Spontaneous

Back to normal. Hooray! I even managed a few cups of tea, which is a big step up from water. 

I was slightly dazed at work, but rolled with it. My morning began with a comedy of technical wizardry, reminiscent of something from TwentyTwelve. I had a video conference (VC) with my managers and a group of people on the other side of the world in a dim and distant room on another floor. We got there and the VC had not been set up. We pressed a button and a projector screen came down. Nope, wrong button, but we couldn't get the screen to go back up so we let it be. We found the right plug for the VC and it turned on, but the TV screen remained blank. Someone found an IT man. He discovered that the remote control had no batteries. He also told us that in the three years of working in the building, the VC hadn't been set up in this room. (This is odd as we are always short of VC rooms.) He set about trying different cables and pressing various buttons. The projector screen went back up. A high-pitched whine ensued. And nothing happened on the TV screen. 

We thought we'd ring our team who we were supposed to be meeting, but the phone wasn't plugged in. The IT man turned his attention to the phones. My big boss said, "We aren't we ringing them?" I turned to face the IT man's bottom (the phone plug was in the floor and he was bent at the waist) as I heard an exasperated "I'm trying to do something about that." from him. In the end, we emailed them using a smartphone and found another VC room recently vacated by another team. The IT man came with us, just in case. 

We dialled in and the team on the other side of the world answered. Yay! Except we could see only their hands on the desk. The IT man frowned. He said he could re-boot the system. We all shook our heads and said we'd cope. We chatted about our project, then someone on the screen leaned forward and we could suddenly see everyone. Hooray! We instructed that someone to remain leaning forward and the chap beside him, too. The darkness on the screen had been caused by sunlight. Poor chaps had to stay in that position for half an hour. The wonders of technology.

The rest of the day was easier going. At lunch, I strolled to Waterstones to see if they had a friend's book in stock. As I was browsing the books, I heard someone exclaim, "This is such a beautiful book!" and highly recommend it to their companion. Of course, I had to have a look. When I picked it up, a Waterstones employee called, "That's an amazing book!" And another said, "I made an entire window display for that book." Hmm. Three recommendations and I was just coming to the end of my current book My Salinger Year (reminiscent of my first job at the same time, but no Salinger for me, and a great tale of coming into the working age, expectations, and of a growing love of Salinger). Really, I should have picked a book off the shelf at work for the journey home and picked up Franny and Zooey, which I''d started reading in response to Joanna Rokoff's memoir. But, I ended up buying the recommended book, Our Souls At Night, and ordering my friend's book. The Waterstones employee was happy and chatty. His girlfriend was reading the Rakoff memoir, so we exchanged some notes about that, too. A very pleasant spontaneous purchase.

The headache stayed away all day. Phew