Thanks for the desperation

I was doing some training at an office interstate recently and one of the ladies I was to train was a pending nightmare.  You know the type of woman who is loud, overbearing, flashy and usually the archetypal mean girl.  I have trained her before and was not looking forward to doing it again.  The last time was a constant onslaught of me, me, me, god aren't I funny, smart and so much prettier than you.

Now none of this was actually said but it was definitely there, even allowing for my own insecurities. So this time I came prepared with a plan to show her a new process that would make her life easier, lulling her into a false sense of security, before moving on to some areas where she was making big mistakes and refusing to admit she was wrong.  Unexpectedly it was made it easier by her slavish devotion to trends.  The first thing that came in to my mind when I sat down with her was "What the fuck is with the eyebrows"!

At this point I will admit to using eyebrow powder.  I use it to fill in gaps from overenthusiastic plucking of my eyebrows when I was younger.  This, however, was serious overkill. There was so much brow powder there that it was not possible to actually identify a single brow hair.  It was like a pair of slugs had decided to take up residence on her face.

It was really distracting and just a little scary.  It took me a couple of minutes fighting the temptation to go cross-eyed or actually say "What the..." out loud, but once I had managed to stop staring at the slugs, I moved to a sense of calm.  What was I stressing about?  Ms mean girl suddenly seemed  really desperate and I started to feel just a little sorry for her.

Training became so much easier.  I no longer cared how overconfident and cocky she was because she looked so ridiculous. This must be akin to the old adage "imagine the audience in their underwear".

I don't know where this trend started, but I am really grateful to a world filled with slaves to fashion and just a little depressed that they exist.

Zen and the art of kitchen management.

I have been the office kitchen monitor/Nazi/anal-retentive for many years now, I think about 10 years.  This is largely because I work with males and while some men may be exceptional housekeepers this lot ain't.

I have tried many methods over the years to either keep the kitchen free of toxic waste or, rather ambitiously, encourage those of the Y chromosome persuasion to clean up after themselves. These include:-

• Being the designated washer upperer (I do find it relaxing), until I realised it just made everyone take it for granted I would do it  When I went a leave I came back to ewwwww!
• I monitored the dates of the milk to ensure we didn't get to the point neglected bottle became solid
• Requestimg a roster be set up to get the grubs to clean up there own crap.  This worked until peak season arrived and the dudes became tooooo busy to do something as complex as wash a spoon!
• Putting up helpful reminder signs asking everyone to wash up their crap, dry their crap and, most importantly, put their goddamn crap away in the fucking cupboards and drawers provided.
• Throwing away anything left around the sink and the containers in the fridge which looked to be science experiment attempting to create new, furrry, stinky life.
• I have become unhinged and screeched at people who didn't wipe up spills, left dirty plates in the sink or put the paper towel rolls in the dispenser flap to the back!  Bloody Neanderthals!

Then suddenly this week it happened.  I stop giving a toss.  I realised as I have my own plate cup and utensils I am safe from death due to using the potentially botulism ridden ones in the kitchen.  I have been using a bar fridge, that lives in my office, to store my stuff for the last two years (for convenience as I sometimes often don't stop for lunch) so I don't have to see, or worse smell, what is in the communal fridge.  

So I went around the kitchen and removed every single helpful sign.  For the last week when I go into the kitchen to wash up my stuff, if there is crap in my way I simply move it aside, (not huffily, absolutely calmly) finish my washing and drying and put the crap back where it was.

You know what?  I am so chilled it is unbelievable.  I have spent so much time being pissed off and chucking wobblies that achieved nothing.    AND YOU KNOW WHAT ELSE?  The guys are actually cleaning up after themselves a bit more.  I said nothing about my new outlook but they can't have avoided noticing the missing signs and me calmly floating around, so maybe the new atmosphere is having some magical affect.  

Now I don't expect any miracles, I don't have any expectations at all around how neat the kitchen will remain, what I do want is to be able to sustain my new outlook and, as I am going to be in travelling for work shortly, the big test is coming.  I have high hopes that I can.  I just might take a couple of really deep breaths.

Memories, light the corners of my....... I forget the rest.

I am reading a book at the moment called Brain Rules about how the brain works and I am up to a chapter on how memories are formed, stored and deleted.

Some memories are kept because they are necessary for survival and some are too momentous to not get carefully filed away and then there's other stuff that are neither but are either stored or deleted for no discernible reason.

It made me wonder about some of my memories or lack of them and triggers to bring old ones to the the "front" of my mind.

I was baking biscuits yesterday and it brought back a memory from a Home Ec class when I was at school long, long ago in a place.....well not that far away.  We were making cakes and one girl grabbed a straw broom, broke off one of the straws and used it to test if the cake was cooked.  The teacher saw it and freaked out.  She told the girl she was a disgusting dirty creature to use a straw from a filthy broom to stick in a cake.  Of course the girl was humiliated and I suspect very hurt in a different than the teacher would have expected.  I would bet a stack of money she had picked up this habit from her mother.  I know this because I have a very distinct memory of my mother doing the exact same thing and I in turn had also done it, thankfully not in front of that teacher.  I never did it again after that day because I realised it is a pretty gross thing to do.

So I'll call that a kind of social survival memory.   My next set of stored and deleted memories a a bit more mysterious in why they exist or not.

My mum died when I was seven and although I was so young I have clear memories of her, like the straw broom thing.  I remember going places with her and the rest of the family, her being in hospital after the birth of my younger sister (I was only two and a half) and again visiting her when she was in hospital towards the end.

I have no doubt she loved me, but I have no memory of her ever saying anything nice to me, only memories of when I had been in trouble for doing something naughty and in one very clear memory when I had done nothing wrong and she was in fact wrong (an early lesson that parents are not really all knowing) so no mystery why I would remember that occasion.

It almost sounds like one of those cliché stories you hear that stress the importance of making sure you tell everyone you love then frequently just in case you kick the bucket suddenly and regret for all eternity while sitting on clouds playing a harp.

Sometimes I feel a bit ripped off, but I am not one of those people who blame everything that might go wrong in life on my parents (waaaaahhh, my mother never said she loved me).  I have a heap of stupid memories that come back to me a odd moments that I REALLY wish would be deleted forever, but never a happy mum and me moment.  I do have heaps of great memories with my dad, but I had him for a whole lot longer and, importantly, as an adult.   I sometimes wish I had asked my Dad before I lost him for a reminder of what my relationship with my mother was like, but somehow it always felt like I would be criticising her to the man who loved her until the day he died.

So memories and gaps in them are tricky.  Sometimes the deleted ones turn out to be more valuable than our brains thought they would be.  Perhaps my young brain considered remembering the details of parent child relationships was a bit of a waste of space given all the important stuff to come that could be a matter of life of death. There should have been lots of time to form those memories.

Poor brain, just like parents they are not infallible.