. Like you, I wouldn't have expected that to be filled with interesting anecdotes, but I read that money laundering is so prevalent that, if it were an economy, it would be the tenth biggest in the world. Makes you think, innit.

Sad news from me is that I know someone who is genuinely lost looking for fish: my cat, Dennis. Well, he's my parents' cat really - and he ran away this afternoon when my Dad was picking him up from the cattery. We don't know where he is, he's in a strange area and it's all very scary. Fingers crossed, his greedy stomach will drive him to make contact with some humans very soon.

Chair today, gone tomorrow?

Sigh. Back again for another Monday. Goodness this cycle feels repetitive. Note to self: book some time in the sun as a matter of some urgency. And start house hunting.

After work on Friday I went out for a couple of drinks with Laura and some oxymoronic nice bankers. One of them casually mentioned that someone might be quitting our office and I seized this opportunity to enquire about stealing the leaver’s Aeron chair. Aeron chairs are debatably the most comfortable office seat on earth. I first became aware of them when I read about their evolution in The Wisdom of Crowds (recommended) and first saw one in the flesh/webbing when I started working here in March. There are a few Aerons smattered around the trading floor but supply is limited to around 50%. The rest of us are forced to make do with Eighties chairs with limited lumbar support that cause me to slouch down into a semi-reclined state, making me look both permanently hungover and fat. Not a look I want to cultivate.

There followed a lengthy discussion about the best procedure for bagging oneself an Aeron. Naturally, the simplest method would be to order one from the catalogue but things are never simple and due to current internal cost-cutting attempts, such profligacy is inadvisable. The only solution is to keep one’s ear to the ground and, the moment someone quits or is forced to leave, politely pounce upon their chair before their buttock indentations have faded.

Complex Aeron-related sagas are the cause of much office bitterness. My companions had a wealth of stories to tell about their own Aeron grabs – in one case, precise dates and times from 2005 were provided when someone went on three months’ leave and their chair was stolen while they were away. Another gentleman on his way out was packing a few belongings into a box when a colleague brazenly wheeled away his chair and then returned a few moments later to drag out the five foot pot plant that had been sitting in the corner by his desk. With such hard-nosed tacticians surrounding me, something tells me my wait for an Aeron may be a long one.

Following post-work drinks on Friday I met my friend, Nick, at the National Portrait Gallery, where we felt uncomfortable among those enjoying brightly-lit end-of-week jazz in the ticket foyer and then improved our minds in an exhibition of twentieth century British press photography (also recommended).

Over dinner later on, Nick reminded me that I had once interviewed the ex-pop group, A1, and had asked the band’s alleged hunk, Ben, whether he would genetically modify kittens and puppies to stay baby sized if he could. I had completely forgotten ever writing or asking this insightful question but I wasn’t surprised: it is clearly a recurring theme for me as it’s an issue that still troubles me today.

Of course, on a practical level, I would go mental if someone tampered with nature in that way, but I do feel strongly that, given that around 98% of the motivation for acquiring a cat or dog is that they start off as a kitten or a puppy, and given also that the ratio of kitten/puppyhood to grown cat/doghood, over the course of a lifetime, is approximately 1:16 in cats and about 1:18 in dogs, it would arguably be for the greater good if they could stay small and fluffy for a bit longer. Surely this isn’t beyond the reaches of modern science? It would certainly slow the incidences of pets abandoned after a few months. The slogan isn’t ‘A puppy’s for life, not just for Christmas’ because no sane person abandons puppies. But the moment their legs lengthen, the little tail wags less, the head to body ratio shrinks and the skin fits the body, we lose interest. Which is sad – yet maybe it will be the catalyst for something really wonderful. Perhaps those scientists could use their knowledge for good, just this once. Forget working on disease cures that are clearly pipe dreams and put their time to the modification of domestic pets into a permanently juvenile state. Now that would be time well spent – and, in a major PR coup, I already have the backing of Ben from A1. Who’s with us?

Gains and Grievances

Today's achievements:

1. I successfully rewrote my CV for the PA/Executive Assistant arena - this involved deleting everything I believe to be impressive about my employment history and flagging up non-events such as typing words per minute and the fact that I can organise a meeting.
2. I finally completed my application for a writing job at the Red Cross that sounds gripping - unfortunately, having finished the online form after a substantial amount of time spent grappling with awful drop-down menus and reams of equal opportunities questions, I spotted the salary in the job description. I had got the idea from somewhere that the salary was around £28K. I was wrong. It is precisely the salary that one would expect from a fascinating job at a charity: a pittance.
3. I checked in at MacFixitForums where Apple geeks share info, and found that my post about slow running programs had been answered. I thus rebuilt Entourage, my email programme - and installed and ran OnyX, a deceptively small programme that rooted out all the space-filling rubble on my system and gave me an extra 1.5 Gb of available space. Very satisfying.
4. I sellotaped the spine of my borrowed copy of Duruflé's Requiem as it was falling to pieces.

Today's gripes:

1. People who are clearly at their desk and who are, in some small way, holding my future in their grasp, but who do not reply immediately to my emails. They should be culled.
2. Part-time job ads that use pro rata payment information: it's misleading and irritating. A new position that I thought sounded extremely appealing was advertised as four days a week, salary £30K pro rata. It all seemed lovely - but then I took a fifth of the salary off, to account for me working four days rather than five, and it emerged that the actual salary would be £24K - not an insubstantial difference. How annoying.
3. Cats that don't run down the stairs fast enough when I'm trying to reach the front door before the postman sprints gleefully away down the street clutching my undelivered package. Loitering on the staircase in front of me is not helpful - particularly when I am in a hurry. Of course, my frame is delicate and fragile, and I am well-known in my family for being fleet of foot, but even so, in a contest between my descending weight and a feline spine, I think we all know who would win.

With the day's achievements outweighing the gripes, I think I can afford myself a virtual high five - although high fiving oneself does smack of desperation and loneliness. Additionally, I must make sure I don't get too cocky - it's only lunchtime and there's still much potential for further events of both negative and positive persuasions. I'll put the high five on hold 'til the flower of Tuesday has unfurled a few more petals. Check back soon for more terrible metaphors and self-indulgent musing.

Now That's What I Call Pointless...

There is a cat that lives a few doors down from us. He is rather unusual and thus I have been unable to provide an accurate supporting illustration: suffice to say he looks somewhat like the feline on the left, but is not stuffed with kapok. His fur is sleek, thick, lustrous and a rich silver with black stripes: a miniature snow tiger pacing the streets of suburban London.

My father, always keen on anything that appears to be expensive or exclusive, immediately developed a fondness for this new creature, and can often be spotted engaging in lengthy monologues with him outside our house, monologues mostly consisting of my dad crooning "Aren't you beautiful?" to a mutely adoring audience of one. What the cat lacks in verbosity, however, he makes up for in gung ho confidence. He bounds up to greet total strangers with a fickle friendliness better suited to an under-fed labrador; he jumps over the fence into our garden and sits on the shed roof, looking into our house as if wondering what these strange people are doing on his land; he runs in through the front door if we hold it open too long and - my mother suspects - comes in through our cat door at night to snoop around.

So while my father - further won over by the cat's perceived 'gusto' and/or 'oomph' - continues to speak out in support of the striped cat, my mother and I have decided that he is a cocky nuisance who may, we hypothesize, even be terrorizing our own cats so that they are unable to feel rulers of their own roost.

Consequently, when I was walking down my road this morning and spotted the beast sitting squarely in the middle of the pavement waiting to be admired, I purposefully strode past without giving him a second glance. As I looked back at him (a fatal error in my attempt to persuade the cat that I hadn't noticed him, I now realise), I even allowed myself to think that he appeared somewhat put out and confused that a passer-by had failed to acknowledge his perfection.

However, as I let myself back in to the house, I had to concede that, in reality, my snub was perhaps a little pointless. At base, I was bullying a cat, employing juvenile psychological tactics usually only engaged in a primary school playground. Much as we might anthropomorphosise our pets, freezing them out through emotional warfare probably won't have much of an impact. Although my mother and I have persuaded ourselves otherwise, the cat in question probably doesn't have an ego any more than my own cats understand our logic when we tell them off for sharpening their claws on the sofa, but laugh when they sit in cardboard boxes. I grew out of dressing up our family pets in my dolls' bonnets and cardigans when I was four and my cat, George, wet the bed while 'sleeping' in my toy cot - but it seems that, even aged 29, valuable lessons about domestic animals are still mine for the taking.