Wednesday 11 July 2007

Office Face

I cut myself shaving yesterday.

(Normally, I imagine that would be up there with "What I had for lunch..." and "So I joined Facebook..." as the first line of a blog post guaranteed to make even the most turgid of readers run a country mile. But please bear with me.)

As it happens, it was quite a nasty nick; over an inch in length, tapered from top to bottom and prominently displayed to the left of my philtrum (you can look it up). It looked as if I had either:

a) had some sort of late-night kebab-shop battle over the last chicken shish;
b) got into an argument with a (slightly half-hearted) Chelsea Headhunter;
c) tried to shift a lengthily-clawed, somewhat-annoyed cat from the sofa; or
d) cut myself shaving.

And do you know what? Not one person at work commented on it in the entire day. Not a single analyst at the 7am morning meeting. Nobody in sales or trading when I was sorting out their conferencing. Nothing from I.T. when I was testing my new PC upstairs. Not even the lugubrious PL and CJ at lunchtime in the Rack & Tenter. None of the normally chatty backoffice team when we were discussing the crazy world of client codes. Not Dei. Not Alex. Nobody.

Now these are people who can generally be relied upon to pounce on the slightest change in haircut and render the owner speechless with a tirade of lighthearted abuse. Similarly, the introduction of a 'jazzy' shirt into the work wardrobe will often be met with wide-eyed mirth and the general donning of sunglasses. I can only assume that they think I live such an exciting life that random facial injuries are deemed to be par for the course.

Almost certainly, though, they didn't want to draw attention to the fact that I am clearly an utter buffoon who can't even be trusted to scrape the dead hair off his chin without carving himself to ribbons :)

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