Sleepless Monday

Monday, February 27, 2012

Right now I’m functioning on a total of around one and a half hours of sleep. After a weekend of fitful and restless slumber, it’s left me a lot more weary than I would normally feel on a Monday.

I feel a little like I do when I’m slightly drunk, only not in a fun way. My brain is having trouble forming thoughts as succinctly as it would were I well rested, and I’m experiencing that same odd behaviour as I get when intoxicated which means that all of the simple words have eluded me, and I can only speak to people as though I were first running my thoughts through a thesaurus. A limited and poorly edited thesaurus, that is. But missing is the buzz of good humour and the warm, lovey feeling that envelopes me when alcohol is to blame.

The other thing I’ve noticed is that I’m feeling things more intensely, the way you do when you’re drunk. The trifling little day-to-day nuisances that I usually ignore are grating on me; I’ve laughed a lot harder at any jokes I’ve heard that was really warranted; and for some inexplicable reason, hearing about a friend’s weekend has made me completely and utterly melancholy.

As fate would have it, of course, there is no chance of getting to bed early tonight as the recent resignation of a co-worker has left me with so much work to do that overtime is inevitable.

I see in my future a large quantity of overdue work projects, copious amounts of coffee (and other caffeinated beverages) and ultimately, an imprint of a keyboard on my forehead.

A Bit of Perspective

Friday, February 24, 2012

It really puts your own life into perspective when you find that your co-worker is quitting because right after he was left jobless by a company that went into administration, his father died, and the stepmother he’s been living with is selling the house, so he’s soon to be homeless and he wants to go and stay with his lesbian mother and her long-time lover in Wales because he’s getting divorced, and his soon to be ex-wife has found out about his girlfriend (whose soon to be ex-husband wants to kill him because he blames him for the break-up of their marriage) and things have turned nasty, and now he really needs some time away from everything.

It makes my own problems seem kind of trivial. It’s a good bit of perspective for a Friday.

It doesn’t, however, make me feel any less annoyed about the fact that his quitting has just increased my workload. So I guess when people tell you ‘what you need is a bit of perspective’, you can just tell them to get stuffed. And that is much better advice for a Friday.

Recommendations for a successful start to the week

Monday, February 20, 2012

  •  Don’t bring a milk drink to work, then drink it ‘shortly after arriving’, only to realise once you’re done that it’s actually been sitting on your desk for 3 and a half hours.
     
  • Don’t follow this milk drink with a spicy Sri-Lankan curry for lunch.
     
  • No matter how tight your budget may be, never consider single ply toilet paper a valuable money saving idea.

You want a what now?

Thursday, February 16, 2012

I’ve posted before about the ridiculous things that one finds themselves typing daily when you deal with playground equipment.; Mis-spelling things to make them sound more ‘kiddy’, my dyslexic fingers turning regular words like ‘sun’ into ‘sin’ – conversations with customers about squeezing balls (of the kind that you put in a ball pit, that is).


But there is another thing that I find myself typing numerous times per day that you would never expect someone at a playground company to be typing. Something that seems to be more the kind of thing an employee at an erotic publisher would type.

‘Cock’.

I type it at least 20 times a day. Hundreds of times each week. Cock, cock, cock. And why? Why on earth would someone dealing with playgrounds be typing ‘cock’ all the time?

Streamlining.

When designing playgrounds, often you want to put in a ‘cockpit’. And when you’re doing this multiple times a day, typing the word ‘cockpit’ becomes time consuming. So you streamline. You chop the end off of the word, until you find yourself typing the word ‘cock’ more frequently than an a cybersex junkie.

I often thing that if ever a phone tap was placed on my work phone, an unwitting listener might easily think they’d tapped into a phone sex line, what with all the ‘cock’, conversations about ‘balls’ and today’s lengthy discussion with a customer about fixing his 'knob'.

Leaky Sponge

Friday, February 10, 2012

People say that children's brains are like a sponge, soaking up information anywhere they can find it. If that’s really the case, then I feel sure that at some point early on, someone picked up my information sponge and wrung it out a little.

Often, very basic information about the world and how it works seems to have trickled its way out of my brain and been left somewhere in a puddle of abandoned information. And I’m not just talking about the kind of information you never use, but also very basic things that you learn at primary (elementary) school. Things like basic multiplication tables and long division; why there are seasons and how electricity works. Want to know what 8 x 8 is? Don’t ask me! 245 minus 73? Hand me a calculator then!

It’s a very strange thing to find that you’re lacking in basic skills like these, especially if you’re not a stupid person. I may not be able to do long division, but I can design a playground that meets four different kinds of legal standards, fits into a small space and know exactly how much it will cost all in the space of about 20 minutes. I can read an entire novel in less than a day. I can use just about any computer program you put in front of me, and have it mastered within an hour. So why on earth do I have to think so hard about things I should have learnt when I was five?

Perhaps it's just that since I've been a nerd from the day I was born, I’ve come to rely too much on digital devices to provide these kinds of answers for me. Calculators and computers have made that part of my brain that deals with basic maths obsolete. My brain has decided to expunge all the information that it didn’t really need to hold on to, and as a result all that is left is a mind that has a firm grasp on vocabulary and technology, and little else. It would explain all those other blank areas in my mind where things like ‘history’ and ‘geography’ subjects should reside.


Is it too late to reverse this kind of knowledge loss? Can I bring it all back? And is 30 too old to be learning things that could be taught to me by my eight year old niece?

When you feel low

Monday, February 06, 2012

When I'm feeling down, and it feels like there is nothing that can cheer me up, there is one place I can turn to. One thing that never fails to make me smile, no matter how often I see it. And though you might expect it, it's not something deep and meaningful. It's not something that puts my life into perspective. It's a movie. A cheesy movie. It's Bridget Jones's Diary.

Judge me if you will, but hear me out; it's not the romance story that does it for me (though that's nice too). It's not the mischievous sexiness of Hugh grant, nor the inexplicable attraction of Colin Firth. It's not the image of an awkward, relatable woman finding love. No - it's the fight scene.
It's the greatest fight scene of any movie ever made. It's ridiculous, it's crazy, and it's so real that it makes me laugh out loud no matter how low i'm feeling.

When life is feeling like a bad drama movie, the only thing to cure it is romantic comedy. You can switch off your brain and let the images of two very proper English men trying to have a fist fight pull you out of your slump.It works for me every single time.

So before you judge me - try it. When you feel like crap and nothing appeals to you, watch the movie. I guarantee it won't fail to make you smile, even if only a little.