Saturday, October 28, 2006

Midnight Binge

Working in a call centre does bring about certain less than desirable changes in the body clock. That is anybody’s guess. Well, I am no exception. When I started out on this job I grew progressively weaker, plagued by headaches and my naturally frail constitution did not help matters. I might be blessed with the tenacity of a bulldog, but not its stamina. The long and short of it all is that at the moment I do not eat, sleep or behave in a manner like normal humans do. Waking up at 12 o clock in the afternoon and groaning about the fact that there’s only 2 more hours left till I have to get dressed and climb into the van is not a pleasant thing to do. And I do that every single day, with no exception even on a Friday.

I have also come to believe that normal hunger patterns somehow wither away like a dried up mass of weeds, from us call center animals. Nobody is hungry at the right time. And we all work when we are supposed to eat, eat when we are supposed to sleep and sleep when we are supposed to be doing something constructive like the rest of the world does.

Like yesterday I came home famished. Normally I find a chicken-roll on the table, I warm it up in the microwave and that should be sufficient for a good night’s sleep. But yesterday, I had the usual chicken-roll and two musambis, I still wanted more. Well, it’s just the excitement of a weekend, I thought. But it was not so as I found out half an hour later. Sleep was not about to bless me kindly until I did something about my drooling tongue and mind. So I shuffled into the kitchen and set about making one of the most delicious meals ever. Yum. A huge, I mean huge heap of steamed, buttered vegetables, 10 cocktail sausages fried to perfection and two scrambled eggs. I ate it all. I mean, I am the kind of person who would consider one scrambled egg to be a satisfying meal, but I binged like there was no tomorrow. I was an animal. By the end of it, I couldn’t move. I could barely drag myself to bed and when I did I found myself unable to sleep again. But I ate. Somehow that made me happy. I ate well. I loved it. I yam luving it. I work in a call center. That my bahaana is.

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