Work Reflections:

Since i will soon be leaving my job, I've been thinking back over the highlights of my time with the team. Following are my top 5 days:

1) The day we had an oil sick and our lives were put in minor peril.

I seem to have a habit of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and consistently throughout my time i am ALWAYS up to something stupid when the head of our building walks into our room. On this occasion Rowl had knocked a bottle of olive oil on the floor in between our desks, which also doubles as the only way to access the other desks on the other side of the room (this is why giving us lunch rooms would actually be a good idea). We both looked at it glugging onto the carpet for a while before deciding to try and mope it with a paper towel. Little success, and by this stage Junior had wandered over. We then decided to wash it with soapy water, this now seems like a stupid idea, but I'm sure some sort of logic took place at the time. So Junior got down to wash it with a little bowl and cloth, and VT our managers manager wandered across. He helpfully observed the situation also whilst i made a sign to put on the floor near by (as it had become very slippery) stating that people needed to be careful as there was a risk of minor peril ahead. I then rejoined the observers and the big head manager unnoticed slipped in also. Once we had got over our positive encouragement and criticism of Juniors efforts we notice him and someone remarked how accurate this was of a council situation, one person working with 4 looking on and criticising and managing them!

2) The day when 9/11 almost happened again.

The quality of our equipment at work is questionable and whenever the fire alarm goes off you are dubious at best. I for one enjoy fire alarms as i have not grown up and come from the school of thought that if you hear a fire alarm you should shout/scream joyously, be very noisy, and run out the building in as silly a manner as possible, only after collecting anything you want to take with you and hitting save on your computer. On this particular day several people adopted my philosophies'; especially as the fire alarm would be fixed only for us to have to leave the building again ten minutes later. On the third time of this happening as we were slowly packing up and considering leaving the office for another jaunt outside, a colleague in all earnestness declared, 'Come on people! this is how 9/11 happened!'. This caused us great merriment to imagine that 9/11 could occur again in Peckham in a crappy 3 story social services office where people cannot be bothered to leave the office quickly on a fake fire alarm. I'm not sure many people died in 9/11 because they saw the planes crash into their office but stopped to press save on CareAssess before leaving.

3) The day we developed the box game and were caught on the brand new CCTV camera

New CCTV camera's were installed in the meeting rooms and we were given one of these rooms as an office for several days temporarily. Along with this temporary move, we had no computer access and so work was limited. We developed an awesome game where we hid something in the empty 30 boxes lying around the room and then time someone to find it. We played this game in as noisy and violent a manner as possible, forgetting all the while that these CCTV camera were hooked up. Once we realised we were being spied on we thought the easiest solution was to block the camera as there was no reason for them to be on us (there was no risk of client attack). We then (Junior- it is always Junior who leads me astray) thought we could remedy this by sticking a piece of paper over the camera, which we promptly did and thought nothing more of it. In typical council fashion however, they noticed and without coming to check they called in an engineer to fix it. Imagine our embarrassment when he came in, removed the piece of paper and charged the company a huge call out fee. They never did find out this was us.

4) The day N-Man's draws were reversed.

To deal with the boredom of our office sometimes little pranks get played along a theme and these escalate more and more until we get too busy to be creative, or think independently and have to return to the monotony of record making. On this occasion a theme of altering each others person draws below our desks was picked and several items moved around, draws swapped with other people or even made to look as if they had been emptied. The height of this enjoyment was when we turned around N-man's draws and drew on some lines and blue tacked on her key so it looked like to was the right way around. It was very funny when she spent a while trying to open her draws and then looked around embarrassed as she realised.

5) The day StaceyG told me i was boring.

I work with teenagers, and every now and again i like to think I'm good at it and that i really know how to understand them and get on their level. And then people like Stacey come along and put me straight. Once during, what i thought was a great session about feelings and dealing with emotions, Stacey stopped me mid activity AND sentence and innocently asked, 'Are we nearly finished yet? I'm bored'. Well i was stunned, and promptly wrapped up the session amid stuttering and stammering and embarrassment. That'll teach me for thinking I'm cool.