You'll Always Find Me In the Kitchen at Parties!

Managed to squeeze a quickie in for the Madhouse:

I get a little lonely at work actually.

I’ve now had three full and long days, despite being quite close to home, the volume of traffic makes it a long trip in and out. I get a lift with my SIL next door but she leaves early and my start times are flexible so I’m left standing outside a locked door waiting for someone to let me in at about 7:45 each morning.

It’s a huge office. Single floor but there must be a couple of hundred people here. All sitting in our little corners of well-resourced greyness with the exception of half a dozen ‘executive’ staff who appear to have small but very much ‘open-door’ offices. It’s newly furbished, bright and well equipped. We have very generous sized corners of greyness. New desks, new chairs, new HP Computers and nice flat screens but still corners of greyness. I miss my wonder wall.

This is the problem with being a contractor, you never quite ‘take possession’ of your workspace. It’s always a hurriedly cleared desk with the remnants of the previous occupier dangling over the edges. In this case, rolls of development plans and fat files . . I’ve been plonked in the sales and acquisitions department, sandwiched between three men wheeling and dealing on land acquisition, applying to council for Development Applications, devising alternative names for new suburbs and lamenting their private sector cousins with whom they’re in business but whom apparently ‘don’t know what they’re getting into’.

This tangled with all three men’s obsession with their health (something happens to the over 50 mail it’s all cholesterol and prostates and runny eyes and ulcers) . . so there’s little for me to ‘grasp’ onto even for a coffee time chat. People are pleasant but only a few I’d call friendly.

They lunch alone. Two massive fridges in two massive lunch rooms filled with masses of lunches, neatly packed and labelled, just in case someone wants to steal their soy tofu snacks.

They don’t chat much among themselves except in little cliquey pockets. Nobody except the black English girl in Marketing wears colour. Seriously, she’s in a nice green boucle Chanel rip-off suit and I’m in red. Everyone else is grey, beige or combinations of blue, black and white.

How odd to be so invisible or perhaps it’s my ego playing tricks on me.

Despite the strangeness of not-quite-belonging the job is interesting, the coffee tolerable, a street full of cafes to have lunch in (if I had someone to have lunch with) and a great discount fruiterer and butcher downstairs. There’s the murky Parramatta River to sit by at lunchtime if you can avoid having someone trying to bum money or cigarettes after you or your lunch being abducted by seagulls . . .

Actually the only place I’ve spoken more than business lingo or two words to, was Walt, very sweet Walt, who hijacked me in the kitchen . . . clearly I don’t spend enough time around the water bottle! Yep, that's the place to make friends . . for the rest of the week, I'm going to spend, much more time hanging around in the kitchen!

Sorry about the weird font, I've switched to a Mac and it doesn't like "Georgia" (PEBCAK)