American woman

I was reminded about this by having to rip the bottom layer of my sandwich apart at breakfast. There was a very sociable, and attractive, American girl in the queue for breakfast. Somehow she got involved in my conversation with Dan and I ended up talking to her more than Dan while I was waiting, but we ended up talking about nothing much. We mostly talked about how bad the canteen was, waiting time and food wise. I complained about the length of the queue and suggested they should adopt a McDonald’s style serving system, then she complained about the woman who was serving; how she never cuts all the way through the bread, so that you have to rip the bottom bit of bread or toast when you come to eat it. Unfortunately, for some reason, I deliberately avoided talking to her about obvious things like why she was working in a tin-pot town like this, how she came to work for us, which part of America she came from (assuming she wasn’t actually Canadian) and which department she worked in. I imagined everyone that talks to her asks where she’s from and how she came to be working over here.

Banana allergy

We have had Hazel passed on to our section, with one of the other sections needing to shed staff. She has had no experience of the stuff we do and we had to appoint someone to train her for this week. We chose one of the Steve’s. This Steve is the one that cycles into work and also eats two bunches of bananas a day. Unfortunately, after we’d decided Steve was the man for the job, we were told that Hazel is allergic to bananas. Then when she started, she confirmed that she was allergic and couldn’t go anywhere near them. We didn’t know that banana allergies existed, but she reckoned that even contact with her skin would result in her swelling up. Now Hazel is quite rotund anyway and our first, childlike instinct was to see how much she would swell up, and even see if we could get her to burst. As it turns out, Steve has been training her very well and carried on eating his bananas with no ill effects as yet.

Well-being day

For well-being day there are various activities going on for the staff. Someone was sent round all the floors to try and encourage people to go and see what’s available. On the first floor they have a woman doing head massages, a cycling machine that powers a smoothy maker, so that you can make your own smoothy while you peddle. Then there was a Wii-Fit with a ski-jumping game and a football (soccer) heading game.
We’ve now had a few new ladies from another department (which the company is getting rid of) who we are trying to train, so that they could be used on our section instead. One of these is Hazel, who is a large, loud lady. We all listen to what the woman has to say about what is on offer then Hazel says:

“Why does she look at me when she says Wii-Fit, as if I need to have a go on one?”

Writing's on the wallys

The latest thing in our office between Nige, Cat and Becks is drawing on each other. Yes, drawing on each other like kids. They started off writing “love” and “hate” on each other’s knuckles. Then they started drawing smiley faces on their arms. Lately they’ve been using the office stamps saying “Copy” or “Received” to stamp each other’s hands and legs.

Take a look at some better quality knuckle tattoos.

Just Managing

Junior has not made a great impression on us as a manager. Last week we were snowed under with work, which he has been promising people a fast turn-around for. On Wednesday he had spent the day on the internet finding the cheapest car insurance quote for his new car he was picking up the following weekend. Then on the Thursday he asked myself and Eric to go to a meeting over the other regional office 50 miles away, which was basically a waste of both our days. When we came back we found out that he had done bugger all, and Thursday’s work had piled up for us to do on Thursday evening or Friday. Then on Friday, when there was too much work for us to possibly get out, he was still fannying about asking us to do other stuff for him.