Carnivorous Cow's four-in-one stomach rumbled loudly. "Breakfast will happen," she muttered, "once the @#$& coffee place opens!"
"Then tell her what you'd _like_ for breakfast?" Gramsci suggested, slipping underneath the keyboard of the vestigial PC.
Carnivorous Cow thought long and hard. She remembered the old days, when she still squatted in the building across the road. By seven o'clock there would be a small cluster of cars in the parking area, and not all of them white Toyota Camries bought on the car scheme either, parked in their habitual spots. New arrivals would take note of who was already there, and within seconds phones would ring with invitations for early morning coffee.
This wasn't whipless caffe moccha from the coffee place, which didn't yet exist. This was plastic coffee in those awful white ceramic cups filched from the Dean's Committee Room in years past, whitened - for those as did - with lumpy Cremora and sweetened with sugar sachets collected from local restaurants and takeaways. It tasted like mud, mostly, but it contained sufficient caffeine to do the trick, and - Carnivorous Cow admitted sadly - it wasn't *really* about the coffee, anyway. It was about the company.
Taking a few minutes out, before the day really got underway, to connect with colleagues and catch up on critical issues, kvetch, or speculate wildly about what nefarious scheme Bremner might be hatching next to prevent teaching and research from actually taking place, went a long way to making the day easier, somehow. Carnivorous Cow missed that. Better tasting coffee didn't make up for the loss of time in people's diaries to connect with each other and with what it was that brought them here each morning - and by that, she reminded Gramsci, she wasn't meaning that fleet of Camries.
DFERTASRTY NMSARTYIOOP{NBM, typed Carnivorous Cow, which was her best attempt at "Dear Marion". She paused. "Breakfast has yet to happen, but what I'd really like for breakfast, is company."
Cows have widely spaced eyes, so have rather more peripheral vision than humans; but less depth of vision, as a result. This might account, in part, for their uselessness at spelling - not only are their hoofs rather too big for the keys on the bog-standard keyboard, but their lack of depth of vision makes their aim less than perfect too. So, if you ever intend playing LaserQuest with a cow on your team, make sure she gets the look out role but lets *you* do the shooting....