Icebox

4/22/05

By: Ryan Jett

It’s very cold in my office. By “my office,” I don’t mean one of those private boxes with such amenities as a door or walls; I mean the large building in which my tiny cubicle sits exposed to the comings and goings of people I’d cross the street to avoid. And it’s cold. Really cold.

I am comforted by the fact that I no longer have to keep the food I bring to work in the terminally packed refrigerators provided for us, owing to the fact that management keeps the lunchroom temperature at roughly thirty-six degrees. It’s nice, not to have to worry about cramming your half-eaten burrito from last night into a cold box between somebody’s leftover double-breaded deep-fried Crisco-injected cheez-bombs and that jar of yellow liquid that looks dangerously like a urine sample. The reason the lunchroom, and by extension, the entire rest of the building, is kept cold enough to render carbon dioxide into a solid has something to do with the high number of menopausal females working in my office. The fact that most of them are rather corpulent, (though they seem to believe complaining about it as they shovel M&Ms and cheesy-poofs into their faces at the speed of sound should cause the pounds to just melt away,) only exacerbates the situation.

You would never need infrared goggles with these ladies around, as they are now capable of detecting a temperature increase as minute as 0.25 degrees. (That’s Celsius, not Fahrenheit!) And they’re not shy about it. I can only assume they feel that simply because they’ve been fortunate enough to reach the age of “The Change” by the dumb luck of not being eaten by an alligator or driving their cars into wayward petroleum tanks, this somehow entitles them to have dominion over the excited state of the air molecules we all share. In short, they complain at great length and volume about it being “just so hot!” until the magical fairy with the blue key or some bullshit shows up and unlocks the thermostat (always lock up your thermostats otherwise they’ll jump down and abscond with your valuables while you sleep,) and cranks that bad boy down to “Penguin.”

You know these women of which I speak; middle-aged, heavy-set, lonely yet somehow jovial females with a “hot firemen” calendar who practically wet themselves with joy whenever someone brings in a baby. Now I have nothing against fat people, as long as they don’t impair my daily functioning in any way by either smelling curiously of cheese or falling on top of me. But let’s be real; you’re fat, and you’re hot because you’re fat and menopausal. Recently one of these lovely creatures (a woman easily 300 pounds, I’m not kidding,) actually had the audacity to say, “I’m just hot-natured.” What?! You’re not fucking hot-natured, iguanas are hot-natured, you are fat. Not big-boned, either; whales are big-boned, you, my dear, are fat, okay? I’m just looking for some reality here.

So the rest of us, those still possessed of a normal, functioning internal thermometer, are forced to huddle around our CPUs warming our blue hands over the minimal heat that escapes from the little vents. I’m considering bringing in a flaming oil drum. Maybe I can steal one from the homeless people in movies. (Despite the fact that I have indeed encountered many homeless people I have never once seen one hunched over a flaming oil drum or trashcan.) I think all of this is awful and wrong. Surely the minority of us not currently treading swiftly toward Death’s door should be allowed to control the temperature. We have more life left to get through; it’s hard enough without missing body parts due to hypothermia. Or maybe we could set up a color-coded chart of alternating days. We could take the even ones and sit around in what the older women must think comes close to the temperature of hell; the outrageous environment of around 73 degrees. On the odd days the frost queens of the workforce could crank it down and I would know to come into the office dressed as if preparing to cross the Antarctic tundra; though I don’t know if management would let the Huskies stay under my desk all day.