| Wetwork |
[Dec. 19th, 2002|12:07 pm] |
| [ | Feeling |
| | nauseated | ] |
| [ | Reading |
| | John Grisham, The Summons | ] |
There's too much damn water around at the moment.
For one thing, the leak in the office water cooler persisted until the entire plastic keg had drained into the carpet. There's a patch 10ft by 6ft that squelches as you walk through it - at its worst yesterday it actually splashed, as if you'd jumped in a puddle. The room now smells foul, although it may not be mouldering carpet responsible - it might be dodgy toilets or cabbage cooking in the canteen Christmas lunch. No-one seems quite sure. No engineer has come out to look.
The Waterloo and City line was closed this morning because of platform flooding. Often nicknamed the Drain, the Waterloo and City line is a fantastically useful little stretch of the London Underground that gets you straight into the heart of the City in a fraction of the time you'd otherwise take. Because of this, it's always running at capacity during rush hour, people packed into the trains like sardines, and the slightest disruption causes chaos. This morning the disruption wasn't slight: the Drain wasn't draining and when you peered down at the platform you could see it was under six inches of water, lapping gently up the lower reaches of the ramp that leads down from the concourse
I use the Drain a lot, but there's one thing about it that really has the power to freak me out. When it's really busy, or disrupted, a backlog of people builds up waiting for it. About one trainload will fit on the platform at Waterloo. The second and third trainloads queue back out from the platform, through the two doorways and up the long, shallow ramps that lead down to it. They stand, perhaps eight abreast, packed together on the ramp, not moving forward, no room in which to turn back if they change their minds, waiting for their turn to disappear through the little holes in the wall that are the doorways. The people at the top of the ramp are, of course, on your level but people further down just drop away gradually until you can look down on the heads of the ones at the bottom of the ramp perhaps 20ft below you. No-one moves. No-one talks. It's a horrible sight, like watching cattle being herded into a slaughterhouse or the last sand draining out of the top bulb of an hourglass. It was like that yesterday: I took a different route and put up with being late.
I tell you, if you don't live in a city be glad. You may think it's boring and that may be true, but there are worse things than boredom. |
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| Comedy central |
[Dec. 19th, 2002|03:30 pm] |
| [ | Feeling |
| | happy | ] |
| [ | Reading |
| | Just finished the Grisham after lunch. | ] |
The office canteen was doing Christmas dinner today - beef, turkey or nut roast wellington, roast potatoes and parsnips, Yorkshire puddings - the works. Unlike the restaurant chain Xmas dinner of a couple of weeks ago, they did it properly. There were even crackers on the tables.
I don't really like Christmas - I'm the original 'Bah Humbug' Scroogey Grinch-like character. I don't want to go somewhere and hide from it, I prefer to hang around and be cynical, but I'm definitely not a fan. However, I do enjoy the crackers.
We ate our lunch with a consultant who's only recently come over from India and we tried to get him to pull a cracker. He looked at it doubtfully and said 'What is this'? When told, he seemed unconvinced: "That is a cracker?" And he had a point. They were as cheap as they come. But that's the whole idea.
Anyone who spends a fortune on expensive "luxury" crackers hasn't understood it at all. So long as they actually do go 'bang' four times out of five then the cheaper and tackier the better. You want to have the nervous feeling as you pull it and wonder whether it will bang or not. You want to hold the gift up to everyone else and shreik "how rubbish is this?" You want the paper hat to disintigrate within minutes (otherwise you'll be stuck wearing it for hours). And you so want the joke to be toe-curlingly awful. What's the point of it otherwise?
So, in the spirit of festive cheesiness, here are the two jokes I salvaged from today's crackers.
What's white and goes up?
and
A bottle of lemonade fell on a barman's head. Why wasn't he hurt?
Answers tomorrow. Feel free to guess in the meantime... ;o) |
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