Monday, September 19, 2011
Smellies
Yesterday's puzzle was about air fresheners. Why do the people who make these things put such unpleasant perfume - or perhaps odour would be a better word - in them? A particularly bad example is the air fresheners which are commonly installed in taxis in Swindon. Little plastic contraptions which stick to the side of the passenger doors, rather in the way, I assume, of a fridge magnet. Is their something about Arkells' beer which causes its consumers to emit unpleasant odours, unpleasant odours which need something pretty rank to cover them? Another example is the perfume added to the spray on furniture polish used here at Epsom. The covering argument does not run here as no housewife is going to admit, even to herself, that her house contains unpleasant odours. Maybe the explanation is that the housewife wants to know and to make known that she has been polishing and an odourless polish would not tick this box. While a nice odour polish would cost too much. Or perhaps the carrier for the polish component of the aerosol would not carry a regular perfume? Ask Jeeves perhaps?
For this or perhaps other reasons woke up to a complicated dream this morning, drawn once again from the world of work. Also featuring long stairways in dank and cavernous buildings, a product in part, but not I think in entirety, of my time in the old, pre PFI/PPP Treasury Building. In the days when a government building really felt like the offices of government rather than the offices of some dodgy commercial enterprise.
I start off at some boring meeting. I am about to go away for a week and I am spending my time at the meeting working on a job application for which I have been short listed and the interview for which is the day I come back, maybe at 1720. I rush off without putting my papers away properly.
Come back a week later, bright and early, and start to look for the papers. Somebody helpfully retrieves the papers, in a plain manilla folder, from where it had been put away in the front of an open fronted cupboard. Luckily no-one had disturbed or removed it.
The folder contained, inter alia, papers for applications for several jobs, together with feed back from the various paper boards at which my applications had featured - if not exactly starred. I had failed to make the short list for one of them, one which had lots of illustrious candidates, so I did not feel too badly about it. Another job was more vague. I did not seem to be on the short list but I was mentioned in a positive way. Perhaps there was hope? This job was flavoured by the Fire Service College at Moreton-in-Marsh, a place where I had once done a bit of work. There was lots of other stuff but I could not find the papers for the interview later that day. Or rather I kept coming across them but they kept slipping away from me. I spend the whole day fiddling about, not getting any closer to where or when the interview was to be.
I don't think to try phoning anybody up to find out - which would look bad but which would be betting than a no-show.
I do very little of the preparation needed to impress the board. All that whoop-whoop stuff which seems to be part of applying for jobs these days. All that whoop-whoop stuff which boards think mean that you will hit the ground running. Maybe they have a point.
I eventually run the papers down about the time it turns out I am supposed to be at interview. I decide to do nothing. Still don't think to phone to apologise or even try to wangle another date.
At which point a rather cross mandarin turns up, modelled on someone who was a big cheese in my first department. I thought we were supposed to be talking about this job you are applying for, he says. I didn't think so at all, although I did remember talking to him about it before I went away. He was clearly peeved, particularly when he heard about the missed interview. He wanted me off his books and started to lecture me about the need to take getting another job, getting off his books, more seriously. I tell him that I have half a dozen or more applications in progress. Not mentioning that actually most of them have already hit the buffers. I start to think that maybe I am going to get made redundant and am rather emotional about it - even though this would be rather a good outcome. Anyway, cross mandarin calms down and slopes off.
It is now about 1815 and clearly time to go home. Go down lots of stairs. Come to a river, vaguely Thames-like but the detail is all wrong. Seems familiar just the same. As I cross the river, I see the gutted carcases of two large mechanical sharks dragged up out of the river onto the muddy foreshore, one rather larger than the other. Interesting, but not especially so. Get across the river and join the crowd streaming away to the left on their way to the railway station. Which is the way one would turn, as it happens, after crossing Westminster Bridge heading for Waterloo.
Wake up to remember that I do not need to worry about this sort of stuff any more. At my age I should be concentrating on the state of my various bowels. Not to mention that of one of the jars of blackberries and whisky (see 29th August) which is fermenting and which should not be. Just as well that I gave it a bubble closure rather than a close closure.
# posted by Jim @ 1:48 AM 
