Tuesday, February 20, 2007

The Meat Locker

Work is trying to freeze me out. Literally. I don’t know what it is about this area of the office where I reside for eight hours a day, but it is always, always freezing cold. I mean so cold I’m wearing a sweater over my sweater and hunting around for a blanket to wrap around my legs like I’m some old fart in a nursing home. And if I had a pair of fuzzy bunny slippers, you can be sure I’d throw them on over my sassy heels just to keep my digits from turning to ice cubes.

I’ve had the engineer up a few times but there’s nothing he can do. Something about the way the HVAC system operates and the fact that all the heating registers are in the offices, and all the people in the offices like to close their doors and keep the heat to themselves instead of sharing it with the cogs shivering in their pods.

It was so bad yesterday that I drank five cups of coffee in the morning alone just to try and keep my body temperature up. I was so wired by the afternoon I had to lay off the stuff. Then of course come 3:30 I crashed and could barely keep my eyes open. This morning is shaping up to look about the same. Every one of my extremities is cold. My fingers can barely bend so I feel like I’m just mashing my fists into the keyboard.

I thought with the renovations they just did next to my pod that some warm air would flow through, but it didn’t. Now if feels like cold air is blowing down from the vent above me, so I have a steady flow of freezing assaulting my person.

Worst of it is, I can’t even get a space heater because it’s apparently a fire hazard due to the fabric pod material and also an electrical hazard because it takes up too much wattage and might crash our system. I say bring on the crash if I can just have five minutes of warmth.

If this keeps up, I’m going to have to go in search of shared body heat. Somewhere other than here though because...well I have no interest in swapping body heat with any of my officemates. A girl has to have some rules.


On the plus side, if I ever get lost in the Arctic, I feel confident I could survive. At least for about eight hours.

Days left until Documentary Hits the Airwaves: 16 Days!!

5 comments:

Unknown said...

Bring a thermometer in and document the temperature. Surely there are laws against working in conditions like that?

Shelli Stevens said...

This may sound crazy, but I'm jealous of the cold! LOL. I wish we had snow and cold. I love bundling under blankets. I hate anything over 75 degrees. But I hope you get some heat heading your way soon. Or maybe it's an excuse to go shopping for more sweaters :D

Unknown said...

Kelly I feel your pain. My office is just as bad, but I have two extremes. My training room is a boiler room and I nearly pass out when I'm teaching. Then I go back to my cube and freeze because there's no heat. It's all in my training room apparently.

Buildings suck!

Tess said...

Yikes! I remember those days, except for me it came in the summer, when they cranked up the A/C in our building and I'd freeze in my pod, not having access to anything so exotic as sunlight :-/

I have the docu air date programmed into my Palm - both the desktop calendar and my handheld :-) Sean is going to set the VCR to tape (it's a complicated system he's put together here in the cabin) - he's a friend of Joanna's, so he wants to see it too.

Melissa Amateis said...

It gets cold in our office, too, and like you, they banned our space heaters. I finally caved and brought a blanket to work. There were a few days that I'm sure I looked like a mummy.