Disputed Territory

I woke up this morning with blocked sinuses and a headache. I'd no sooner taken something for that, than I found that the milk had gone off overnight, despite being in the fridge. Now, whilst you can get away with using slightly off milk in tea or coffee - if they're hot enough, the bad taste is masked - there is no way you can mask its sourness when you put it on Weetabix. Even if you pile on the sugar. Personally, I blame those bastard dairy farmers - they somehow made my milk curdle to get back at me over that post I wrote yesterday. Anyway, after such a disastrous start to the day, I should have known that that it could only go downhill. which it did. I arrived for only the second day in the new offices, (actually the same offices we were moved out of last September, but refurbished), which we moved into last Friday, in which, after a year of wandering like a nomad, I finally have a desk again, only to find that some IT twat had set up at my desk, leaving his shit and laptop all over it. Naturally, I exploded.

Having moved said twat on, with, I hope, the clear message that having been arsed around by work for more than twelve months desk-wise, anyone trying to co-opt my newly acquired office space is going to get short shrift, I was left to ponder just how territorial we humans are. OK, we don't go around pissing on filing cabinets and the like to mark out our territory, but we definitely get very protective as to our personal space. Especially in an office situation. Any encroachment into your territory seems like a threat to your precarious status. It isn't just desks which bring out the territorial instincts - parking spaces are, if anything, even worse for this. I speak from personal experience - it's a real relief that I don't park my car at work anymore. The lack of an allocated parking space means that there's one less piece of turf I have to defend every day. That said, I'm almost as obsessive over my personal parking space. Actually, it isn't just desks and parking spaces - today I got quite irritated when I came home to find that someone had washed down the steps leading up to the terrace my house is situated in. Those steps are actually part of my property and I resent other people taking it upon themselves to do anything to them. If I don't nip this in the bud now, the bastards will soon be emboldened enough to start pissing on my doorstep.