The Lying, the Switch of the Wardrobe. Or, What the Muggles Saw

There is a story about a little boy whose furniture comes to life and rearranges itself in his sleep.  Employees at my office are treated to the same experience on a regular basis.

One day a few weeks ago, I wandered over only to find that an extra couch and a glass-topped table had been added to a nook in a half-forgotten alleyway, turning an otherwise drab corner into a pleasant place to recline and take illicit phone calls.

On another occasion, I found that the long table in one of our conference rooms (where I was prone to occasionally taking "afternoon interviews") had been traded in for a smaller table and a snazzy-looking computer bank.  Two weeks later, the computer bank was gone but there was no sign of the long table.  Theft is unlikely - after all, there were two computers in this bank - which reminds me of that old children's nursery rhyme that ends with the telling line "and the dish ran away with the spoon."

Today, I wandered over to the office water cooler only to find that someone had put a large and elegant-looking set of drawers next to it, turning a forgotten passageway into a locale for chatting with co-workers and hiding items that you don't ever want anyone to know belong to you.

Meanwhile, in a prime and much-frequented hallway, someone has put up a mid-sized fridge with a microwave on top of it, which is fully half the furniture I bought for my college dorm room.  The overall feel is a bit more "Embassy Suites" than newspaper office, although a quick peek into the beer-less fridge suggests the rearrangement was more an act of forgetting than an act of God.

Of course, in the run-up to the much-hyped Commonwealth Games (an international sporting event in which, in true American fashion, I refuse to believe) this phenomenon has been occurring on a city-wide scale.

Visitors to India Gate might have been surprised by the appearance and disappearance of entire decorative flower beds.  Fences and road dividers have come up, disappeared and been forgotten.  Much-needed street signs have made appearances on thoroughfares that, as far as I can tell, have never been called by the indicated names.  Yesterday, on my way to the office, I noticed that a police station the size of a closet had come up in an otherwise bare clearing about two blocks from my house.

It's what you'd expect if God was a Sims enthusiast who kept forgetting to save his game.

(I should note that what makes the furniture and street rearrangement seem arbitrary is the lack of a noticeable plan.  The brave little police office that came up outside my home can probably accommodate an officer, provided he is thin)

Of course, it's possible that the Municipal Corporation of Delhi's famous ghost employees are finally doing some ghost work. In which case, they can carry on.  I kind of like it.