Office mishaps
I am pleased to say that there aren't many mishaps to report this month, so I had better own up to one myself. I sent out an invoice for a large sum that, I noticed the next day, proved to be a very large sum: there was an extra zero in it. A quick telephone call to a helpful secretary, and the offending document was destroyed before it reached the client.
When Gary heard that I was composing some more office trivia, he offered to get me a coffee, but unfortunately it never materialised. He was probably too busy remaking the model of a 40-storey office block that he had built to one scale horizontally and a different scale vertically.
It's a shame (about the coffee I mean).
Dangerous doughnuts
It's becoming a dangerous tradition that people buy doughnuts for everyone in the office. One afternoon Justin ate two doughnuts, one macaroon and a "large number" of small chocolate eggs, after having been to the nearby Indian YMCA for lunch (famed for generous servings of curry at very reasonable prices). And he still looks thin.
On the move again
Next month we are due to aquire the rest of the floor on which we currently reside, so a new plan was drawn up. After we had accommodated the model-making areas, meeting spaces and sofas (no architect's office is complete without a couple of these), there was just enough room for 20 people. At our present rate of expansion that will keep us going until June, so we are going to have to move again quite soon. I can't wait.
A bind over binders
I never knew ordering stationery could be so trying. We need some A3 ringbinders, but they are not available from the manufacturer of the blue A4 ringbinders I bought earlier, so if I get A3 binders in a blue that looks almost the same in the catalogue, they might clash. So can I get them in red please? The picture in the catalogue shows them in red, but there is no order code or price for red.
We also need a couple of cheap calculators: they must be simple (no fancy functions), but they need a square-root key, a 10-digit, non-tilted display, and, most importantly, the colour must be black. There are 135 calculators in the stationery catalogue. None of them matches our exacting criteria.
Ken's post
It's not usually very exciting, but I was intrigued by the following from someone who works for an architectural magazine (not 黑洞社区): "I suggest we rendezvous at the service entrance 鈥� I'll be there at about 9.30am. (Small, fair-haired, probably carrying a copy of this month's [name of magazine].)" 9.30am? For a journalist? Really?
Marathon man
It's amazing the lengths some people go to in order to avoid exercise. On Monday 19 April Gary and James asked Barry if he would like to come for a lunch-time run in Regent's Park. He made some feeble excuse about having run 26 miles the previous day. (OK, he did it in three hours 51 minutes, which is pretty impressive, since the previous week he looked as if he was in need of crutches. And he raised lots of money for Barnardo's 鈥� but still).
Man of many talents
For the last three months, as well as trying to do my "proper" job, I have been acting as Ken's secretary/PA and office receptionist. When I worked for a large company in a former life I spent some time running a smallish department without a secretary, so I developed my own secretarial skills. But looking after a group of architects who make beautiful models but aren't house-trained, with a boss whose pocket diary often includes meetings that aren't in his Outlook calendar, is not a restful occupation. But all that has changed: we now have a full-time secretary. Welcome Melissa!
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