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Jul. 1st, 2006 12:41 amA circuit blew on my side of the office yesterday afternoon just as I was leaving for the day. It was still out today, so I spent the morning in a refugee cube on the engineering side, with a couple of my department members. It was quite productive, surprisingly.
Since it's a long weekend (our office is closed Monday and Tuesday), they "closed the office" at noon today. This, in practice, means that about half the office leaves at noon, and the rest trickle out over the course of the afternoon, depending on their workload, deadlines, and level of obsessiveness about work.
I ended up staying til 2, not necessarily because I have any pressing deadlines, but mostly because my child was watching the Tricky Dogs from one til two, and I didn't want to pull him out. And also the other refugees around me were staying, so there was some amount of peer pressure.
They happen to both be single, and also happen both to be a bit workaholic in temperment. As I was leaving, they made a good-humoured crack about how terrible it was to put priority on a life outside of work, and that the re-education would start on Wednesday. Which, of course, made me bring up Winston's rat face cage.
There's a part of me (now admittedly, I read the book in 1989 or 1990, so I suspect it doesn't have the same resonance to me that it does to those who read it before 1984) that wonders if the sheer horror of the concept of having your face eaten off by rats doesn't, in some way, dull the edge of all the horrors that come before.
Then something in that discussion led me off into a tangent about Orwell's motivations (and again, bear with me, since I'm aware that both the biography and the chronology are completely and totally off). I was tremendously amused by the thought of Orwell as a (miserably) failed children's book author. Just imagine him, slaving away over 1984 as a special treat for his beloved child, only to read it aloud to the inevitable appalling result. And then imagine him starting on a second attempt: Animal Farm. It's got pigs in it, right?
Anyway. We all thought it was amusing. Except one of us who thought Orwell wrote Flowers for Algernon. (It's not his fault. His degree is in Engineering.) So I thought I'd share with you.
But mostly I'm gloating about being off from today at 2 til Wednesday morning.
Since it's a long weekend (our office is closed Monday and Tuesday), they "closed the office" at noon today. This, in practice, means that about half the office leaves at noon, and the rest trickle out over the course of the afternoon, depending on their workload, deadlines, and level of obsessiveness about work.
I ended up staying til 2, not necessarily because I have any pressing deadlines, but mostly because my child was watching the Tricky Dogs from one til two, and I didn't want to pull him out. And also the other refugees around me were staying, so there was some amount of peer pressure.
They happen to both be single, and also happen both to be a bit workaholic in temperment. As I was leaving, they made a good-humoured crack about how terrible it was to put priority on a life outside of work, and that the re-education would start on Wednesday. Which, of course, made me bring up Winston's rat face cage.
There's a part of me (now admittedly, I read the book in 1989 or 1990, so I suspect it doesn't have the same resonance to me that it does to those who read it before 1984) that wonders if the sheer horror of the concept of having your face eaten off by rats doesn't, in some way, dull the edge of all the horrors that come before.
Then something in that discussion led me off into a tangent about Orwell's motivations (and again, bear with me, since I'm aware that both the biography and the chronology are completely and totally off). I was tremendously amused by the thought of Orwell as a (miserably) failed children's book author. Just imagine him, slaving away over 1984 as a special treat for his beloved child, only to read it aloud to the inevitable appalling result. And then imagine him starting on a second attempt: Animal Farm. It's got pigs in it, right?
Anyway. We all thought it was amusing. Except one of us who thought Orwell wrote Flowers for Algernon. (It's not his fault. His degree is in Engineering.) So I thought I'd share with you.
But mostly I'm gloating about being off from today at 2 til Wednesday morning.
