Friday 16 July 2010

Looking good for the office?



This has appeared across the track that leads to my house,if you come an visit anytime this summer just ignore it and drive right on over it - don't be worried that you will catch us skinny dipping, we will hear you before you see us.

An X like that, scrawled over my domestic approaches, could annoy me if i didn't know it indicates hidden treasure.

However, the thing that is bugging me at the moment seems to be sandals.

On Friday evening I drove from the office where I sometimes work to the station where I intended to catch the train to the beach. The security cameras would then have recorded a remarkable transformation as I stripped out of “a day at the office”, down to my boxers and into “a weekend at the beach”.

Critical to all this was my sandals – I have one, smart and cultured pair for the office and another casual and bohemian pair for the beach, campsite and whatever.

Equally critical was advanced planning for the return on Monday morning when I would need to activate a reverse transformation and drive off to meet a client from the automobile industry.

Get, bike out, strip, add shorts, put map in bag, hang up trousers with fresh pressed shirt and cycle off to catch train.

Unfortunately in my haste I left the smart and cultured sandals on the floor outside the car and when I returned, in haste and covered in sand and sun cream Monday morning they were, of course, gone.

None of this of course compares with this morning - another dawn of “off to look good with a client” - when I woke with stiff and creaky back.

I reached for the deep heat ointment – a particularly fiendish one found in a German supermarket before European legislation outlawed such venom – and liberally applied it.

Then I washed my face.

I should have washed my hands first.

2 comments:

vicki said...

Ha! Loved this.

I have that need-to-look-good-for-the office feeling intensely on the first day of a new course. I reason that on the second day it doesn't matter so much because appearances will hopefully be pretty irrelevant by then, but on the first Monday I find it a challenge to look clean, sharp (as they say in the US - I think they mean neat and tidy) and well-pressed.

We decided not to iron anything in our house a decade of so ago. We do have an iron which we keep in the back of a kitchen cabinet (you have to move the waste bin out of the way to get to it) We have no ironing board though, so in emergencies I get towels out and lay them on the floor, but it's a bit of a pallaver.

But onto more interesting matters: that cross in the road. Might it mean optical fibres for high speed internet, Chris?

popps said...

Optical fibres- ha!
No, it was the annual mountain bike challenge and they were warning the cyclists so that they wouldn't het lost in the wrong end of the forest!
We will have to stay happy with the hamsters in cage that we use around here for all things digital.
I agree with you though, ironing belongs in the middle ages.