Mostly Harmless

In search of a good cuppa

Disclaimer

Kettles are not permitted in the office. In fact all domestic appliances are forbidden. For instance, you won't see anyone using hair straighteners at their desk. The drinks available gratis from the vending machines also feature in Dr Seuss's book The Lorax, in which we see them being used to pollute a lake where once "the humming fish hummed". The "hot" water provided by these machines is nowhere near boiling (health & safety) and so barely awakes the full flavour of a Vintage Darjeeling or Assam (organic).

What to do?

The solution turned out to be a concealed kettle. We positioned the offending article in an empty desk pedestal with a deep filing drawer, drilled a hole in the back and through this fitted a hose which fits over the spout of the kettle. The trailing end of the hose runs between cubicle partitions all the way to the outer wall where we have integrated it discreetly with an air conditioning outlet.

The tricky part was concealing the kettle flex which must plug in to a highly visible integrated socket strip on the top of my desk. We purchased the thinnest 13amp rated flex we could find and adapted an unused ethernet socket on the same strip to supply mains power and earth on three of its pins. A similarly adjusted RJ45 was attached to the end of the kettle flex.

Now it was possible to plug in and operate the illegal device in a manner entirely above suspicion, and many clandestine pots of tea were enjoyed by all.

My boss, naturally, is unaware of this arrangement. One day he brings his young daughter into work - along with his state-of-the-art Armani Laptop to keep her occupied. This laptop (not to take anything away from the daughter) is his pride and joy. He has graced it with multiple bootable partitions so that he can run a selection of Linux distros, Windows, Mac OS X, Solaris 10, Nexenta and others. He once showed me OS/2 Warp on the thing and we all suspect that somewhere it is harbouring DRDOS and CPM. It has got to the point where you can't have a simple conversation with the man without his mentioning GRUB or chain loaders and their various problems. Anyway. He stations his daughter, Louisa, in the desk next to mine and boots up the machine for her to use. We're all gallantly chatting to her, for she is a tad shy, when suddenly her eyes widen to the size of billiard balls and she points her little finger at the laptop screen in front of her.

- Daddy!

I'm just wondering what the funny smell is when I see the laptop screen kind of ripple and then go dim with a soft "pop". Burned into it is a ghastly death mask of Windows XP (doubtless from a choice of several). The "Start" button has expanded like a deformed wiener, as if in mockery of a laptop which is surely never going to start again.

I get a sick feeling in my stomach as my boss steps back from my desk with his hand in his mouth.

- Dammit! They told me the battery problems were fixed!. That's it! I want a replacement and a free upgrade. Holy LILO! it's even fried the ethernet cable!

A thin bluish wisp of acrid smoke dissipates slowly in the air and none of us says a word. The silence grows suspiciously lengthy until, in a moment of inspiration, I crouch down and say brightly, "Louisa, would you like a drink from the machine?"

Posted at 10:06PM Dec 14, 2006 by John Alderson in Lake Guillemont  |  Comments[2]