Tuesday, May 09, 2006

What noise annoys an oyster?

There's a new member of the "make lots of really annoying noise" conspiracy. She disguises herself as our cleaner, but I know her true allegiance.

I must explain, as an aside, that I find the concept of having a cleaner disturbing. I've been capable of keeping my own place clean for many years. However, my College (probably correctly) believes that students are incapable of either tidiness or cleanliness, so three times a week someone comes in to clean the kitchens and bathrooms, and empty the bins. Occasionally, she also hoovers our rooms. This doesn't work for me, on many levels:

a) I still have some of my mother's socialist principles, and I figure that these workers are not being paid a particularly good wage for what they do;
b) this said, they are often also pretty useless at what they do;
c) the hoover makes my room smell like cheese (nasty cheese, not the good stuff);
d) even when I indicate that I'm busy working or sleeping (by putting my wastepaper bin outside my door - the traditional sign), she still insists on waking me up/disturbing my work in order to tell me that she's meant to clean my room. To which I always reply "thanks, but I'm busy" to which she replies "I will just clean your sink" to which I reply "no, really, I'm very busy - I'll do it myself" and then I feel guilty that I've actually just let her off doing some work. As though I'm some kind of benevolent capitalist paymaster.

Yeah. So she's the new member of the conspiracy, anyway. And once she's woken me by knocking on the door, she then proceeds to keep me awake by vacuuming every other square inch of floor in the entire building. I know, I know, I shouldn't complain that the cleaning's being done. But sadly, the vacuum cleaners have either not had new bags put in for a milennium or so, or they need replacing. So she can hoover as much as she like; it will have no effect whatsoever. Except to make me slightly mad.

The council has also changed strategy. The road-digging men have gone, but then they sent a guy in a machine to clean the pavments at 12:30 a.m. the other day, I'm not kidding. Flashing orange lights, big machiney noises, at gone midnight. And they cleverly picked the one night that week I wasn't up until 4 a.m. working.

Starting to think living out in the country would be a good option. Except The Conspiracy probably has some tame cockerel in its pay, not to mention a cow with a particularly loud moo...

Wednesday, May 03, 2006

The Da Vinci (planning and roads, subsection 2:a) Code

A dark office. Rain spatters the windowpane, glinting in the orange light of a solitary streetlamp. The figure behind the desk is still, smoke curling up from the cigarette between his fingers to surround 40 watts of dim lightbulb hanging from a frayed flex. The phone shrieks...
"Yes?"
"We've found her." The figure straightens, leaning into the receiver, grabbing for a chewed biro.
"Tell me!"
"She's living on Woodstock Road, in Oxford."
"I'll have someone dispatched immediately. Go with God, Falcon."
"God be with you, Eagle."
The man allows a smear of satisfaction to cross his face, before reaching again for the telephone, and pressing a button marked "repairs".
The chase has ended, but for the woman who is his target, the horror is about to begin...

I swear this is what happens in Council Offices around the country. They find out where I live, and then they send men with unfeasibly noisy machines to do roadworks or dig up water mains right outside my window while I'm trying to study. It's getting to be beyond a joke.