F1 Rocks Singapore (the view from the office)

Another evening: the Champions League being illegally streamed in the background, the wife out of town, no food in the fridge and the end of summer arriving through a spectacular deluge that combined horribly with the holes in my shoes can only mean one thing: time to scribe.

Then again, tonight can’t come close to matching the all night 37 hour shift special that accidentally happened the other week (although on the upside I have inherited a very nice towel from that evening and I again had the pleasure of using the office shower). Annoyingly many of those hours were spent away from the infinity speed broadband comforts of the office due to security (I did consider hiding and camping before realising that the door to the toilets is locked overnight, and neither did I fancy an Entrapment esque web of motion sensors to contend with), although armed with a beer watching the tennis at John’s house things could have been worse. Having incurred the curses of a furious Scandinavian through the night, the awkward small talk with our bearded post room manager at 5:55am waiting for the office to open actually turned out to be the worst part of the experience..

Anyway, I got off lightly compared to some lately. Steve’s never-ending battle with his design agency finally came to a head involving a lot of capital letters and some phone slamming. Another colleague was strip searched at Heathrow airport flying out to Singapore for business having repeatedly set off the security alarms. The incriminating evidence was later discovered to be in the area of bosom support. The mental image of this event is joyously excellent in a cartoonish kind of way.

Speaking of Singapore, that’s where most of the workforce are based these days indulging in what I can only imagine to be an endless succession of the sort of parties seen in the juicy bits of free newspapers. The actual evidence suggests otherwise, indicating a lot of hard work with nine days to go until Da Mouth kick off F1 Rocks and numerous diva demands to cater for. The newspapers in England have recently run made up in house stories including the suggestion that Beyonce will take a 37 second helicopter flight from her hotel to the stage, and that there’ll be an after party on a 71st storey helipad with every chance of a Black Eyed Pea or two plummeting to their doom. These rumours may not escape the stringent filtering of the Singapore press, and neither would my recent digging which has unearthed the gold that one F1 Rocks artist checks into hotels under the pseudonym ‘Dixie Normous’ (say it out loud if you don’t get it. Although not if you’re in the library).

Nemesis update: The original content of this paragraph was deemed too incriminating on my behalf, so I’ll diplomatically say that I’ve discovered when not furiously maintaining personal hygiene, the nemesis engages in activity that screams ‘corporate high flyer’ even more the driving an open-topped Porsche along a mountain road with a busty blonde in the front seat or having a basketball hoop over the waste paper bin.

Time to go finish the Champions League and brave the deluge, although undoubtedly I’ll spend most of the night trying to ignore the incessant whirring of my new fangled Blackberry, a sign that I’m well on the way to replicating the nemesis’ corporate stylings…

P.S. I just heard that one of the F1 Rocks artists wants a brand of chewing gum flown in from England before they’ll take the stage in Singapore.. A trident strike? I’ll believe it when I see it..

My Kingdom for a Blackberry!

I’m squinting through tears of tiredness as I sit in a deserted office listening to Radiohead, thinking that the Subway sandwich (Sub of the day of course – Tuesday = Meatball Marinara Madness) that constituted dinner was a long time ago, and wishing I was on a sofa with the home made Crunchie ice cream that the wife knocked up earlier. Alas. But with the morning comes a fresh onslaught of strife direct to my inbox, so I have to make the most of these lulls, even if they only come about at 9:40 pm. I do actually have a sleeping bag in my bottom draw, cereal on my desk and a gloriously futuristic shower on the seventh floor should the worst happen..

So anyway, there are too many things and not enough people: a great ratio when applied to food, but terrible when applied to tasks. Mistakes are creeping into our work and mental psyche. Kate keeps emailing the Black Eyed Peas’ manager when she means to drop me a note as we have similar names. A colleague who shall remain nameless submitted their subscription to the Daily Mail for me to process as an expenses claim earlier (this could explain their general agitated state – Jon Gaunt can’t be good for high blood pressure). I’ve been adding really simple tasks such as ‘getting a glass of water’ to my daily to-do list so I can enjoy the rare satisfaction of ticking things off more often. Another nameless colleague has been accused of foul play by their partner who can’t believe that working so late comes as standard. Even my pin up of Jenson’s girlfriend doesn’t give me the same rush of pleasure anymore…

(Stopped writing here as Frank, our ever surly security guard, tired of my protestations of homelessness and turfed me out into the night).

I’m resuming now a day later, full of jacket potato (topped with beans and tuna – killer combo) and doom mongering chat about job security at lunch, and feeling much brighter. Perhaps it’s the realisation that it’s not my fault that the extranet is doomed (I’m just a mouthpiece for a lousy system – like Barack Obama with fewer nuclear capabilities). Maybe it’s the fact that my Crunchie ice cream hadn’t yet set and was essentially a yoghurt of condensed milk and cream. Could be that I’m cheered by the homeless guy meandering down King Street yelling ‘I AM ENGLISH’ at foreign looking folk. I think it’s more to do with the fact that it’s the middle of the afternoon, and although my taste in depressing music hasn’t changed (Elliott Smith today), I’ve concluded that my overall happiness is now constrained by the volume of, and anger expressed in, my inbox, and the emotional rollercoasters of my colleagues, which permeate Dementor style through to me.

Anyway, enough pontificating on my PMS, I have to go and indulge my growing fixation on Pixie Lott, which has been fuelled by a 40ft billboard of her being put up next to the office. I think Mrs Button may have a pin-up rival before too long..

Nemesis Update: