Beware of The Warehouse...

"Eee hee!" in the words of those kids off the Simpsons... Chez SH HQ, today has been designated warehouse day. A charming occasion when most members of the team are dispatched to our cold, isolated warehouse to rifle through poorly labelled cardboard boxes covered with at least 5 years of packing labels, searching for items to be packed up and taken to site this Easter.

Most members of the team that is... apart from ME!

And how do I choose to exercise my freedom? Attempting to ensure that *I* will be the first customer to purchase a coffee from our town's latest premier coffee house - a new branch of Costa Coffee which opens today :o)

[My Costa fascination is well recognised. The mug on my desk is a Costa mug, and regularly people give me disapproving looks and ask if I stole it from a franchise. As if! I paid good money for it! I'm not sure that raises me much in most people's esteem though. I have been known to calculate the value of things (like my salary) in the common unit of currency... the price of one medium, black, Americano.]

In our office, I am in the fortunate position of curating our tuck shop. Hence, my desk is the equivalent of the kitchen at a good party. Lots of people coming and going, finding what they came in for and dispensing pearls of wisdom to me in return.

Come the afternoon, the wanderers return from the frozen wasteland of our warehouse and I await news of the day's efforts from which I was so pleasingly excused.

R enters. I'm guessing she's after a Cadburys Caramel. I ask for news. Apparently M (who is quite small) has been designated "ledge-monkey" and has spent the morning high up on a ledge that no-one else could stand up on, peering through boxes nobody could reach.

At ground level, R has had an equally fascinating time. I hear how unrelated items returned from previous events have been discarded in mixed boxes. Several unusable and filthy plastic beakers, random items of lost property and my favourite (and potentially most useful item)...

R stumbled across a range of international plug adapters stashed in an unlabelled box. "Why on earth do we keep these?" she enquired to G - person supposedly in charge of warehouse looting chaos.

"They're international plug adaptors - we keep them so we can give them out to any international speakers if they turn up at the main event without their own", he justified.

R is not convinced. G has been known to hoarde a host of pointless items in the warehouse in the past. Previous victories include convincing him to dispose of about fifty 4'x6' cubicle dividers in a state of extreme disrepair and occupying much needed real estate on the warehouse floor.

"OK," she conceded "These could be quite useful, I suppose...". [Pick your battles.] She continues rifling through the armoury of adaptor plugs in the box. "Isn't it a shame they all convert english appliances to US sockets"...