Symbolic Forest

A strange day at work yesterday, and one in which I was instantly, quickly, and very correctly stereotyped.

Taking a shortcut through the warehouse behind the office, I got talking to Colleague M. Colleague M is fairly new, so tends to get all the rubbish jobs, such as sitting out in the cold of the warehouse sorting through boxes of stuff before it goes upstairs. We ended up talking for a while, and for some reason I ended up having to mention that I have a website.^**

“Yes,” said M, “you look like the sort of person who would have a website.”

Frankly, I was a bit baffled. M may be right, but I have no idea why. What do people who have websites look like?

Keyword noise: blogging, Colleague M, colleagues, stereotyping.

I’m one of those people who has trouble reading others. I can’t spot body language until it’s too late. I can’t spot inflection either. This isn’t good, when dealing with other people, but I’ve got used to the fact that I just can’t do it.

Now, that’s fair enough, but there seems to be another side to this that I’ve only just started to realise. Not only can I not spot other people’s feelings; other people can’t spot mine either. If I’m in a bad mood, people never seem to notice; if I’m not in a bad mood, I nevertheless constantly get comments like “why are you so pissed off today?”

There are two possibilities here – well, three really. Firstly, it could be that being useless at spotting other people’s emotions makes me useless at displaying my own, or that I am useless at spotting them because I’m useless at displaying them. Secondly, though, it could be just that everybody is as terrible at I am at this sort of thing. I just assume that it’s easy and natural, when everybody else is actually having just as much trouble as me.

Keyword noise: body language, emotion, feelings, inflection.

Back at the office today, and I wish I hadn’t been. The first things I had to deal with: a manager, not my own, complaining that I wasn’t doing my job properly; or at least her idea of what my job should be. My own manager’s response to that was: “Bollocks, ignore her,” but I feel stuck between a rock and a hard place.

There’s not much motivation about at the office. There’s no joy in work when your only hope is to make people slightly less annoyed than they otherwise would be. There’s no recognition that we’re ever doing anything right, only constant complaints that we never do enough.

Keyword noise: colleagues, management, motivation, office politics.

And, I’m back, from a weekend away to North Wales.

I’m not going to recount endless details about the trip, because most of you would probably find it very boring. I met new people, saw some new things – new to me, I mean – and had an energetic time. I enjoyed it so much that, by the end, I was telling everyone that I’d definitely be coming back.

Keyword noise: Ffestiniog, Rheilffordd Ffestiniog, Ffestiniog Railway, Cymru, Wales, Gogledd Cymru, North Wales, volunteering.

You can tell it’s getting closer to winter. This morning was one of those mornings when everything under the duvet was at that perfect cosy sleeping temperature, but you just know that the air outside the bed will have a nasty chill to it.

Keyword noise: autumn, morning, bed, seasons, waking up, winter, the calendar.

Last Wednesday, in the office kitchen, making a cup of tea. A random colleague with a history of attention-seeking pops her head round the door: “I had a dream about you last night.”

“Oh yes?”

“Yeah.” They looked around quickly, to see if anyone was within earshot. “I was naked, and tied up like this” – they mimed a hands-above-head position – “and you were whipping me!”

“Riiight.” Run away! I was thinking. Run away! “Um, better go and do some work. See you later.”

Keyword noise: colleagues, dreaming, fantasy.

A few weeks ago, feeling bored, I signed up with an online dating site.^* It’s free, it only takes a few minutes to fill out, it’s just a bit of fun, you never know what might happen, and so on. Scientifically, it promises to find you your very best possible match from the people in your district. Of course, hardly anyone came up from this area, so I went away and forgot about it.

Yesterday, I thought: why don’t I look at it again? Why don’t I look further afield? So, I searched for my best match out of everybody in the country. And found one. My ideal partner, out of every man and woman in the country on this popular dating site, is my friend K.^** So much for meeting new people!

* but no, I’m not telling you which one, or what my profile name is.

** I recognised their profile immediately, because I was there when the photo was taken.

Keyword noise: compatibility, dating, friends, online dating, small world.

The car went in to the garage this morning, following the crash a couple of weeks back. The car I was loaned, of course, didn’t have any petrol in. Hardly any at all. The warning light was very definitely on, and the needle was barely lifting off its stop.

“No problem,” thought I, “there are plenty of petrol stations on the way in to the office.”

Not many with petrol, though.

Whether there is going to be a petrol blockade this week or not, clearly that’s what a lot of people have been expecting. Driving from the garage to the office, I passed three petrol stations closed from lack of supplies: “open later today”, one said. Eventually, reaching an open one, I sat in a ten-minute queue which had doubled in length by the time I left. We don’t need a blockade – the panic-buying has already started.

Update, September 13th 2005: I found out later that the closed garages hadn’t actually run out of petrol at that point; they were closed for other reasons. However, as everyone (including me) assumed they had run out, it didn’t help things at all. People were already queueing heavily at 7.30 this morning.

Keyword noise: crowd behaviour, driving, panic buying, petrol.

Work must be getting to me. I know it must be, because I’ve started dreaming about it every night. Bizarre, twisted, warped dreams it’s true, but still dreams about being in the office and with all the co-workers.

I do my best not to think about work when I’m not there. I don’t always manage it – if I’m on a long weekend I usually log into the office network to check my mail at least once – but I do try. I just wish I could stop the office popping up in my dreams too. Last night was a bad one: one of the company directors discovered I had a list of People At The Office Who Regularly Download Porn and came over to my office to ask me to explain how I’d discovered it all. The only problem was: he brought all the people on it with him.

Update, April 12^th 2022: At some point I should probably post the story about how and why that list genuinely existed.

Keyword noise: colleagues, dreaming, pornography.

Yesterday: a day out, to the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television with The Parents. We’d not visited almost since it first opened. Most of it has been completely rebuilt since, but the gallery on the mechanics of TV is still unchanged from 20 years ago, back when blue screen Chroma-Key was an amazing feat of modern technology. The exhibits have all been re-captioned by Tim Hunkin, but even he only gave it a 2/5 score.

We didn’t go to see anything specific, but we did look around the current exhibition: Fashination, about the grey area between fashion and art. It seemed a rather strange choice for the NMPFT to put on. I suppose the connection was the importance of fashion photography, which was touched on in one part of the exhibition; but it really would have fitted better at somewhere like the V&A. The most interesting section – given more prominance on the website – was the “street fashion” polaroids of random people and their clothes. As someone who wishes they could just wake up, throw on something random and still look great, I love the idea that fashion is not the province of Great Artists whose work is more suited to a catwalk or photograph than to everyday life. Which seems to be entirely the opposite opinion to everything else in the show.

Keyword noise: art, Bradford, Yorkshire, fashion, photography, street fashion, style, museums.