Three of my four colleagues were away. One's on a 3 day course (yes, that one...) and two are on holiday. Although I wasn't actually alone in the office, my only remaining team mate has an unfortunate obsession with talking about her 3 year old son - a subject that I'm afraid I can only put up with for very very short periods at a time.
Now then. 3 year old sons are not the interesting things about which I write. Unless you find them particularly interesting, in which case I'd suggest that you go and Google for '3 year old sons' and leave me alone.
The day was proceeding in an orderly fashion - work was being... well, paid lip-service to, phonecalls were being made and I even turned up to a short meeting at one point. It was great and I had a warm fuzzy feeling of accomplishment inside. Then, at 11am on the dot, the Fire Alarm sounded. It was very dramatic. Let me give you a flavour of the drama:
"EEEEEOOOOOOEEEEEEEOOOOOOOO"
"Oh bugger. Let me just finish my coffee."
"EEEEEOOOOOOEEEEEEEOOOOOOOO"
"Where's my coat... it looks a bit chilly outside. Keys, keys... Gotta lock my desk up."
"EEEEEOOOOOOEEEEEEEOOOOOOOO"
"Where exactly is the fire exit, anyway?"
"EEEEEOOOOOOEEEEEEEOOOOOOOO"
See? I can tell that you were on the edge of your seat there! It was just like 'The Towering Inferno'. I should remind you at this point, that I work on the 14th floor of an office block. Many many stairs to be walked down. At one point, the stairs had collpased and we saw Steve McQueen standing on the level below saying "It'll be ok... just dangle off that flimsy bit of metal. I'll catch you, honest. Send your small children first!"
(The Steve McQueen bit was kinda made up by the way)
Anyway... 370 odd steps later, we reached the ground floor and made our way over to the meeting point. Now this always interests me. The meeting point is in a motor bike park on the other side of the road. Whenever we have a fire drill, the occupants of the building tend to swarm across the road with no regard for the many cars that whizz back and forth. Who cares what a ton of speeding metal thinks, eh? No-one died, or got mangled around the bumper of a battered old Peugot 405, so that was nice.
Three quarters of an hour later we were still standing outside. Our resident temp, a member of the TA with the attention span of a chicken giblet started threatening to make announcements using a nearby traffic cone as a megaphone.
After making a few enquiries, I established the reason for our extended wait. (It always amuses me that people in general will wait around without question indefinitely until they are given instructions - no attept to find out what's going on or to change their situation. I guess it's some sort of herd instinct. Maybe I could get a grant to research it...) The fire alarm button was broken. They couldn't switch it off. Sadly, the lifts are connected to the alarm system and while the alarms are going off, they cannot be used.
So I went to the pub.
Well, it was precatically lunch time and it was clear that we wouldn't be going back in for a while, so I simply made effective use of the time afforded by the situation. I've been on a management development course, you know. I can do these things.
I rounded up a few bodies and headed off to Walkabout on Corn Street, where I indulged in what was described as a 'Brekkie Burger'. This, of course was the heart-attack-in-a-bun mentioned in the title of this post. It had a burger, bacon, fried egg and a hash brown in it. And it was dripping with delicious fatty liquid. I could feel the cholesterol building up as I ate...
Well. After an uneventful afternoon, I spent a great evening heroically righting wrongs in Paragon City with attractive young ladies. And Stead. Who is neither attractive or young. Er... or a lady.
So there you go. I acknowledge that the day was, perhaps, not as interesting as advertised. But I'm not refunding you.
Oh... Oh the bus. Forgot the bus. Yeah. That was this morning. Some silly moo got on the bus before me. It's the first stop of the day, so the bus driver was grumpy, I was grumpy and we couldn't be arsed to listen to some baggage dither about whether she wwanted a Day rider or a Return ticket and whether she was going to pay with her ten pound note and have to get a change ticket in return. It was, she informed us, the first time she'd caught a bus for years. She doesn't know how close it came to it being her last...
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