THE SAD LAMP

"You could always just put a blanket over yourself," joked Mat from the other side of the room. Someone else over there suggested that they all needed to come in wearing sunglasses from now on.

Here's the problem. The SAD-lamp that HR recommended for me... is so blindingly, brilliantly, blisteringly BRIGHT, that it's as though I've harnessed the power of the sun itself and positioned it star-like in the centre of my desk! And it's lighting me up like Gandalf in the caves of Khazad-dum.

I tried angling it; it blinded Tim. Tim wasn't backwards about saying so. I put it between my monitors so that my head would block the light for everyone else. That had the effect of casting a massive shadow of me behind me, and silhouetting my screens to a near pitch black, in much the same way as the moon goes dark during a solar eclipse. Call me old-fashioned, but I reckon I need to be able to see what I'm doing.

Positioning it the other way illuminates me in ghostly white (hence Mat's 'helpful' suggestion of the blanket) and, over the row of monitors, makes me look like some sort of spectral meerkat, popping up angelically for any passers-by and company visitors to do a double-take before guffawing into the kitchen. And I'm pale enough (and laughed at enough) already.

So, it seems the choice is between filling the office with the light of a 10,000-lux Hertzsprung-Russell-main-sequence yellow-dwarf star, and coming in super-early every day to radiate in an hour of sunlight before everyone else gets in.

One thing's for sure, my seasonal-affected-disorder will definitely not be improved in any way at all by irritating my colleagues, blinding myself, or illuminating my desk with the kind of theatrical spotlight you might expect for the Angel Gabriel.

Oh the irony.