The Sun & The Biscuit Tin

Both of these stories involve Liam. For some reason during the course of writing the posts for this website I feel the need to purge all of the stories involving him as quickly as possible. They probably have been sat in my brain the longest so they are clamouring the hardest to get out. I promise I do have other stories involving other people!

Let’s start with the tail of the biscuit tin that started it’s life with us chilling on a lovely board room table and ended with it being splatted on a wall. Grab the popcorn this one is a good one!

I can’t remember a lot of the back story but I do remember the biscuit’s were a gift from someone who came in for a meeting and they were left untouched on the board room table when the meeting attendee’s popped out for lunch. Relevant to the story is the fact that Liam would never pass up free food and being a smallish team sometimes the boss would pay for KFC or take us out to the pub for lunch on special occasions. This was lovely and none of us ever assumed the company would pay it was just a nice bonus when they did. Liam however would always answer the question of ‘Do you want XYZ for lunch?’ with ‘Is the company paying?’ and if they weren’t then he was not interested. If anyone bought in cakes or anything edible he would always be first to be sniffing around and always asked ‘are they free?’ before tucking in. As if Linda next door was going to bake brownie’s, pop them in the middle of the room for everyone to share and then demand 50p from everyone. The problem is when you are an ares hole you assume everyone else is one too I suppose.

Let also bear in mind that the little snake didn’t pay his own rent and probably got paid much more than he was worth because his Dad paid his salary so money wasn’t exactly in shortfall for him. He was the type of bloke that would go to one of those 241 restaurants and order 2 meals and wrap the 2nd one up in a napkin to take home. (My Mum actually did this once when 3 of us went out to lunch and she pretended her ‘friend’ was meeting us, ordered their dinner and then put it in her handbag. I am still ashamed.)

So the biscuit tin being unopened in the office must have been torture for him as he sat at his desk all morning wondering if he was missing out on free sustenance. This must have become too much for him at some stage because he braved making conversation and asked us if he could have one and we replied that they weren’t ours so we didn’t know, and probably best wait until the person that bought them opened them. Which must have been the wrong answer because a few moments later the biscuit tin and it’s contents were hurled across the board room and landed in a shower of buttery crumbs on the floor leaving a dent in the wall and a lot of shocked faces as Liam called us all cunts and fled the scene.

Once we got over the shock of being called c u next tuesday’s and having a near death experience with confectionary we gathered ourselves together and took lot’s of photo’s of the crime scene before calling the bosses to let them know. Conveniently Liam never did that sort of thing when people that mattered were there to witness it.

He then returned after we had all left for the day and cleaned it all up leaving nothing but the dent on the wall to show it had ever happened, and thank god we had the photo’s as he then tried to deny the whole thing and said he had gone home because we were all bullying him. Even when faced with the photo’s he still tried to deny it and of course his Dad had to make the great voyage across continents to sort it out (which really meant he would pretend to deal with it but actually was covering it up as best he could by telling us he was dealing with it but was actually doing nothing of the sort.) Obviously nothing got done about it and we all had to be subjected to sitting in a small office space with a psychopath all of us silently seething with the injustice of it all. Our only comfort being the 1 hour each day that he went out for lunch and we could all speak freely.

Shortly after this episode had been dealt with/covered up, Liam’s next beef was with the amount of light that managed to seep it’s way through the blinds into his eyeballs. He sat under a small window that was well above head height and there were blinds covering all of it that you could adjust to let as little or as much light as you wanted in but they were not blackout blinds and of course they also had gaps between them that let small slivers of sunlight through.

His first port of call to deal with the abomination that was vitamin D was to complain to the landlord who simply took one look at the already closed and perfectly sufficient blinds, laughed, and said ‘what do you want me to do, throw a bucket over the sun?’ Which caused most of us to laugh and Liam to mutter darkly under his breath and then take matters into his own hands by painstakingly blu-tacking each blind together so nothing could get through. This must have taken him a good few hours of the afternoon and whilst he was doing this we all tried our best to work whilst containing silent hysterical laughter and communicating with each other through looks alone.

However that wasn’t the end of it as there was STILL too much sunlight peaking through the blinds because there is only so much blu-tac can do. Short of sewing the blinds together I think he was scuppered so his next plan of action was to DIY his own blackout blind, which he did by using a cardboard box and more blu-tac. The end result was an office that looked like it was boarded up, and my poor boss who had to share a space with a sunlight hating troll.

I still don’t know why no one did anything about it. Sitting in my current office over 10 years later where I work with normal human beings (don’t get me wrong none of us are ‘normal’ we all have our quirks, I actually do have an old computer box that I stick to the top of my monitor everyday for the 45 minutes a day where the sun shines directly into my eyes before it moves behind a tree.*) but if someone got up and started blu-tacing blinds together and sticking cardboard boxes to the windows someone would have a word.

*I work in a beautiful listed country building and the windows are 8 ft tall so we can’t easily get blinds to fit. So a cardboard sun shield is a small price to pay and I am also only limiting my sunlight rather than forcing the whole office to sit in a darkened cave.