Food up there

I was at a *really* "exciting" temp gig (I temp occasionally, though I'm going to stop after this month) and wasn't able to use the computer, and the only reading material I had was an old Wall Street Journal and some Japanese vocabulary I had saved for down time such as this. I had five hours to kill, since the phone I was supposed to answer hardly rang, so I wrote and stared out the window and thought and tried to motivate myself to study Japanese, even though I was feeling quite lazy.

And no one was around, so I sat in silence until some people showed up to take a break from a meeting they were having, and I heard someone tell his coworkers, "There's food up there," and when he left, other people told each other the same thing: "You know, there's food up there." It didn't matter what people were talking about, the most important thing seemed to be food--free food.

It wasn't like they were saying there's "good" food up there; just the fact that there was food was enough for a special announcement. As if people need more of a reason to indulge themselves and seek out as many opportunities to pig out. I was nicely surprised when they handed me a sandwich that was definitely outside my normal eating patterns, but they didn't give me a drink, even though someone else said, "There are drinks up there."

When things are really slow, it's amazing what you'll notice, even in a quiet, cold office downtown with windows that are so sound-proof, the buildings and traffic outside are just decorations.