The joys of work II - and some cause for alarm

As I said in my last post, I get on OK with my immediate colleagues. I guess we're all relatively experienced (in terms of age at least) - there are no Kids of '88 in our team, no tricky Gen-Y upstarts to deal with. I'm not so sure about some of the other people on my floor however. The bloke who sits opposite me and works in Finance is six foot five and twenty stone. Now he's fine, but his boss (a she) most definitely isn't. I really feel for the big man, as well as the woman he sits next to. "Now the figures in the 87002 account don't reconcile with the 70501 account, and did you forget about the 54101? How long have you been here now? How could you possibly not remember? This really isn't good enough." And so on, and so forth. It isn't pretty to watch and can be quite distracting. It's interesting though how having a boss from hell can create solidarity within a team. In a similar vein, we had a variety of full-day workshops in my last corporate job, ostensibly to instil in us the company's values: unity, integrity, fraternity and whatever else. But the real reason (perhaps) that they ran the workshops was that most of the staff hated them and would want to rebel, together, against them - thus creating unity and fraternity via the back door.

Last Thursday at 8pm I heard an alarm go off. It sounded a bit like a car alarm, maybe 50 or 100 metres away. Oh wait, maybe it's a fire alarm. It doesn't sound like it's in this building though, so unless I get a knock on the door I'm staying right here. Then someone knocked on my door. "It's a real fire! Get your tag!" What tag?! "OK don't worry, just get out!" And I got down those stairs pretty quickly, thankful that I lived on the fourth floor and not the ninth. Of course it wasn't a real fire at all but a six-monthly drill. The alarm could do with being a bit louder if you ask me. And that tag, well I've since found it attached to the fire extinguisher, which was last checked in June 1989. It was good to meet some of the other residents out in the car park. The subject of earthquakes came up, and supposedly this concrete building (constructed in 1970) would hold up OK, though I'm not convinced. Christchurch had another big aftershock yesterday - a magnitude 5.5 - followed by a string of smaller tremors.