heat, cold, pencils

Quite amusing today; several of us were moving round to different desks in order to do some checking of a codes & titles list, which was fiddly and needed to be done by hand and by two people to make absolutely sure it was accurate. One of my coworkers came round to the desk next to me.

Five minutes later she was complaining about the cold and looking up at the air conditioning vent directly above in a suspicious way.

She's seen the rest of us (who normally sit under/next to it) complain about the cold, but I think that in the past she'd always felt we were possibly being a little overly sensitive.

Heh.

(So why don't I try to move my desk? Well, it's a good position, it's got my back to the wall, I can always put on a cardigan, and in summer -- especially the way summer seems to be getting hotter -- it definitely has its advantages.)

---

Dolor

I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,
Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper-weight,
All the misery of manila folders and mucilage,
Desolation in immaculate public places,
Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard,
The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher,
Ritual of multigraph, paper-clip, comma,
Endless duplication of lives and objects.
And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions,
Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica,
Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium,
Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows,
Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate grey standard faces.

-- Theodore Roethke