Blue Monday

I've remarked before about the quality of the light in the ten minutes or so after sunrise, and for a few minutes today it was divine as the sun climbed through the shallow layers of cloud. There is an asymmetry about the lengthening days, the sunset is getting later more quickly than the sunrise is getting earlier. This meant that to see the sun rise I had to tarry longer than I ought to in order to get to work at a reasonable time.

It was maybe that I was in such a hurry to get to the office this morning that led to this truly being a Blue Monday for me. As I was about to take the sharp turn into the road where our office is, I spotted the Road Closed and Diversion signs. The diversion took me on a magical mystery tour of a huge housing estate, a couple of miles to cover a distance that is normally a hundred yards. At the end of it I was confronted with another road closed sign blocking the only other way to the office car park.

There followed an encounter with High Vis Man who far from being acquainted with modern standards of customer relations, turned out to be obstructive, supercilious and sarcastic. And while I could see from where I was that the road to the office was completely passable, he wouldn't let me go down it, saying I might run over one of his colleagues. He could offer no solution to the challenge of getting to work when both accesses were apparently closed, saying that if there was a problem why wasn't there a queue of people in a similar position behind me? When I did eventually get to work I found out that several other people had had the same problem, though unlike me, they hadn't stopped to talk to High Vis Man, they just ignored the signs and went through. I asked HVM who he worked for, his answer was "Why do you want to know?". "Because I want to make a complaint". Though the large corporate that he works for doesn't appear to offer a complaints procedure.

Sorry to anyone who has read this. It's about catharsis, I needed to vent some frustration. I had just a tiny inkling into what it felt like for a certain cabinet minister trying to ride his bike through the gates of Downing Street. But then they did at least let him through, and I can honestly say I didn't swear or use the p word. Perhaps I should have done, I might have felt a bit less disturbed by the incident. It was a bad start to the working day.

I'm not one for getting the blues, but I had them today, and I didn't know what Blue Monday was until I heard colleagues talking about it this afternoon.