Office cryogenics

I am ALWAYS cold. It doesn’t matter. I kept waiting for that point in pregnancy where you’re too hot (esp. as I was due in February), but it never came. I just had to keep looking for bigger coats. The only heat change I had was that I couldn’t stand heat in the first trimester. I wasn’t hotter than normal, but if I got hot, it made the nausea worse.

So offices are ALWAYS cold to me. I am always the one sitting in a meeting with a pashmina or scarf wrapped around me or a space heater hidden under my desk. My fingers are always freezing so that I have to switch my engagement band to the other hand to keep it from banging around. A good friend of mine used to use my hands as her personal AC system in the summer – it would take them forever to warm up, so she’d ask me to put my little icicles on the back of her neck to cool her off when it was 90 degrees.

So when I sat freezing my tush off in my office today, I didn’t think anything of it. I figured this was par for the course. As my fingers and toes froze, I figured that was normal – though when my face started to get really cold, I thought it was getting to be a bit much. I IM’d another coworker who told me that she was cold too (but had her space heater on), but OK fine. Then this afternoon one of my coworkers (a guy in this case for those going with the theory that women are always cold) walked in and said – my God, it’s cold in here! I think it’s 10 degrees colder in here than elsewhere – certainly colder than in my office. Apparently he has a little key chain thermometer in his office – showing it was 68. The gradations were very hard to read, but it was definitely below 65. I emailed a friend I used to work with (who always used to make fun of how cold I always was) – he suggested that maybe they were preserving me for future use…