If one whiffles the trousers of history, you shall discover many disturbing incidents involving the humble shower. The Germans were guilty of some reprehensible alternate uses during the war, Janet Leigh suffered something sharper than shower gel in Hitchcock’s Psycho and “ if you were privileged enough to attend public school “ one was expected to uncomplainingly endure the repeated rogerings from the Head Boy.

Being a comprehensive lad, thankfully that vignette of education passed me by, but now I’m adding my own “ admittedly somewhat milder “experiences to this pantheon of misery.

Remember last week when the ratio of queue to showers attained the hitherto un-scaled irritation ratio of 10 to 1? The situation was sufficiently dire to inspire the apathetic grumblings of the shower room to take direct action. A torrent of emails bombarded the Facilities help desk with our list of outrages demands including working showers, a non sticky floor, removal of old clothes and dead bodies and “ pushing it a bit “ the occasional refill of the hand towel dispenser.

Our reward was action, well the promise of action anyway which for Facilities (Motto stop whinging, it’s shit for everybody here“) constitutes the same thing. Dusty parts were retrieved from back order, the jet wash hosed down ready for use and a flange of boiler suited engineering types were summarily dispatched into the land of the unshowered. Their promises were legion “ bounteous hot water, non fetid environmentals and a reduced risk of typhoid.

And in the meantime, we bathed in the warm glow of finally getting one over the hidden denizens of our property group. We showed ˜em, they can’t stand up to mass action, typical bullies “ snap like twigs when facing a bit of English backbone. You could almost hear the strains of Jerusalem as we indulged in a bout of metaphoric back slapping. Although that could just have been the onset of post sprout rectal music, you can never be too sure.

The signs of actual activity were all around me this morning. We had a new bin, a strongly worded note re: weapons grade socks and a small patch of cleaned floor. On the downside, they had disconnected the boiler. You see this is their standard response, you ask us how much worse it can get and we’ll show you.

Apparently the boiler has been eaten by one of the carbonised socks which now have taken upright form and show the beginnings of a personality. It’s hard not to cue up a joke about offering them the shower maintenance contract but there’s probably little point. After the bracing nay heart stopping experience of a freezing shower this morning, it’s clear the facilities group are looking to solve the problem more cheaply by simply killing us all.

And I see the weather forecast predicts an onset of wintry conditions layering frosts onto the icy wastes of Aylesbury Vale. Now I was born in Yorkshire, we’re meant to be good in cold conditions but even with the genetic thick skin of my birth, freezing cold showers have pushed me over the edge.

I shall, therefore, be found at my desk naked displaying the message Smelly Non Showered Person Appeal “ Please give generously” on a strategically placed sign .

This is not a new type of bestiality inspired cigarette, rather a sad tale of suicidal bagers taken from that irreverent electronic daily, The Register:

Reginald Perrin would love it: rail services near Tonbridge, Kent, were yesterday disrupted by “a smoldering badger on the line”, the Daily Mirror reports.

Said disruption was not, however, on the same apocalyptic scale as that commonly caused by the wrong kind of leaves on the line, as watch manager Peter Brown explained: “Somebody had reported an electrical fire on the track at 8.30am. It [the badger] was on fire and every time a train came past it reignited.

“The flames would die down, but when another train passed the wind would cause the fire to start up again. I wasn’t going to have trains stopped because the badger was already dead.

“We just told Network Rail there was a smoldering badger on the line. It didn’t present a further danger.”

A maintenance crew was duly dispatched to remove the fried badger from the tracks. Brown noted: “Thankfully I should think it died very quickly of electrocution, and did not suffer.”

What a shame for the badger’s family; think of the children Mum, mum, can we go and see Dad’s grave? / No but if you’re good, we’ll visit his ashes?

PS
In episode five, series two of The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, the hero does indeed explain his late arrival at work with: “Twenty-two minutes late, badger ate a junction box at New Malden.”

Two unrelated events and a mad coincidence nail home the hypothesis that all is not well on our planet. Firstly what is going on with the weather? I know it’s autumn, streets disappearing under crinkly brown carpets, significant lack of light during morning and evening and the strengthening of cooling winds. Fine with all that, no meteroligical issue at all with standard seasonal conditions, but the rainfall, well that’s quite another matter.

It never rains all day anymore; oh no, instead we get torrential downpours more suited to a tropical storm, and then just as the rain is properly lashing down, it stops and the sun comes out. Ten minutes later, badoom, huge crack of thunder, rain bouncing off the street to eye level, creation of inland seas. Sorry, it’s just not right and a strong letter of complaint will whiz off once the correct government department to whinge at has been established.

Secondly, Chiltern Railways have unbelievably been awarded a prize. Suspend that disbelief for a second to reconcile their being first at anything except shoddy service, when you realise it was voted for by holiday makers“. As a friend at work says i.e. old people who only ever travel off peak, have all day to kill, enjoy the scenery out the window when the train stops for hours, and rate any experience as preferable to an imminent death!“. He’s right of course but either “ and I can’t credit this “ every other train franchise is somehow worse or they’ve blackmailed the judge’s with heavily photoshopped pictures of deviant sexual practices involving goats. Goats I’d wager.

Now to the co-incidence, as the horror of Chiltern Railways being awarded anything but custard pies to the face sank in, I was reading this:

The three toed sloth rests or sleeps on average 20 times a day” [CR trains] It’s only real habit is indolence“[CR staff] The sloth is busiest at sunset, although using the word busy in it’s most relaxed state” [CR ability to get two trains off in one hour about 7pm]. It moves at a speed of 400 metres in one hour” [Yep, sounds about right unless Rickmansworth Signals are involved]. When motivated it can crest speeds of 250 metres an hour on the ground. Unmotivated it covers four to five metres in an hour” [See previous point re: Rickmansworth signals]

There’s more, oh yes. If you come upon a sleeping three-toed sloth, two or three nudges should suffice to awaken it” [CR ticket inspector]. It will then look sleepily in every direction but yours. As for hearing the sloth is not so much deaf as uninterested in sound“[sorry mate, no idea, can’t help you”]

It finishes with a jolly “How does it survive you might ask?“. You might indeed. Un-bloody-canny or what?

A small prize for anyone who identifies the blatant plagiarism of which book?

To pull together the strands of this world gone bonkers, I’m increasingly turning to the rather splendiferous bullshit generator which spits out such gems as:

Do you think he’ll mind if we repurpose the synergistic interfaces and redefine the granular channels so we can innovate global infrastructures? We’ll probably need to harness cross-platform relationships, expedite distributed mindshare, empower revolutionary convergence and scale extensible architectures to achieve our goal of world domination through the structured agenda, but it may just be possible if he gets on board!?

I’ll not let on who provided this mastery of nonsense or the original link; suffice it to say he occupies a lofty and senior position in our organisation.

Today I’m feeling a. bamboozled and b. ready for a drink. Option b, I think.

The lifts adjacent to our hamster pods are ironically termed the Fun Boy Three“. This is an oblique reference to their inability to travel vertically without shuddering to a lengthy halt, or maliciously crushing a limb in their claw like doors. The closest one has a ground state of broken; occasionally it judders into life to cheekily abandon passengers between floors, before being immobilised by a weary collection of excuses. Can’t get the parts mate” or too many fat people on the upper floors have knackered it“.

This leaves just the two operating although today one was in obvious mechanical distress. There was a disturbing combination of bumping and grinding likely to trigger a sequence of catastrophic events, ending in a plummet to, and probably through, the ground floor. For anyone familiar with the lift plunging, cable slashing scene in the original Omen, the parallel was obvious. Entering that lift could only end in a fatal anthology of blood and entrails. Still, being more than a little keen for a quick shower, a large coffee and an entraily bucket of fried food, it seemed worth the risk.

The doors made three abortive attempts to close before slamming shut in an ear bleeding crash. Anyone venturing an unguarded arm, in an attempt at holding the lift, would have been reunited with their withered stump on the ground floor. They would have had plenty of time to bleed down the stairs though as the lift attempted a bold sideways move, clearly aggravated at being rigidly secured in it’s perpendicular prison,. It put me in mind of the elevator in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory except with less glass and more potential for imminent death.

More victims ill advisedly added themselves to this boxy death toll, and the lift responded with a mechanical death rattle as the doors finally wheezed open on the ground floor. Pondering the possibility of spending my entire morning waiting for a non lethal encounter with a rising lift, I jumped both physically and metaphorically out of the box and made slow but safe progress up the fire-stairs.

Shaky legs and rasping lungs apart, this proved to be a shrewd decision, as the entire Fun Boy Three had joined their striking brothers in the shower and ambushed about half the firm between floors three and four. There’s a book running on whether the coffee machine or lifts will be repaired first, but, based on historical precedent, I sincerely hope those trapped are provisioned with sandwiches for at least a couple of days.

In the same way that people begin to resemble their pets, these lifts remind me of some of our less auspicious working practices. I’ll not enumerate these in all their glory, but take slow, difficult, inconsistent, frustrating and bonkers as examples and I think you’ll get the idea.

It’s hard to credit that an apparently sane man can get properly annoyed at both showers AND lifts in the same week. Unless you’ve met me, in which case you’ll be nodding sanguinely, muttering once a nutter, always a nutter“.

In a doomed attempt to clear the half written backlog, I’m switching strategies in favour of shorter de-fluffed articles starting with this one. So in terms of a punchy opening, that’s a close approximation to events in the changing room this morning.

We’re down to one shower now; no-one knows why and since the facilities helpdesk is peopled by those whose objectives include saving money” and being apathetically unhelpful” but do not include fixing the problem“, it’s unlikely to be sorted any time soon. Adapting to this watery uni-jet, we’re all selecting the quickwash option to ensure a decent throughput.

Except for the bloke in front of me. You could tell he worked for tax; all his clothes were laid out as if he were waiting for his funeral, which wasn’t far away unless he hopped it sharpish out of the shower. But no, entirely incognisant as he was to the increasing backpressure of sweaty and late individuals, each body part was three times meticulously and laboriously washed.

Honestly, anymore selfish and he’d have ripped the showerhead off the wall and taken it with him. I was defiant, ignoring the normal protocol of staring at the ceiling or partaking in a spot of urban archaeology, nasally dating abandoned socks. Instead I fixed him with my best Paddington Bear Stare and willed his shower gel to morph into drain cleaner. But, of course this was wasted, him being a member of the dull numerical class, his myopia was confirmed by a pair of dustbin lid sized specs perfectly aligned on his towel. He was clearly washing by slow touch and memory.

Finally, probably sensing a build up of barely restrained violence, he vacated the shower area wrapping himself in a square root of towel. I was showered, dried, dressed and outta there before he’d even clothed himself in appropriate trouserage. I’m sure he was ticking each task off in a book pants on, check, plum line from nose aligned with Y-Front, check, talcum powder nostrils, check, etc“.

God Alive, it was bad enough sharing a ten minute fetid space with this denizen of the accounting hoard; so I couldn’t help thinking as he put on his wedding ring (polish three times, twirl, examine in light, make constipated face, polish once more, slip onto finger, twirl, check positioning, complete double entry book keeping“) what it would be like to be his wife. Not in a kind of kinky, cross-dressing homo erotic fantasy (oh that’s me screwed with the google-bot indexer now) rather in a has his wife been selected for canonisation kind of way“. And if not, why not?

It was only the thought of his poor family that wrenched away the happy slappy fist of doom that was bunching subconsciously. If I’m caught behind him again though, I’m going to hide his glasses, mess up his clothes and eat his wedding ring. Just to check if this really does make people like that explode.

Trust me, he’s earned it.