Chilling in the office
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It's cold at work. It often is. In the summer months, it's not so bad. Having windows along one side of the building lets the sun in, sometimes achieving something bordering on pleasant. But between the tail end of autumn and the onset of spring, the office is like a fridge. It does have heating, but it's temperamental. In fact, as I write this, it's broken and won't be repaired until tomorrow afternoon. The morning has very little to enamour it to me.
When the heating is working, it's still cold, especially in the mornings. Mondays are the worst. When the heating has been turned off for the weekend and the cold has had chance to get comfortable, it isn't so easily evicted at the start of a new week. It lingers until at least lunchtime and is slow to leave even then. The surface of my desk is often so cold that it is uncomfortable to touch. I'll often switch to using keyboard shortcuts until midday if I can help it just to avoid resting my hand on my desk to use my mouse.
The heating takes its time to warm up. The building is at least a couple of decades old. The heating system is probably the original one that came with it. It still has a pilot light. I know this because today it went out and nobody could get it lit again. It's been freezing ever since. There are radiators all around the office. Some of them have water in them. Mostly they have air. You can hear it when the heating is turned on. It gurgles like an excited baby that has just worked out it can make a new noise.
All of the radiators have thermostats on them. You can turn them from the off position, through a series of numbers between one and five, past a snowflake symbol that nobody really understands the purpose of. None of us are sure this works. If you turn it up to one, the radiator eventually gets hot, especially at the bottom where the water is. There's no real difference between five and one, except that it gurgles a bit more.
In both cases, the heat will normally stay within the vicinity of the radiator. If you sit next to or on the radiator, you might get warm if the chill from the windows above them doesn't get you first. If you sit on the other side of the room, like me, you're unlikely to feel their effect. There are occasions, however, where the heat does travel from the radiators to the rest of the room. If it does this, it somehow manages to get too hot. This results in the radiator being turned off and sometimes a window being opened. This in turn makes it cold again and so the cycle repeats itself.
I know my colleagues and I aren't the only ones to have a cold office. I know that some reading this (if indeed it is read at all) probably have it much worse. I also know that reading about somebody else's woes won't make it any easier. It's just that typing it keeps my hands that little bit warmer, and right now I'll take what I can get.