Flowers and proteins

There are memories I have that at times play through my head involuntarily and repeatedly.

One is about a brief period that I spent working for the London Borough of Bromley before my undergrad degree started in 1998. My job was to monitor "Y2K compliance" for the council.

Before 2000 there was allegedly a fault with how a great many computers were programmed to handle dates after the year 2000. The fear was that errors in this dating system would mean aeroplanes falling out of the sky, accidental nuclear war, hospital records being jumbled, and a bunch of other doomsday scenarios. Thanks to the Y2K bug, I had a job.

The term "Y2K compliance" at the time was a buzz-word, something that people (including myself) associated with programming geniuses who knew how to unpick the inner workings of microchips. The reality was that I sat a desk and mindlessly googled various manufacturers for the compliance level of their machines and recorded the data in a spreadsheet.

Day in and day out I sat at my table, often completing my task in an hour and trying to find ways of killing the other 7 hours of the day. I was so bored that I began trying to derive Newton's equations of projectile motion under uniform gravity beginning only with the assumption f = ma. For some moments I thought myself a little clever for doing it. But then, having done it, I realised it was such a simple problem that it would hardly have entered into the maths 101 syllabus at University.  I plugged the equations into spreadsheets, simulated tennis balls doing bouncy things, and noted that Newtons equations work perfectly with the arrow of time working both forwards and backwards. Why did the Universe, then, evolve with time moving in only one direction? I had no clue, and would not discover the answer to that question for some years. Then I got bored. It was as though my mind had totally run out of fuel to burn. Even the thought of thinking seemed to consume too much energy. I began to enter a strange kind of partial brain-activity-ether-real world.

I soon discovered that my job was not needed. The council merely had a use-it-or-lose-it budget to work with and employed someone to do some "compliance" work to chew up spare money. It was the first time I looked into the bureaucratic machine, its unthinking gears in constant motion, so inhuman, so parasitic, so much like a sign post saying, "don't lean on this sign post."

The office was open-plan and the people who sat next to me and around me seemed to be career council types, the kind of drone-like apparatchiks attracted to low skill, high wage jobs. None of them  asked me any personal questions. None of them discussed anything outside of soccer and what they had done the previous Friday night. And that's if they talked. Most of the time there was eerie silence while they busied themselves with something. As an 18 year old fresh out of Zimbabwe I felt like I had been transplanted from an ancient place into a heartless future in which the strange mannequins in front of me  embodied all of the lifeless dystopia of nightmares: robotic, empty, bankrupt of spirit, void of curiosity.

I pathologised them on the surface, but the reality was that I felt like there was something deeply wrong with me. I sensed it was I who was strange for feeling, for thinking, for wondering about the world and its ways. I felt that I was alone in being miserable because I was paradoxically not miserable. It was as though the people around me would never know their own misery because misery itself was their baseline of existence;  everywhere and therefore nowhere.

With time I even wondered whether their brains detected light as mine did, whether the three-dimensional shape of the room around them looked the same to them as it did to myself, or whether the light hitting the back of their brains illuminated the same pathways as it did in mine. I wondered whether they experienced any form of emotion that was not some how blunt.

The only escape from the machine came at lunch time. The clock would hit 1pm and I would stop what I was doing and walk down the 8 flights of stairs to the exit. I would walk across the grey road that ran between the grey buildings. Now and then I would study the structures around me: ugly and full of steel and concrete, so grotesque that I wondered whether the architects had tried deliberately to make the world an uglier place; whether they had felt it their duty to destroy beauty wherever they found it. The monoliths almost hurt my eyes with their prison-like proportions, their lazy symmetry born of computer-repeated pillars, and the communist-like poor quality of their materials. And it was as though these buildings were bowels from which the grey empty-behind-the-eyes, plodding zombies were birthed and ejected into the streets.

I would walk with the zombies until I reached the sandwich stand. And there I would wait in the queue until I finally saw her: the single red flower painted into the grey and black of the prison surrounding me. "Good afternoon what can I get you today?" she would say in her French accent as she locked me momentarily with her green eyes. I would ask for a sandwich and then I would watch her delicate wrists and hands move as she cut the bread, her firm skin, her perfect collarbones, so delicate compared to the soul-sapping ogreish pillars just behind her. I'd watch her chestnut hair sway to and fro, and her eyes look about. Her eyes seemed so human, so alive, life happened behind them. She would hand me my sandwich. "Anything else?" And I would always want to say, "just your number, please."

Many times the fantasy words were at the tip of my lips: "Would you like to get a coffee some time? You know, real coffee, ground properly in a grinder, served in an elegant cup. And we can talk about real things, like nobody around here ever seems to do."

But each time the moment came my mouth jammed and my words vanished. And then I would just thank her and look her in the eye for the brief moment that I could. And I would take my sandwich and walk across the grey street and under the grey communist buildings and enter the grey council building I worked in. And then for the rest of the day she would be the sole moving figure in the empty canvas I called my mind.

I prepared myself one day to get her number and I went down the stairs, all the time thinking about how I would deliver my lines: "It would be lovely to see you when you're not making sandwiches, or: can I give you my number?" (Maybe it would be less terrifying for her if I gave her my number instead of asking for hers, I thought.) But when I got to the sandwich shop that day I discovered that she was no longer there, that someone had replaced her with a robot. My World darkened, as though the last red flower in existence had wilted into the colourless concrete to leave just grey, everywhere.

There was also coffee: One of my chief aims as Y2K compliance officer was to make my boss a cup twice a day. It smelled and tasted awful: acrid; muddy. It was stored in a bucket-sized industrial tin, tasting much like its industrial-like paint-tin would suggest. One day I took my boss his cup and he sipped at it and immediately spat it out. "Oi, what's in 'ere? Make me another one, the milks off..."

The milk had curdled. "That's strange", I thought, "because I tasted the milk before I put it into the coffee and it seemed fine."

I went back to the kitchen and sipped some more milk from the bottle I'd used. It was perfectly fine. Then I poured a little hot water into a new mug, added to it some coffee and trickled some of the milk from the old bottle into the mix. It immediately curdled as it hit the coffee. "Interesting" I thought. Then I opened a new carton of milk and poured some into a fresh cup of coffee. It didn't curdle at all. Again I sampled milk from both cartons, the old and the new. They both tasted fine.  "I know what's happened!" I thought as I walked to my boss's office. "Sir", I said, standing at his door. "May I come in?"

"Yes, come in. And don't call me sir!" he said.

"I just wanted to say that I think I've worked out what was wrong with your coffee. Essentially, I did a control experiment with the old and new milk....to cut a long story short, I suspect the milk I originally used, while tasting perfectly fine, was on the edge of going off, so that when I placed it in the mildly acidic environment of your coffee, the chemical milieu therein was sufficient to denature the already partially deteriorated milk proteins past a critical point, essentially producing the coagulation you observed...all that said, there are probably hundreds of chemicals in coffee and milk, and who knows what kind of complex chemistry could be causing the coagulation. Still, the simplest explanation could well be..."

I stopped. The freeze-frame of that moment still enters my head at times. I see it when my mind is blank, when I'm not thinking of anything in particular: his eyes boring into me, his thumb clicking his pen in and out, his eyebrows slightly turned down as if he were angry, as if he wished in that moment for a button that would open a trap-door and send me to a shark-tank. "I'll get your coffee now", I said.