Ice age

The banded pay structure, by which new employees of the company receive an increase in salary on the anniversary of their employment, was apparently suspended today on the grounds that it was against age discrimination law.

What I understand by that is pay freeze. 

No farewell

a is likely to lose her job on Wednesday, as that's when her consultancy period - the time the company claims to be open to alternative suggestions to making her redundant - ends. 

Her closest colleague sent an email to the whole company inviting everyone out for farewell drinks she was arranging for a this Thursday. 

She was told by management that her action was "premature".

Review

I Heart Huckabees is not a very good film.

Disclosure

Philosophy club this evening, trying to get to the bottom of Heidegger's concept of dasein and resoluteness towards an existential awareness of death. I can't say I grasp it although I'm impressed by the idea that there's no alternative to "disclosing"  yourself in the everyday world.

Bean

It was the canteen's Christmas lunch today, so we went down early before it sold out. The food wasn't bad - a bit cold as usual, and the nut loaf was dry, but there were sprouts, Yorkshire pudding, swede mash, roast potatoes and mince pies for afterwards.

There were also crackers and tablecloths on the tables and a stereo in the corner playing Cliff Richard and other seasonal songs. 

We chose a table that looked liked it hadn't already had people eating there - the crackers were intact. I pulled mine with m and it cracked satisfactorily. Inside was my novelty: a dried baked bean and a plastic coffee stirrer.

A dried baked bean and a plastic coffee stirrer.

No joke.

I used the coffee stirrer to launch the bean at r as he came to sit down. It missed. We then spent lunchtime talking in the innuendoes that flicking the bean inspired.

Immune

The people who were off yesterday came back sick. On my right, g has a terrible cough but controls it heroically, hacking occasionally into her scarf. On my left, d is silent. Line manager p has a head cold, also bearing it stoically. 

I put on my iPod on random after listening to this week's Adam and Joe podcast and it found me some good stuff: The Blue Aeroplanes' cover of Boy in the Bubble and some Buck 65 plus a couple of mp3s by r who is in a band. 

The economic news is depressingly bad, and at least one more redundancy is expected in our department before Christmas.

Film

We didn't have our manager at work today and several of the team weren't in either. By the afternoon the few that were in the office began emailing each other with ideas for films that ought to be made. The instigator of this game, r, was pitching a rom-com starring Jennifer Aniston. 

I offered a sci-fi blockbuster:

GAYLIEN (18)

In space, no-one can hear you, queen

Two space truckers (Sylvester Stallone, Mel Gibson) with nothing to do on their long-haul trips but pump iron and watch porn receive a garbled communication from a drifting space pod. The ship's computer ROGR (voiced by Clint Eastwood) decodes it: Somewhere Over The Rainbow. 

When the space pod's occupant (Peter O'Toole) is revived an alien (voiced by Alan Carr in a wordless language) emerges from within him and takes over the ship by hijacking the sound system, turning it in a 24-hour disco. Only the on-board synthetic life-form (Johnny Vegas), whose hearing circuit is malfunctioning, is immune. The alien also reprograms ROGR so it sounds like Judy Garland. 

The truckers become obsessed with a range of transvestite costumes and do not realise as the ship crashes into a space colony of macho clone workers (Bruce Willis).

Theme tune: An Illegal Gaylien (Sting)