Send me to my room. Now.

This afternoon at work I did a childish thing.

I went to the drinks machine to get the coffees in. The measure of how interminably dull a day is in this place is the number of times various people leap up with a cry of “I’ll get the drinks in!”. On a really uninspiring day, even I can be seen having a good old gossip with the lovely ladies at the other end of the office under the pretext of hunting and gathering refreshments for parched colleagues. In order for you to understand just how bored I have to be to do something nice for other people, please consider the startling statistic that, in the five years I worked for my last employer, I made the tea precisely twice, and I spat in someone’s the second time because he a) professed his astonishment that I was making tea again only three years after the last time and b) complained that the first one I made him was rubbish.

So anyway. This afternoon. Bored. Bored with wrestling with budget figures that Not So New Boss Anymore completely failed to provide before swanning off on a Caribbean cruise. Bored with not eating any chocolate. So bored that I was even bored with reading blogs. You know that saturation point you reach where you’re thinking I Just Can’t Look at Another Blog Without Screaming and then you’re all ooh! I wonder if anyone has replied to my comment on [insert your blog name here]? And you spend the whole afternoon trying to do some work but failing because by now your mouse hand is genetically predisposed towards firing up IE and browsing your favourites list even as your brain screams no!! I am turning to mush and besides, you’ll get the sack if you don’t stop surfing and do some work!!

Um.

So anyway, off I schlepped, tray in hand, to get the drinks in. Pressed my nose enviously against the glass of the vending machine and drooled a bit over all the horrible, overprocessed things in it that taste so good but that I Cannot Eat. Read the months-old notices on the bulletin board. Again. Contemplated setting the fire alarm off (just for fun. You know).

And then I saw it. The last plastic cup for the water cooler. I didn’t need that cup. I was getting hot drinks. I knew full well that if the springy cup-holding thing is empty you can’t have a refreshing cold drink. No. You have to wait for someone to come up from the post room with more cups. Except if you ring the post room and nobody is there, you might have to wait for ages. Or you could go down to the post room yourself. But it doesn’t help, you see. Because if nobody is there, you still can’t get any more cups. For ages. So there some hapless colleague might be, thirsty and bereft of cup. It would be a dreadful thing to take the last cup and put someone in that position, and of course I would never do such a thing.

Instead, I licked my finger, rubbed it round the inside of the cup and put it back.

See you in hell. Wheeee!