A friend has a crush on a work colleague. It's a minefield, you say? A no-no right up there with eating a boiled egg at your desk or stealing the boss's parking space? Yet the heart is a bored and lonely hunter, hellbent on causing its owner as much embarrassment as possible. My friend has the hots for this drone, and worse still (or better, glass-ceiling considered) she is his manager.
Nothing has happened. She is currently in stage one of attraction, which we shall call innocence. They have been drunk in each other's company on a work do. They have engaged in harmless send-and-receive foreplay. She is spending ten minutes longer a
day deciding what to wear. But that is all.
I've told her to throw a printer in the face of workplace regulation and ask him out but she insists this is a case of forbidden love and is resigned to quietly lusting away behind her computer. In the meantime, I've warned her, some less principled filly will reel in her catch and she'll be left in her power-skirt best, waiting for an ambiguous but professional email to ping into her inbox.
People are funny about relationships commencing at work, which is ridiculous considering work is all we do. I'm surprised anyone in Britain manages to meet someone outside the hours of nine and five, six, seven, eight... For me, getting lucky outside the office would limit my options to the lollipop man, the tram workies I encounter daily on leaving the house, or the chap at the Co-op who takes the money for my tea on the way home. Out of the three I'd probably go for the lollipop man because he once gave me a sweetie. My feelings towards the tram workies are closer to those felt in the last throes of a relationship when all is sour-faced slanging matches about the infernal mess and lack of respect.
In any case, I met my partner at work and it all turned out fine though, erm, neither of us work in that particular office anymore or are allowed within a ten-mile radius. Okay, okay, it was a total scandal, a bit like when Richard Burton fell for Elizabeth Taylor on the set of Cleopatra, but with less glamorous hair and confined to the Gorbals.
cramaswamy@scotlandonsunday.comThe full article contains 400 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
