Always More Heat

You can always have more heating. There’s never been a time in my life, throughout all the homes I’ve lived in and all the different workplaces, where I’ve thought, “Hmm, could be a little cooler in here. Someone should turn the heating down.”

No, sir. I even worked at the Icicle Zone, which is a winter wonderland type place with artificial snow, a ski slope, ice skating and an office that was constantly kept at about a zillion degrees to make up for how cold it was in the rest of the building. We pretty much had the best heating services and repairs Canberra office workers could hope for, which is ironic because it was, after all, the Icicle Zone. We also had the best cooling, and that was just how it worked.

Every time people went into the office, even for a few moments, they’d shed all their layers, but not me. I could work in there wearing a jumper and still feel like it was a bit nippy sometimes, especially if I wasn’t wearing my thick socks. I think this is making up for my childhood right down the south of the South Island of New Zealand. Invercargill is chilly for most of the year, and it can get pretty harsh. And not the kind of chilly that you get used to either, which is annoying. I told my parents that we needed more heating, and my mother would say “No, no, no… money, child. Money.”

It was something like that. So we never had good heating services in the house, and as a result, I now seem to have some kind of body heat deficiency – at least a perceived one. But then I moved to Canberra, gas heating reigned supreme, and I was happy forevermore. The end.

Well, not quite. I work in an ice-cream shop now, and it’s flipping freezing all the time. Maybe I’m also just very terrible at picking careers that don’t have the word ‘ice’ in them somewhere. 

-Neo