From our man in Balconia

Double rainbow

The weather has warmed up significantly, so I'm back on the balcony with my iBook, a cup of coffee, and a belly full of bacon and scrambled eggs. It's a beautiful day: blue sky with just a few decorative clouds, gentle breeze, the hum of traffic from the street behind me. Very nice indeed. [Update: just two short hours later, it's raining again. Gah.]

It's been a long and hard week at the architects'. The lead engineer is on holiday as of today, so we have been frantically struggling to get through the stack of concretework drawings before he left. (We didn't make it, there are still four plans out of around twenty which cannot be approved and released to the builders until we make some strategic decisions.)

The atmosphere in the office is just horrendous, I dread going to work these days. U is in a condition of permanent hysterical panic which expresses itself in outbursts of rage. The day starts with her telling us how awful it is that we haven't yet done X, Y and Z, what sort of idiots are we? She then lays out a list of critical things which must be done today! urgently! without fail! and of course neither X, Y nor Z is on the list. So they remain undone, and at the end of the day she tells us how stupid and lazy we are not to have yet done those things which are obviously much more important than the crap we wasted our time on.

This is her standard procedure: she treats G just the same way. She tells him, "call M but do this and that first." Ten minutes later as he is doing "this" she says "Haven't you called M yet? Dear God!"

The only reason I am still in the office is my 22-year friendship with G, that he would suffer if I quit (because there's nobody else around to do the work: the two part-timers have both quit recently, gee I wonder why). If U were sole proprietrix, I'd have left many months ago wearing a huge grin. However, that reason is wearing thinner. I have noticed the effect that the atmosphere has on me, in my blogging and commenting: I tend to avoid both, giving carefully anodyne comments where I had previously been (more) involved. I have retreated from nearly all physical and emotional contact to become a reader in a darkened room. (Actually that's not the only reason: I am also still in the office because I avoid conflict and confrontation, and being indispensable to even such a psychopathic team bolsters my ego. Call it a "love substitute," and call that pretty damned sad.)

I have to quit before it kills me or permanently warps my spirits.

All of this came out at dinner last night with Princess, she really is one of my dearest friends. It was a spur-of-the-moment idea, I couldn't get a place in the Viertelesschlotzer (a pleasant local restaurant between work and home) and so decided to eat in the city, and gave her a call. Princess suggested a newly-opened Indian restaurant (which doesn't have a website, imagine that). We ate well, drank water, and talked until nearly midnight. She drew me out on the subject of the atmosphere at work, and its effects, and made me realize that it does actually affect me. We talk often and at length about feelings and "emotional experiences," things that we would not tell other people.

G and I used to be able to talk in this way, but he has closed down almost completely in recent years which is very saddening.

In other news I went back to the opthalmologist and had a full checkup: everything is OK except that I'm getting older. I was given a prescription for a pair of reading glasses, for the computer and paperwork. which will be ready next week. He also recommended bifocals for normal use, but I'm not going to get them yet. I just don't have the money.

In other other news this is my four-hundred-and-second post. I missed the occasion of the four hundredth which I had vaguely thought to celebrate in some way. Tomorrow is my blog's second birthday, and that occasion I will celebrate in some as yet unknown fashion.

In otherest news today's must-see video clip is an amazing high-tech paintbrush from MIT. Thanks to Late Edition for the tip.