After having been gone for a week and a half, I am back at work. To say I missed it would be an overstatement. Well, more of an outright lie. To put things into perspective, I had a cold over New Year’s and preferred that to work.

It’s not that I have a bad job. I generally enjoy what I do, mindnumbing though it can be. The people I work with are for the most part not insane, stupid or annoying. None of that changes the fact that it’s work. If they didn’t pay me, I would not do it. I know the old saying about doing something you love and unfortunately neither vegitating or napping are growth industries. Neither is roller blading or drinking last I checked.

So what’s the point of this entry? Not that I should have stated that earlier rather than in the third paragraph. None, really. Except to say that while I was away, the flourescent lights were replaced above my cube. When I moved to this cube, I removed the lights because they put me to sleep. Now, I had no peoblem sleeping at my desk – it’s my supervisor that didn’t like it much. For three blissful years, my desk was lit only by my monitor and the ambient light in the room. When I came in this morning, those blasted cancerous tubes of harsh excessive lighting were humming and blazing away.

I think the guy in the next cube did it. He moved in there long after I had moved into my cube. In fact, I was the first person in the room containing our cubes. Ah, those were good months. Before anyone else had a desk in that room. I was all alone. I could play my music, make all kinds of noise, bounce my tennis ball around and not bother anyone.

It wouldn’t be so bad except that the lights are not directly above my cube. They’re half above mine and half above the guy next to me. What’s more, they’re to the left of my monitor which creates this weird indirect lighting where half my workspace is overlit, and half is heavily shadowed.

The reason I am writing all of this is that I hate flourescent lighting. I hate it with the fire of a thousand suns. I hate the stark light it casts over things. I hate the sterile glare shining off the neutral inoffensive colors of our server room. I prefer darkness to the “light” it gives. If were food, it would be eggplant. Flourescent lighting is the communist dictator of lighting – cheap, unappealing, harsh uniformity.

Having said that, I am not 100% anti-flourescent. I do use the flourescent bulbs intended to replace the incandescent ones at home. The light they give off is not this illumination from Hell I deal with at work. It’s the soft creamy glow similar to the incandescents they replace.

So, other than that, first day back to work since pre-Christmas. Yay, I’m all a-flutter.

Update: To top all of this off, our proxy server – stunning technological example of speed and efficenicy that it is – is acting up again causing the molassis-like connection speeds I’ve come to know and expect at work.