1 post tagged “clothing”
The facilities manager for the College tells me that the cooling system for the building where my office is located involves some enormous water "chiller" a block and a half away. From this chiller cold water is pumped through pipes (like the hot water that serves to heat things) in any number of buildings. In the ceilings of these buildings there are mysterious objects called mixing boxes that chug hot and cold together? in tandem? cold water from the chiller and hot air from somewhere else? somehow to produce air of the approximately right temperature and blat it out at you as your thermostat requests.
They don't fire up this chiller until a certain mysterious date. Then the cold water takes some time to make its way through the pipes, and I suppose once it's there, it displaces the hot water, or some of it, or something, so the whole system is rather inertial. This is all most fascinating and obscure.
In any event, however, the chiller is now GO and everything is VERY COLD. This is too bad because it makes me even less inclined to be a good little worker than I would normally be, which is extremely not very. I could in theory up and go home, but this would not produce any better results, and would make me feel that I had given up, which I have, but later I will feel the psychological effects of having given up less, I think, than if I do. Better, I think, to stay and suffer.
On the matter of the suffering: The skin on my hands, alarmed by these unfavorable conditions, has taken on a creepy waxy sort of appearance, which sets off my uneven, bluish fingernails very nicely. Now that I examine this situation a little more closely, I see that the waxiness is part and parcel with a general failure of elasticity. This is interesting because my typing is actually producing strange dents in each fingertip, and the dents don't immediately go away. If I hold up my hands, each finger looks to be its own specially malformed baby head, squashed by the birth canal. Sorry, fingers, but it's true.
