One coffee too many, and one bird-shit-free pair of trousers too few is making me do that thing I sometimes do where I grit my teeth unconsciously in an uncomfortable and unnerving fashion. A day of highs and lows unfolded as follows:
A physio appointment which I'd for some time been anticipating would get, once and for all, to the root of my wobbly ankles and ungainly gait, turned to hours of total tedium in a waiting room full of magazines in a language I couldn't be bothered to understand. It was ten past nine and I was sitting uncomfortably, and hung over, in a suit and tie, trying to find pictures of hot camping chicks in Das Outdoor Magazin, a German magazine for people who hate attractive women but love to read about the specs of an 800 quid sleeping bag. After an hour in this waiting room limbo, goggling in amazement at the enormous and groteque forms of people twice my age and thrice in need of physio than me, I was finally admitted to a kind of anti-room with a cheap-looking physio's couch (bed? bench? You know what I mean). Following another 45 minutes, thirsty and alone, watching the Windows XP screensaver ping around the screen turning from cube to sphere to a kind of siamese conjoined-testicles arrangement, I decided I'd had enough. I left the room, went back to reception and gave the receptionist a piece of my mind. My heart wasn't really in it though because she (belatedly) told me that one of the doctors was ill and the other had had to foreshorten her holiday to come and reinvigorate the fat lumps still in the waiting room. I left with a new appointment for 7:40 in the morning next friday. Apparently I'm "only the second patient" that day. I had no idea German doctors offered a night-service.
I wobbled into work at around noon and was almost immediately invited for lunch. Quizzed Chinese colleague about what Chinese communism is really all about (disguised capitalism, but without the unions or the voting) and how it feels to know that the feeble Europeans around him will soon be slaves to his people (apparently we won't).
I was then told, confusingly for those who like their tales to be either all bad news or all good news, the emotional thread here becomes a bit tangled. My boss took me to one side (over one of the aforementioned one-too-many coffees) and told me that following a discussion with his boss, he'd not only managed to agree the extra money I'd insisted on having for my labours, but he'd managed to more than double what I'd asked for. No idea if this is some kind of German custom whereby I'm supposed to politely refuse and, in exchange, offer a basket of beef sausages for his wife. Anyway, if it is, I missed the politeness boat and went instead for the quids. Nice.
Having missed this opportunity to feel triumphant and wonderful (opting instead to not quite believe what I'd heard) my bike started acting up on the way home from the office. This is something I really can't bear, and it always fills me with thoughts of how all beautiful things must, eventually, fall to bits. (Incidentally, I always say that one of the nice things about going bald early is that you get all the aging-phobia and existentialism out of the way earlier, and can from then on go merrily into decrepitude without any further shocks to the ego.) I flipped the bike upside down to indulge in an in-depth bit of scrutinising exactly which link in the chain was not correctly settling into the gear, an exercise as pointless as my insistance on always trying to look at a spot on the back of my neck, or peer into my mouth to look at a bleeding gum. As if seeing the thing will somehow allow me to do something about it.
Anyway, this particular pointless exercise led me to have grease on my hands, bird-shit on my finest (only) tailor-adjusted work trousers, and the afore-mentioned clenched teeth that my dentist and I so despise.
All of this is a long-winded way of saying that, even in the face of a massive pay rise, life has a way of making you kneel in bird shit that no amount of unexpected cash can protect you from.
Having said that, I'll see how I feel about it when I hand my trousers, guilt- and overdraft-free to the dry cleaners for them to sort out the mess.
Until next time loved ones,
Rob
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