You have a ‘quick question’? Oh good, I have a couple of hours

Ask me anything, go on. Except for THAT, of course

Photo © 2024 Camylla Battani | https://unsplash.com/fr/@camylla93

At the end of an extended, hot and steamy sweaty session, one of the four willing young women suddenly sits up, looks pleadingly into my eyes and says: “Just a quickie?”

Here we go again, eh, reader!

Not really. My most faithful subscribers to this weekly column have guessed exactly what’s going on. As usual, I begin with a woefully outdated schoolboy innuendo to grab your attention, followed by a bland explanation of the double-entendres. Phnar.

It’s almost five o’clock on the final day of a difficult ‘graphics creation and media workflow management systems’ training course. (Several of the few hairs remaining on my pate turned grey as I typed that last sentence, but Client Gets What Client Books.)

The air may be getting chilly outdoors but it is like a sauna in the tiny windowless dungeon allocated to us for the week. The aircon had stopped working months ago, they told me, but what with everyone basking in the final glory days of WFH permissiveness, Facilities Management never got around to getting anything fixed. Apparently, FM themselves had been W-ing FH when they ought to have been M-ing the Fs, the F-ing Ws.

Our sauna vibe is enhanced by the severely muted illumination provided. One of the lights had been flickering on day one until I could stand it no more, jumped onto a swivel chair and tore the fucker from the ceiling while screaming “Nyyyaaaahh! Ya bastard!” This earned me a ripple of embarrassed applause from my trainees but I noticed they avoided eye-contact for the rest of that morning.

Not that you could tell it was morning. After my lighting adjustment, the room felt like a sauna but looked like command and control on a submarine, which rendered the atmos heavier still. The five of us are now humourless, irritable, uncomfortable and – in my case – unpleasantly and very visibly damp under the arms.

Oh, I did write “steamy” too, didn’t I? We have a kettle.

And she isn’t asking for a quickie. She said: “I have a quick question.”