Deepe in ye Darkeness, Somethynge Stirrs

So Metro got told last week "They're bringing in another IT guy. You're going to have to move before Friday." Then he heard "You're going to have to move this week." "Friday?" he inquired plaintively. "Yeah," said the lying sack of an IT director, leaning beamingly over the desk. That was yesterday morning. At eleven o'clock the person who will be occupying my desk came in and said "Oh--weren't you moving? Lionhardt said you'd be moving this morning."

Metro knows when he's been licked. Usually there are traces of saliva, and sometimes cat hair. Notwithstanding which, he also knows that you can fight city hall only if you're prepared to set the place afire. So he grumblingly moved.

Metro lost 16 square feet of desk space, because his 7' desk won't fit in the 7' space he now lives in. This, O Avid Fan, is a severe handicap to one who regards his desk as a flat filing cabinet.

More interestingly, the new Metro desk is located in "the cube". In times long lost two ceilingless walls were built out from the corner to form a small square room. Inside said room dwell the odd couple of our workplace. Call them George and Kramer.

Kramer is a lanky dude with a shaved head and spectacles. Somehow "spectacles" seems the right word. He would be entirely at home in a woodcut illustration of Scrooge or Screwtape. He is tall, thin and stooped, with a quiet demeanor unless roused. George is short, balding, and permanently irritable. If a bag of money fell on him he'd be too busy complaining about the headache and threatening to sue to notice it was stuffed with cash. Though he does have a terrific if morbid and depressing sense of humour.

However, in one respect he's rather like Gollum: he dislikes the light, he does. My precioussss.

So Metro moved from a desk ten feet from the front window, at the perfect angle to receive sunshine but not glare, to a space about twenty feet on each side, to share with three people and their computers what was once an executive office for one. There are four fluorescent fixtures above this space. Each equipped to contain four long tubes, light for the giving of. That's sixteen potential sources of sickly glare, rather than sunshine.

But only one fixture contains these light-giving tubes. When I first arrived, I thought it was some misguided gesture of economy on the part of the company that made a quarter of my office look like the darkest depths of Mordor. But it's George. He dislikes the glare (and I don't really blame him), so he had fourteen tubes pulled out. What light there is in this space, arcs eye-scorchingly from the two tubes above and opposite me, turning my monitor into a backlit monolith with a glowing centre.

Fortunately we're moving from this building sometime within the next six months. So screw it. Not that it'd do any good to complain. Despite the fact that without us they'd have $#!7 to sell, we as a department occupy a similar slot to the janitorial contractors who come in just as the office shuts. The rest of the company (being about 40% salespeople) sort of know we're around, doing whatever it is that we do, but they don't see us as essential to the process.

In fact, we've pre-empted a large, daylit office on the second floor of the new building, reasoning that being the denizens of the basement, in a section of the building most people never see, has led to this incorrect attitude.

Anyway, as I was moving my computer tower into the new space (where it must squat atop a desk without sufficient underspace to store it) the new guy appeared, dragging a box.

"Bet you're thrilled," he said.
"Could be worse," I said, like the Black Knight of Monty Python and the Holy Grail (It's just a flesh wound!).
"I know what you mean," he said reflectively "this is my sixth move in two years."

Yeah, it could be worse.

In the words of M. EaGLe: Es macht man denken (Makes yer fink, dunnit?)
"I wept because I had no shoes, until I met a man who had some, and mugged him."

But for now, the Mine of Moria awaits me. Fly, you fools!

If you're looking for something to do, why not go rock out to some Funny Money? The I highly recommend as a tasty metal treat the song which starts playing when the site loads.