Strawberry Sensations

The box says "Delicious eaten hot or cold". I disagree. They're only good when they're hot... and fresh from the toaster. But then they're too hot to handle when they're fresh from the toaster, which means you're left with a fuzzy, fried tongue. There's no denying that they're delicious though. When I was younger, I thought they were sickly and too sweet... Isn't that ironic? My tastebuds were a lot more mature then than they are now. Having gone out into the big bad world however, I now jump, literally, at the chance to devour something sweet and.. uh.. sugary. There's a lot of bitterness out there, and consequently, with the passing of time, I've become a sucker for sugar. A favoured medium of the sugar fix, is the Pop Tart, especially the Strawberry variety. All I need is one to see me through the day.

Last week, I met the other 129 'young professionals' in the same boat as me. The boat was bloody crowded mind you, which meant that at every coffee break I lunged frantically at the scantily-clad tables which screamed out promises of "sugar, sugar and more sugar!!!" I'm not saying the environment was bitter, rather, that the growing realisation of my sheer incompetence when compared to the other 129, did incredible things to my own personal levels of bitterness.

Take Day Two of the Induction Programme for example... On that memorable day, I found myself feeling rather drunk and disoriented as a result of a poorly-prescribed dosage of malaria medication. The 'medic' who proffered the prescription was in fact my mother, who has no medical training whatsoever, so I can't exactly say I was surprised to find myself stumbling over my abnormally-large shoes, falling off chairs, and slurring my oddly-constructed sentences. I was put to work in a team of five, which proved to be a total disaster for the simple reason that in such a small team, the efficiency of each member is paramount. This also means, that any dummies within the team are immediately exposed, as there really is nowhere to run or nothing to hide behind when there're so few of you. I made not one useful contribution over the course of the 8 hour day. By the 5th hour, I resigned myself to the menial task of moving the counters around the board (.. we were playing a game, not studying rocket science, which makes this memory all the more painful) and counting out the money. I also proved to be a dab hand at wiping out the figures recorded from the previous round, without leaving the slightest trace of black ink behind on the board - Talk about a fait accompli!

By the end of the day I had eaten six or seven chocolate biscuits and had drank 3 cups of tea (each with 3 cubes of sugar). If only I'd had a trusty Pop Tart to hand. First, it would have spared me having to drink disgusting tea (I hate tea.. but more on that later). Second, it would have gone some way towards compensating me for the shame, dismay and extreme sorrow I felt on that terrible terrible day. Actually, now that I think about it, it would have taken a hell of a lot more than one Pop Tart to do the trick. Day Two was a bad bad day