Working holiday

Today our office is very, very quiet due to a national train strike. Various unions have been flaring up with strikes lately because of policies the government has been passing. I don't know the details of it all since I hardly understand these things when they happen in the US, but the workers are not happy. A few weeks ago the public transport workers striked in Amsterdam so there were no buses, trams, metros or ferries. My mom was visiting at the time, so we had to get around by taxi a couple of times. Rather costly day. In a country as small as The Netherlands, many people fully rely on public transport (myself included), so these strikes do hit hard. And that is very evident at my work. In my department, only 4 people are here out of 14 or 15. Well, ok, some are on holiday or away on a business trip, but still, about 5-6 people would have been here if not for the strike. And that's just my department. I'm enjoying it though, I'm all alone in my bit of the office, playing Radiohead and The Veils and Neutral Milk Hotel on the computer, without headphones, and being remarkably productive. I think my eagerness to do work has died out though, and thus I'm writing this.

Earlier some people finally delivered plants to our offices. They're rather large leafy things in various forms. The one near my area resembles Jack's beanstalk, and has soft fuzzy-ish leaves. These are all the plants we get since our corporate overlords won't allow personal plants because they might have diseases they could kill these apparently very sensitive plants that they just brought in. You didn't get any choice of what plant was placed near you, but the few of us here took advantage of the quiet and did some switcheroos, wheeling about plants from office to office until it fit our fickle asthetics. Nothing is sacred if you happen to be out of the office.

And I am increasingly worried about what goes on when we are out of the office and the cleaners are here... I never worried much about the cleaners in the old building. I wasn't happy when they mussed about my desk in what must have been a vigorous wiping of it, but they seemed like decent people. But now... Ok, minor thing, but my garbage can wasn't emptied a couple of days ago, and it was potentially very smelly due to some fruit I had thrown away in it. More bothersome: This morning I found that a newpaper I had left on my desk yesterday had magically moved to a desk across the room. My guess is that someone had a sit and read my paper and didn't bother putting it back unnoticably. Even more bothersome, though this could very well be a rumour: I heard from a co-worker that a friend of hers came in and found a used condom next to her garbage can. Ew ew ew. And apparently when she complained to the people in charge, she was told "well, it happens." Nice.