Glam jobs and Ealing comedies

I work in a very old building. It's a really gorgeous, listed
building in central London, with a marvelous cast iron fire escape
that reminds me of those old English movies (not the Ealing comedies,
more about those later). I love working there.

Usually.
Maybe not today.

Today I got in after a long weekend, feeling very rough (no, the
first wasn't the cause of the second), to find my colleague in a
huff. Well, it doesn't take much to get her in a huff, she's worse
than me, and she'll tell you exactly why she is in a huff. With the
building being so old and listed, and with my organisation being very
reluctant to spend more than they absolutely have to, it follows that
a lot of the building is in its original state. That includes the
pipes. The building is on 5 floors including the basement and ground,
and water pressure to some areas is very, very low. It was thus that
I spent the first half hour at work nursing a coffee and trying to
calm down my colleague who was cursing our clients for being dirty
cows. I was trying to remind her about the age of the pipes, and how
we'd complained about the pressure again and again, for years, and
how we'd always been ignored. Nope, she didn't want to hear. And so
she described, in detail, the size, shape and colour of the extremely
large turd she'd found in a toilet on the second floor, that someone
hadn't flushed (according to her; more likely they had but the lack
of pressure was somewhat acute). She went on to tell me in still more
detail how she'd covered it in toilet paper to flush it, and how it'd
kind of gone half way down before getting stuck. At this point I
burst out laughing. She wasn't impressed, even though I'd been
holding back for a good 10 minutes by then.

In other news: I was reading the paper and saw about the punitive
judgement on CD Wow, that will now have to fork out something like
£42 million in fines and costs to those nice guys at the British
Phonographic Industry, for selling legally published CDs at a decent
price to the British public. The BPI obtained an order freezing CD
Wow's assets to make sure they get their dosh.
I've known about CD Wow for years through friends who regularly shop
there, but I'd never used it myself... until yesterday when I placed
an order for a few DVDs. I've just checked the status of my order, it
says: "pending despatch". To the BPI, probably.