Lost in time

The office clock near my cubicle stopped working at about 9:45 am today. It didn't take more than a few minutes for a couple of guys to come in with a new battery and get it going again, but since we are efficient civil servants, none of us actually got round to reporting the clock's stoppedness till, oh, close to 5 pm.

So we only just got a working clock. Because it's much more fun to spend your entire day getting confused and bitching about the fact that the clock isn't working.

I confess that I got up at one point before lunch to go over to tell someone about the non-working clock, but before I got to that person's cubicle, another thought/errand had hijacked me and I never made it there. Such is the nature of my work environment. Any time when you leave your desk is a perilous opportunity for new thoughts, new ideas, forgotten work and equally disoriented colleagues to waylay you and dragoon you into five new tasks before you remember the original one that you started out with. Some days I get up to go to the washroom and return to my cubicle having not gone --- and not remembering till several minutes later (when the body's alarm system kicks in) that, um, dude, I need to go.