The C Word

I’ve been in a really shocking mood for the last couple of weeks, and who is the source of my irritation – well, it is our old friends my Chinese colleagues.  Yes, another highly racist and offensive blog post coming up.  If taking over my profession wasn’t enough, now they have started to take over my stress release from work.  For the last couple of weeks, they have started to hog the ping pong table.  I have traditionally played sometime between about 4pm and 5pm, and there is one friend who I like to play then because we are quite well matched and the games get suitably competitive.  Now this time slot has been taken over by up to 4 Chinese colleagues.  And they hog the table for at least the full hour.  Sometimes we join them, but then you end up waiting too long between games.  It is so frustrating.  We actually even have a second table now – the (Chinese) head of our community inexplicably decided to waste most of our annual budget on an unnecessary new table, but we don’t have room for it.  This is just a ridiculous state of affairs.  It’s the kind of thing that shouldn’t bug me so much – I can try scheduling another time of the day to play (say lunch?), and push for the second table to be set up somewhere else.  But my status quo has got disturbed, and I don’t like it one bit.