Stationery supplies

Is there any thing in the world less helpful than a computer trying to anticipate your every need? I don't want numbered paragraphs, damn you!

When I started working here, I was kitted out with a full stationery supply on my desk, which included the world's most beautiful stapler. The Rolls-Royce of staplers, was my stapler. It was beautiful, and it stapled like a dream. It even had a compartment in the bottom to store spare staples and a space to put a name label. Such a fine piece of equipment. You can imagine how devastated I was two or so months later, about a year ago now, when I lost it. I looked everywhere. I even accused Greg of stealing it, as he does with so many of my pens, but it was not to be. So I had to get a new one, and it was horrible: it makes a funny noise and I have to press hard to make it work. I think Loretta deliberately bought me a cheap and nasty one because I'd lost my lovely one so soon after starting (and possibly because I did make a bit of a fuss about it and Loretta, efficient though she was, was not whimsical and just didn't understand the love of a financière and her stapler).

A year on: I found my old stapler this morning.

At the back of my stationery drawer, behind the sticky tape dispenser I rarely use.

More Things than Limbs, I think

I was so distracted by the joy and excitement of finding my stapler before that I forgot to write what I really meant to. A couple of days ago, my colleague Brian put in an order for a teaching aid for a particular type of cancer to everybody's favourite mail-order medical supply shop, Limbs and Things, and a compact little box was brought into the office by courier this afternoon. Sitting in my office, I witnessed the following conversation:

Courier: Sign here. (Looks at box.) Limbs and Things... sounds interesting.
Leeanne: Do you know what's in there?
Courier: (Gives box a light shake.) Yeah, well, it rattles a bit... nah.
Leeanne: Testicles!
Courier: Oh. (Leaves office without saying anything else.)
Leeanne and I: (Giggle like twelve-year-olds.)

Brian and I share an office, and I walked in the other morning in time to hear our medical educator, a Very Serious Englishman, say, "I think I need to buy some testicles." It's entirely to Brian's credit, I think, that his straight-faced reply was, "I'll organise that for you", when there are clearly so many other possible answers.