Letter From the Brink #1: From (Roasted) Office Worker #2457
April 20, 2005

Dear Building Management:

Please, please, for the love of all that’s sacred, turn off the heat. Turn it off, I say!

I know it’s only April, and there’s every chance that we may yet experience another freak snowstorm. You have doubtless seen the convincing movie adaptation of this eventuality, “The Day After Tomorrow”. I, however, am willing to take that chance, and prepare for any totally unlikely blizzards by keeping a fleece pashmina at my desk, just in case.

In the meantime, I’d like to explain to you that the precipitation we are currently experiencing is called RAIN. This is distinguished from snow by it’s lack of coldness. When rain falls, we sometimes experience a phenomenon known as “humidity”, colloquially known as “damp”, “moisture”, or “air sweat”.

It is important that you turn off the forced heating in our building, because heat, when combined with “humidity”, creates an environment known as “Vietnam”. I could go swimming in the pools of perspiration collecting in my underpants.

If the hotboxing of my office persists, I will be forced to react to my jungle-like surroundings by adapting my behaviour to suit: skulking around wearing only my dress pants, underpinnings and some grease paint, I will begin cutting down cubicles to create rudimentary shelters, where I can rest in camoflaged shade from the glaring overhead fluorescents, and wait for the next enemy soldier to enter my crosshairs.

Pardon me, I believe I may have lapsed into a false sniper flashback there. It must be the malaria I’ve contracted from the pestilent tropical flies that have sprung up in the warm nest of my desk plants.

Turn off the heat, or the water cooler gets it.

Best regards and felicitations,

Roasted Office Worker #2457