Monday 1 March 2010

Can anyone show me the script please?

I work in a fourteen storey building, which must house a a finite number of employees. I've been working there over two years. How come every time I get in the lift there are people I've never seen before? In fact, when I use the kitchen on the ninth floor, if there is someone else squirting water from the boiler on a teabag, chances are I've not seen them before either. It's starting to worry me. Am I in a 'Truman Show' situation, where the actors are changing regularly? Should I try to break out through the skyline of my local suburbia, somewhere over Pound Mart and the non chain coffee shop that should be nice but isn't? Spookily, today someone was very friendly and spoke to me like they knew me - I could swear I hadn't seen them before. They took the stairs though.

Perhaps there's a crowd of people on the roof, just coming down one or two at a time in the lifts. If I don't get in, maybe they change on the ground floor and go up again until they are spotted. Come to think of it, the security guys in their office on the ground floor always look quite knowing. They're often on the phone too, perhaps they're sending a message to the group of bit-part extras on the roof.

I would take the stairs more often to avoid this conundrum. Trouble is, 252 stairs leaves me gasping for breath at the photocopier and my cappuccino has gone disappointingly tepid by the time I collapse, wheezing, at my desk. The (very good) coffee shop join me in some mild Health and Safety anarchy, and now super-heat my beverage to skin-grafting temperatures. Hopefully, as I get fitter, this won't be necessary. I'll be able to bound up the stairs three at a time, laughing joyfully as I biff the green button on the photocopier to wake it up on my way to my pod zone. I then biff the button on my computer which also takes a good ten minutes to come round. I take the opportunity to stare at the view of Canary Wharf in the distance, where my friend- who-did-better-than-me-at-school works. There must be loads of people in that building, I'll ask her if she recognises anyone in the lifts.

1 comment:

J Adamthwaite said...

This sounds like the beginning of a good story! Who are all these people???