Yeah, it's so different. When I first got to LA I thought "God, everyone is SO friendly". Stage One was that friendliness freaking me out and I got really self conscious and wanted people to stop talking to me. But then Stage Two was feeling really, really lonely because there were all these people acting like they…

I was there eight years! Over time I found sarcastic, allergic-to-earnestness friends… and perhaps got slightly softer myself. Aww.

Yes!

A Californian once said "You should, like, move to the East Coast" to me AS AN INSULT. It was spectacular. People truly found me outrageous at times; bizarre.

I use it all the time! And definitely for all sorts of people (well, all sort of uppity people, obviously); I had no idea that some people thought it had a racial connotation until really recently when I read it on this site. I grew up hearing it and continue to hear it reasonably regularly (and hardly ever for anyone…

Ha, I had the reverse — moving from London to California. People were frequently just *shocked* by how "mean" I was. I loved living in LA but that part of it was frustrating.

Incredible. Thank you for posting that; I hadn't read it before.

Or just… never gorgeous at all.

Laser removal was wonderful for me. No bumps, ever.

She definitely does seem very nice. I find her annoying, but it's not her fault at all.

Mine's a similar conversion; UGH.

There are old windows behind us that let in a constant breeze, and the building "can't" do anything to fix it; I'm on the verge of starting a small bonfire on my desk.

YES. I can't type properly because it's so cold that my fingers are sluggish (and I'm really good at typing ordinarily).

I've no idea what it is in ours, but it gets impossible to type with any degree of accuracy. It's wretched.

Ah, ok. We're dealing with different levels of cold! My search continues…

I do actually have colleagues who work with blankets on them! I often work with my coat on over a thick jumper with a t-shirt underneath (and jeans and boots) and a hot-water bottle on my lap, but my fingers and face are still freezing. Ugh.

But how does the jacket warm your fingers? (This is a serious question, from a freezing office worker whose face and fingers are suffering more than all the other bits.)

We're not allowed space heaters! It's tiresome.

My office is really, really, really cold — so I eat constantly to cheer myself up. (In summer, when my office is really, really, really hot, I eat almost nothing all day because I feel all sweaty and gross and lose my appetite.) I really need to lose loads of weight, so I would *love* my cold office to magically make…

I'm massively naive and always just assumed that they can't get the correct size for the mannequin on and so have to use a bigger size and clip it… that might be because I always got frustrated trying to get clothes on my dolls and was projecting that on to the poor window dressers.