The Office

It's amazing how incredibly aware you get of the person sitting next to you. It's not like we're jammed in shoulder to shoulder or anything, in fact this desk is bigger than anything I've ever had through my four years at Uni, but all the same, I could sit back in my stylishly ergonomic chair with my eyes shut (time and work permitting) and know exactly who's doing what. Ringtones are easy but the rhythm of someone's mouse and keyboard gives away almost as much.

We also have a tin of cookies in the office. Some 'premier selection' or other that involves a lot of chocolate and some biscuit in various shapes and sizes. When I first got here, I thought it was awesome, and it would magically refill every time it got empty. Six weeks on and I shudder to even look at the cupboard where boxes and boxes of this stuff is kept. We also get fruit delivered twice a week, but you gotta be quick, or you'll be left with the last, most dessicated looking orange in the pile, and even that'll go by lunchtime.

One of the upsides I can think of working in a firm that's largely male is that there's never a queue for the bathroom. Although whoever designed the toilet paper dispenser and the toilet roll should be shot. There is too much tissue on the entire roll (you'll probably never hear that one at home) and it rests against the inner wall of the dispenser such that you can only ever get the paper out square by square, because the perforation isn't strong enough to withstand the entire bulk of the roll. Worse still, when you have to twist your arm up into the dispenser to find the end of the roll, and then proceed to pull it out square by square until you've collected enough.

Network printing is another thing that is beyond me (Regressions, I can now handle). You need to remember to set up two-to-a-page, double sided (because trees are good things), and tell it to collate so you're not the idiot sorting through reams of paper. Then you have to choose one printer out of about twenty three, choose which pages you want and how many copies you need and finally hit print. You then walk all the way to the printer of your choice and stand there waiting for it to start, only it doesn't. You dash back to your computer, thinking you've probably sent it to one of the other twenty two printers, and run around the third floor printers hoping that it hasn't gone to the second floor instead. Then it starts all over again.

To be fair though, I haven't been all that desperate for Fridays. Still eager.