Game of Drones

Winter is coming.

The autumnal chill is already in the air.

The term-timers are gradually trickling back to the office with boxes of chocolates, biscuits and mind-numbing tales of their family holiday along with albums/ mobile phones filled with equally tedious photos of beaches, swimming pools and yet more beaches.

Winter is coming.

And with it the annual skirmish of Window Wars, the pitched battles of civil servants forced to hare open plan areas. The APs in their private offices are oblivious to the politicking on the main floor. One of them even has the gall to complain about the hum of the air conditioning unit outside their window. (What air is this thing conditioning? It’s not the mere plebs’ accommodation, that’s for sure. Maybe it’s helping to cool the servers in the Comms room. Or more likely, the secret bar in the Principal Officer’s room.)

First world problems. You have a door, AP. And I hate you for it. I want a door. Those of us who worked through most of the summer with a pleasant breeze from our windows lifting the stale coffee aromas, the rancid stink of rotting banana peels in the seldom-emptied waste bins, the all-permeating canteen cabbage and the noxious odours of the even less frequently washed armpits of the stinkier colleagues, are now unwittingly engaged in this battle as the tanned term-timers, still sporting unflattering capri pants and flip flops in the office (giving the rest of us  a vile vista of verrucae and varicose veins) flap around in their unseasonable outfits, demanding the closure of more and more windows until the goosebumps on their bingo-winged arms subside. As I’ve said, I don’t have a door. So when a putative God (or, in this case, a middle-aged woman) closes a window, a door doesn’t open for me.

I could go to the Woodies down the road from the office and buy myself a door, but then I’d need a wall to make it work. And I’m sure Facilities Management / Office of Public “Works” will have something to say about my bringing building materials into the office.

The solution? Fans. With rotating blades. Sharp rotating blades. Hmmm. It’s one way to get a-head.

Next time: A Dance with Wagons