cold cold day

I don't mind the cold... I really don't... but I gotta say, there are certain places you really don't expect to spend the whole day freezing your proverbials off, and work is one of them!

It was bloody cold in the office today... like REALLY, REALLY, REALLY cold... freezing cold... so cold in fact, that I ended up wearing my jacket at my desk (as the day wore on I was wishing I'd brought more clothes... like a jumper and some gloves) all morning and part of the afternoon.

Luckily today was the first time in the past four weeks that I actually put a jacket on when I left the house... not surprising really since it was around 7°C (44.6°F) when I walked out the door (and yes, I realise that all those people who live or have lived in the Northern Hemisphere and have slogged through snow on their daily commute are currently pointing and laughing at me, but rack off, it was cold!). It did kind of warm up a bit in the afternoon for a while, but I don't know whether that was because we'd all been to lunch and it just seemed warmer after having been outdoors, or what... I do know it didn't last that long, and by around 2:30 it was freezing again. Actually it never got above 14°C (57.2°F) the whole day (thank you BOM).

In all the long, long, long time I've worked in that building it's never been that cold... the airconditioning has packed up completely on a couple of occasions, the power was out for half the day once (very stuffy, warm and quite boring, since I couldn't get into my computer to actually do any work), but it's never been freezing cold... I even ended up with the computer user's Winter malady... Frozen Mouse Hand... which is bad enough at home, but at work? Bugger that! By about the middle of the morning I was ready to pile all the paper on my desk into a big heap and set fire to it (and possibly my desk too) just to keep warm... fire alarms be damned! I usually prefer to be a little too cold rather than a little too hot when I'm working (so I don't, you know, doze off or forget what I'm doing or whatever), but today was taking that idea way too far.

Originally I thought that maybe the giant hamsters that power the heaters must have frozen to death in their humongous treadmill over the weekend, but it turned out that it was only the floor I'm working on... which makes sense, because if it been that cold on the floor where the big bosses all work, you know that somebody would have had it all fixed about five minutes after they all walked in the door this morning.

And it also fitted in nicely with the fact that a whole host of things that just didn't work right today... I took my umbrella with me on my walk because it was raining when I started out, but the very light rain lasted all of about three minutes so I just had to carry the thing... of the ten or so buses that went past my bus stop on the way to work, the only ones that didn't say "Bus Full" were the express buses that don't stop at my stop anyway... then when two of my buses finally rocked up (both at exactly the same time) one of them nearly took out a whole lane of traffic trying to get across to the bus stop. So I got to work about ten minutes late. Then there was the whole heating problem. Then the girly making my toasted ham, cheese and tomato sandwich (ie not from Subway) overcharged me by about three dollars (although I did pick her up on it and we sorted it all out).

Speaking of lunch, I made up my mind quite early that I was going to investigate the whole "hot soup" option (from Boost Juice) for lunch to try and warm myself up. Thank god for their Thai Pumpkin soup (and the sandwich as mentioned above)...and also being outside where it was colder than inside, so once you come inside it seems warmer by comparison, although, like I said, by the afternoon it did seem to warm up a little.

They did finally fix the heating, or at least it sounded like the ventilation system started working, although it didn't get warmer very fast... and that was only about an hour before I left for the day... typical!

And I'm only just started to thaw out now...

Thank god I have the day off tomorrow, albeit unpaid...

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