Fruit cases and balloons

Paul is going round the office drawing faces on balloons. Everyone who is leaving the office this week is getting one. They're going to act as a reminder to those that are left of their former work colleagues. Just in case the twelve that are left forget about them, as we walk through the large, desolate, empty office, through the many abandoned desks and computers leading the way through the room.
Paul is using his fantastic artistic skills, perhaps picked up in a far and distant episode of Play School, to draw happy, smiling, rather freaky looking faces. Bright, coloured bulbs, swaying about on sellotape attached to their computer monitors, grinning with sparkling felt tip eyes, shiny pink lips and coloured hair. I'm sure Felix will make his way round the room with a pin at some point, but for the moment they sway at their various posts throughout the large office, like hot air scarecrows. Unfortunately Gail was the first to pop, leaving a pathetic flop of rubber hanging from her monitor. I think she may have inadvertantly taken part in one of the many games of Piggy in the Middle that Mary, Tricia and Paul were playing as they whiled away their second last shift.
Margaret brought in two giant strawberry sponge cakes for everyones' tea breaks, plastered in cream and icing sugar. Not good for those of us on diets, with fruit for lunch but they were eaten all the same.
We'll miss Margaret's cakes. Cheesecakes and banana loaves were the norm with Margaret and Mary. They'd quite often bake a big cake and bring it in, in order to share with DVD Andy, Creamy Chicken John, Stuart, Gareth, Lost Ian and myself. Tempting us with cream cakes while at the same time threatening us with the cupboard if we misbehaved... Our small, coffee break crew has changed over the past few years, with Lost Ian being the first to suffer the dreaded redundancy, Gareth leaving for better things (well, Rangers News anyway) and Stuart now falling foul of the big 'R'. Both Mary and Margaret are leaving this week, along with Tricia, Heather, Julie, Mandy, Gail, Paul, Gary, Alison, Linda, Paula, JP, Diana, Cameron, Davey and big 1066, sorry David Hastings. Absolutely gutted so many people are going. A real loss to S&UN, everyone of them... most of them anyway.
On Saturday night it was the Prepress night out and, from 8 onwards, we were in Arta. Ka was in town shopping with her Mum during the day, so I met up with her afterwards for the cinema and then a short walk down to Arta, the club notorious between my wife and I for being my false alibi on the night of my Glasgow Stag night.
Arta is a rather trendy bar and club, in Glasgow's Merchant City, with decor including stone statues, big comfy chairs, tall candelabras, thick, patterned curtains, giant paintings and vast amounts of fake fruit piled up in baskets. Not sure what the fake fruit is all about but together it all looks splendid. Jill, a good facebook pal and former employee of S&UN, liked the fake fruit so much, she took some for herself and even tucked some oranges down her trousers to try and convince us all, if any of us were in any doubt, that she does indeed 'have balls'. Obviously she's only got the mental balls, the fake fruit looked slightly artificial down her trousers. Well, to most it does.
Ka had part of her Glasgow hen night there just under two years ago and, after a few bottles of champagne or two, Aunty Nancy decided to nick the fruit basket at her table, believing it to be real. Now she has balls. Walking out of Arta with a fruit basket can't be easy to do. Aunty Nancy still insists to this day that the pineapple was real.
It's also got Monks. When the hour strikes (the specific hour I can't quite recall) a monk strides out on to the stone staircase, his face hidden by his oversized hood, and bangs a large gong and as the sounds of opera fill the air, rose petals start to drift down from the ceiling covering all those waiting on entry to the downstairs club. Looking up I could see the waiters and waitresses from the restaurant upstairs, standing over us, on the balcony, emptying large, wooden caskets filled with the petals. As we waited and I watched the milling crowds queuing up below I considered how unfortunate it would be if one of those large caskets slipped from one of the waiters' fingers. It would be especially unfortunate as I'd left my British Red Cross badge and card at home. I had no proof that I was a First Aider?! Linda, Anna and Tam were all office First Aiders too, mind you, so the unfortunate clubber would probably survive. Unless another falling casket hit one of the giant baskets of fruit, sending a whole pile of oranges and apples down over the top of them. After a few moments he, or she, would realise it was all fake fruit and fight his way out the pile to freedom, only to be hit by a pineapple falling from the bottom of the basket, which would knock him out cold.
"Told you!" Aunty Nancy would shout, popping her head out from behind one of the thick, patterned curtains.
Anyway, we were eventually allowed entry to the club below, brushing petals off our shoulders, and all had a pretty good night. Ka and myself left around one in the morning to get a bus, leaving the majority drunk and happy, dancing and loopy, posing for the camera or playing with their fruit.

Mysterious parcels and murdering

Whilst the Chile miners are being rescued from the depths of the Earth people in the work think I'm buying porn. Parcels have been arriving for me for the past week, various different bodies of the office, collecting it in the mail from the front desk and bringing it up to my desk with a suspicious, high eyebrow, look about their face.
The boss strode up to me halfway through the morning, as I sat working on Slater Hogg, with another parcel and announced, slightly too loudly;
"Michael, here's your porn!"
Julie almost made the wrong move in her latest game of PC solitaire and Margaret nearly choked on her banana loaf. Laughing uncomfortably, I couldn't argue as the real answer was equally embarrassing. An answer I can't go into at the moment as it's all part of some early Chrimbo shopping (yeah, the 'c' word?!).
Barry eventually got the answer out of me, walking away humming to himself about naked pictures. Barry, who, along with Craig, informed me the evening before that I was driving about with a screw embedded in one of my rear tyres. The bu**ers probably planted it in there themselves, perhaps in an effort to interfere with my next murder.
Yeah, you read right. For some inexplicable reason, both Barry and Craig are under the impression I go out at nights, stalking helpless young girls, murdering them and burying them in the nearby forest of Calderglen. They've obviously got nothing better to imaginate.
So I've got one part of the room that calls me 'Doc Brown' and another that think I'm East Kilbride's answer to Dexter. Then there's Gareth, who thinks I lead a very pathetic life.
'Pathetic lives' and 'egocentric', three words included in Gareth's rant during the Tuesday shift about blog and facebook users. Once again he started on yet another 'oh so subtle' tirade against me and that large portion of the population that find some solace and some fun in an online existence. A tirade that was, as he quickly pointed out, in no way aimed at myself, sitting at the luncheon table next to him. Yeah, sure, I thought. In the same way that spinning envelope wasn't aimed at the back of Jeremy Kyle's head.
Jeremy Kyle. Now there's someone that is egocentric and pathetic, hiding behind his bouncers. He's also someone that many people would probably love to murder and bury in a forest.
Not that I'd ever condone murdering anyone, or indeed burying anyone in a forest.
Anyway, I'm off to watch The Apprentice. A programme about egocentric folk that bitch and moan about their work and their colleagues behind their back. Pathetic. You'd never find me doing that.

Tigers and trivial pursuits

Work is getting busy again. Finally. It was a bit too quiet over the last few months for my liking, especially after the redundancies, but now it seems to be picking up a bit. Tea breaks are once again a welcome break whereas the past few weeks they had been merely a diversion. Over the Chrimbo/New Year period tea breaks had been too much like hard work, having to get up off our seat, go through to the canteen, pour a cup of tea, make conversation, etc, when we could have been continuing our game of trivial pursuit or finishing off that book. Unfortunately I did not win either of the two games of trivial pursuit over the Christmas week shifts. Both games had four teams and in both games Creamy Chicken John took the trophy (or he would have done if there had been such a thing). Managing to complete my circle in the first game I went into the second game quite confidently but failed to complete my counter managing only three or four pieces of pie whilst Gareth and Barry laughed at my answers. One of the questions was: which fiery feline group covered Blondie's The Tide is High? The answer was, of course, 'Atomic Kitten' but sadly I could not think of a 'fiery feline' group for the life of me. After racking my brain I came up with an answer. It had to be a last ditch attempt anyway so I answered with, 'The Exploding Tigers'.
Many dubious questions and answers continued with the pies themselves becoming another case of contention. Are they pies? Our household had always went with pies but it was quite surprising the names other players in the office came out with. Growing up, Trivial Pursuit was a game I used to play quite a lot with the parents, aunts and uncles. Usually it would be on one of our many trips to Edinburgh to visit my Uncle John and Aunt Aileen. We would often go through on the Saturday morning and meet up with them usually with an exhibition trip or picnic planned. In the evening, after another slap up meal on that enormous dining table of theirs and a good few glasses of wine they would bring the infamous game out. Usually I would only stay awake for half the game and leave the adults to finish up which involved a few more drinks and staying up till 4 in the morning. Uncle John and Aunt Aileen always called it pie too.
In the office, Creamy Chicken John called it cheese and another term was cake (I think that one was Mary). We should have just combined the two and called it cheesecake. Strangely enough cheesecake is a delicacy of near mythological status in our tea break collective. DVD Andy yearns for the day when another cheesecake shall be delivered unto us as it is considered a rare and most treasured gift. On Wednesdays gone by, one of the admin women, Margaret, used to treat us to a cheesecake, specially delivered, all the way from Iceland. How she managed that on her bike whilst meeting her murder mystery deadlines I'll never know (that's another story). Nowadays, unfortunately, in these financially unstable times, it is a very rare occasion. The office milk is even getting nicked now every Monday morning leaving us all with black tea all week. I suspect one of those pesky printers... My chief suspect is a printer known enigmatically as 'Spiderman'. He's been known to linger around our canteen at times and walks around, rather oddly, with a farmfoods plastic bag over his right foot. We'll have to get Margaret on the case.

Big doors swing on little hinges

This morning, my door fell off. Well, almost. I arrived at work in my wee clio, clambered out as per usual and just as I went to shut the door it seemed to slip, closely followed by it banging off the car's body and bouncing back at me. Mary and Margaret, two of the smoking women from the office, (when I say 'smoking women' I mean they are smokers...) were out on one of their smoking breaks (funnily enough) and immediately started heckling me from the front of the building. A bit like a louder Statler and Waldorf, except female. The top hinge of the door was bust. After visiting the garage I learned it's actually the pin that holds the hinge. Will most probably have to stay off the road now while I wait for my garage appointment. The door does stay closed whilst driving but is not fixed properly in it's rightful place thus the noise of the wind and the nearby traffic seem strangely loud whilst travelling and you feel the need to hold the door in place as you drive... reminds me of a go-cart we built as kids when I had to constantly hammer one wheel as I flew down the hill to keep the wheel from flying off as it was not secured properly. Thankfully the clio has not lost any wheels in such a fashion so I won't be needing my hammer for a while yet.
The little incident made me face a few facts about life. My clio is getting old. It's over ten years old now. Many would have traded it in years ago but I've grown kind of attached to it over the past six years or so. Purchasing it off my former boss in Birmingham, it was my only trustworthy companion in the wilderness of the West Midlands and of course it came with me back up to Scotland and found another new owner and driver in Ka. I'm hoping it will live on for another year or so at least but you never can tell what's round the corner can you. Especially if it's Ka that reversing round them (joke!).
Talking of my time in the West Midlands, I was telling folk in the office how we used to sing Britney Spears songs in David Bowie voices - the way he would sing them - in the office I worked in down south. Shirley Ann was quite impressed at my Bowie impression of 'Hit Me Baby One More Time'. Felix (my immediate boss [he moves very fast!] in S&UN) and Shirley Ann had been watching the Life on Mars tv series recently on DVD which got us on to the subject of Bowie. Shirley Ann was shocked to find out from Barry that the line 'Mickey Mouse has grown up a cow' was a true lyric to Bowie's 'Life on Mars?'. She had no idea it was part of the real lyrics. Mickey Mouse - the saviour of kids entertainment when he was born, something pure and honest that was exploited and used to make the money, cashing in, becoming the 'cash cow' for Disney. Humanity losing it's purity and morals and Bowie looking for somewhere else, somewhere for hope and a better life. That's what I always took the song to mean anyway. It's also about a girl realising she's gay apparently. "But her mummy is yelling, "No!"
And her daddy has told her to go".
'Life on Mars' was brilliant television, pity it's all over. We've now got the 'Ashes to Ashes' spin off with the lovely Keeley Hawes. Looking forward to a second season of that - whenever that will be. 'Ashes to Ashes' was another great Bowie song. But then again I think they're all pretty damn good. Apart from anything on the 'Tonight' album. He's been very quiet of late. Come on Bowie - get another album out!
Listening to the Vampire Weekend and 'Accelerate' the latest REM. 'Accelerate' is definately their best and most exciting album in a while with some great tracks (well, all of them are great in fact). The 'return to form' is an often over used expression but in this case I reckon it's spot on. Ka's been listening to her Alphabeat album. I got her tickets two weeks ago to go and see them in November. I keep insisting that she doesn't need to take me. I don't mind if she takes one of her friends. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be many other takers...