Doing nothing.

Doing nothing with people I like is my favourite activity. It involves comfortable silences, silly nonsenses, interesting conversation, pleasant relaxing, spontaneous ideas, and general niceness of being.

Toilets and other annoying modern inventions

Some inventions of modern science completely baffle me. Not because they are terribly complicated, but because they seem to have no good reason for being invented. The item that I am speaking about it the automatically flushing toilet. Yes, I suppose that they prevent people from leaving revolting bits of themselves in bathroom stalls for the unsuspecting person to find. However, they are also extremely annoying. In the way of automated things, they are either over-enthusiatic, or broken. Yesterday at work I found myself in one of these 'advanced' washrooms, equipt with taps you have to push and then frantically try to wash your hands in the trickle of water the comes out, and automatic toilets. In one stall the toilet didn't work causing a great deal of embarrassment. So, next visit - different stall. This one was very good at it's job. It flushed three times while I was still using it. This is not a nice experience. Then, while I was washing my hands in the annoying push-tap sinks, it flushed twice more for good measure. This is a colossal waste of water, not to mention embarrassing for the unfortunate person who selected that stall. Because, of course, from outside the stall, it seems as though the person inside is either very indecisive, or has severe bladder problems.
I suggest a return to the manually operated toilet. For the good of all.

The Phone Purr

I have a rotary phone. I like it. I like getting angry at the prevalent discrimination against the rotary phone. I like sticking my fingers in the not-quite-the-right-size holes. I like watching the dial turn back after each number. I like that it takes a long time to dial a long number. This generally reflects the distance your call is going: longer equals farther. But I especially like the funny whirring noise that the dial makes. The phone purr.

Clash of the Titans

When is it exactly that girls learn the meaning of 'clash' in the clothes sense. I definitely remember coming to school one day and finding that unbeknownst to me, red and pink had become a socially damaging colour combination. It was in grade four. No one told me, so who told them? And why is it that all the truly interesting colour combinations were taboo? Suddenly only blue was a safe colour, and to be extra sure that you would be acceptable company, blue combined with blue. For the adventurous, blue with green or red. But blue was a must.
This attitude toward stimulating colours lasts a long long time. Especially in high school. In fact, most people never recover and wear blue until death or blindness.

Unsurprise

Yesterday I finished reading The Da VInci Code. It was a Rollicking Good Read. It was not moving, revealing, startling, or any of the other grand claims that had been made for it. It was in fact nothing beyond a Rollicking Good Read. (Which is a fine thing to be.) The 'facts' about the Catholic church were often distorted, and the art historical information was laughable. I particularly enjoyed how every crackpot theory ever ventured about Leonardo was presented as though it has been largely endorsed by the academic community. However, these things can be ignored for the sake of a good story. The only disappointing thing was (and perhaps this is because I had just finished reading 15 or so Agatha Christie mysteries), the ending was so obvious. Who else could the Bad Guy have been!

more work please

I have recently become a terribly incompetent secretary. I am not a very organized person. I love files and boxes, post-its, folders, and mail slots. However, they haven't advanced much beyond the decorative stage in my daily life. At work I am called to use these beloved articles for the purposed for which they were made. This, it turns out, is harder than it seems.

My personal short-comings aside, my job is made much much more difficult by the fact that I rarely am given enough work to do. My employer, labouring under the impression that I am about as intelligent as rather bright sparrow, consistently gives me work that would last about fifteen minutes. She then leaves the office for long periods of time, so I am unable to ask for more work. And when she is there, she manages to give the impression that she is very very busy, faar too busy to give more work to the student secretary. This is accompanied by a how-could-you-possibly-be finished-all-that-work-yet look that is liberally laced with you-did-a-lousy-job suspicion. So, I am getting good at stretching small amounts of work into half-a-day projects. This is an extremely tedious exercise. In the process I have "accidentally" deleted whole pages, redundantly typed out department contact lists, and needlessly rolled around behind my desk on my lovely rollery chair. I have also become extremely proficient at using the labelmaker and spend my extra minutes labeling everything in sight.

All this caused me to wonder: is it really that hard to make a reasonably long list of jobs? Perhaps hiring people you apparently have no real work for is a waste of money? (NOT that I am complaining as I really needed a job.)

In a suprising turn of events, I hope that tomorrow brings more work.