How to create a fun vacuum

Simply take: 50 people that you spend time with only because you are paid to Your boss Free alcohol Ice skating mix vigorously and try to avoid getting either fired or so depressed that you throw yourself onto the ice in an attempt to commit chilly suicide at the feet of a colleague. I was quite happy to hear the anticipatory chatter as everyone got excited about the free drink (as though some acidic wine and weak beer were going to bestow magical properties upon an evening's entertainment) but the morning after is awash with tales of vomit on the bus, German sausage and the peculiar belief that I would be regretting my decision not to come. I have tried to keep to myself the fact that I would rather be rolled in squid and fed to carnivorous sea-beasts to preserve some element of conviviality with my colleagues, but it's only a matter of time before I make free with the shittily decorated chocolate logs and choke someone to death with plastic holly.

Things I probably shouldn't have said at work

'You can tell him to suck my hairy bits' will be one of the things I later regret allowing to slip out at work. I suppose it could have been worse - each individual word isn't offensive in and of itself, so I should be grateful for small mercies. Update - my rallying call of 'Who wouldn't want to come into work and see some festive pubes on the wall?' to inspire enthusiasm in the sales team also had a less than stellar effect.

It can't just be me

Yesterday I had the unpleasant job of justifying apostrophes to someone who had just uttered the phrase 'We could just strip all the apostrophes out'. At first I was pretty nice as I assumed I had misunderstood what he was suggesting, but when I realised that he really did believe that we could just use the same text without any apostrophes I had to dig my fingers into my knee so hard, I thought I was going to pass out just from the effort of not punching him. I mean, I can understand people not knowing how to use an apostrophe (well, I can't understand it, but I have had to accept that it's true) but a complete disbelief in the absolute necessity of having them is another matter. In the end I composed an impassioned speech which started with a short discourse on the most important elements of apostrophe use, covering the indication of possession and including some wisdom about the contractions. I then went on to point out that even if I never contracted another word and managed to express every concept on the website without the use of the possessive, we would still have to be able to use apostrophes in John o' Groats or 3 o'clock and thus it was an entirely unacceptable pretence at a solution. Fortunately, whilst I fear the finer points of my verbal treatise may have been wasted on someone who came up with the idea in the first place, the sheer vehemence of my argument seemed to scare him into not pursuing the suggestion any further.

'Suck it and see'

Is there a more annoying phrase for people to use at work? I mean, there's plenty of management speak that really pisses me off, but something about the image of my most repugnant colleagues sucking anything makes me want to tear my eyeballs out and pour bleach through the holes into my brain.

My own personal hell!

I think I must have been guilty of some kind of hubris in recent times because today I was plunged into my own personal hell. Not only did we have a long presentation where they adhered to the tried and tested method of 'Tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them' which I, in my confidence at my own abilities, find very frustrating to have to sit through, but the torture didn't end there. After a five minute break (don't worry - the directors had expensive sandwiches delivered, so it didn't really matter that the meeting was a whopping four hours long) we came back only for crisps to be offered around. It's no secret that the sound of eating is one of my least favourite, but the sound of 15 people surrounding me and subjecting me to the sound of crunching, slurping and slobbering away made me feel as though my brain was going to burst out of my head. However I have realised that it's people I am ambivalent about that provoke the strongest reactions - I can listen to loud eating on the part of someone I choose to spend time with without too much trouble, but people I work with is an entirely different matter. Another reason why I should work at home I think, and one which I could never really cite on a CV.

Learning at work

One of the beauties of my job, apart from the fact that almost nobody in the company actually understands what I do, is that I have managed to appropriate the tasks I want to do whilst avoiding those which don't really interest me, which is particularly pleasant at the moment as I am writing copy for a brochure about the UK's National Parks, which essentially means reading stuff about the parks themselves, and then regurgitating it in brochure appropriate tones and in bite-size chunks with snappily encouraging asides and the occasional witty (no puns - that's one step too far) remark. During the course of this I have learnt a fair amount about our national parks, not least that the features which make them different from one another are few and far betwen unless you want to go into the latin names of the species that can be found there. I learnt briefly about fishing while I was trying to work out whether angling was just fishing (it is - the angle is the hook) but had to stop when I saw pictures. I have learnt some stuff about cars (Enzo is a pretty cool name for someone who makes cars that people are so boring about), some stuff about dolphins and reindeer and plenty of less edifying things about where small airfields are around the country and the things women let strangers do to them in the name of beauty. All in all however, I just like to learn things, and despite the drawbacks of my job, I am glad I manage to make learning a part of it.

I love my massive studio-style headphones

They are the only thing that stands between my co-workers and certain death. Because we have moved to an office which has no cafeteria and no staff room, in fact nowhere at all to get away from your desk without getting in your car and escaping somewhere more luxurious, I am constantly subjected to the noises of my colleagues crunching, sucking, slurping and talking through mouthfuls of food. The sound of this process ranges from vaguely annoying crisp eating by people who seem to be involved in ongoing competitions with themselves to see how large a stack of crisps they can ram into their gob in one go, crushing them up with their mouth half agape to those who willfully open a mouth full of half-chewed slop to share some worthless piece of information with someone who doesn't care, and certainly doesn't have enough interest to want to see the future contents of their stomach. I am sure that I make some noise when I eat, but at least I have some understanding of the size of my mouth, and don't consistently try to test its limits with just one more crunchy treat which will render me incapable of chewing with my mouth closed, thus subjecting everyone around to the sound of me snorting and grunting my way through the entire mouthful and possibly end in the unplanned consumption of a colleague's fist. But, fortunately for my co-workers, I have massive headphones and a wide selection of entertainment just waiting inside them to relieve me of my bile at their lack of consideration and unashamed gluttony. They don't know how lucky they all are.

Feeling old

I thought that the aches and pains I am increasingly discovering would be the thing that would make me feel old, but that was before I spent a day at home last week due to the snow. I did try to go to work, but when I saw the 4x4 in front of me skid, I decided that the world of internet marketing could survive without me for a day. Moreover, I decided that if I was going to die in the snow, I would want to be doing something a damn sight more worthwhile than going in to work just so that I could show my face and make it onto the leaderboard of 'people who respond to intimidation by risking their lives to get into the office'. However, when I got home, a mere hour and a half after leaving, the Boy Wonder was slightly underwhelmed, and responded not with wild elation that I had survived the peril of the snow and had also come home for an extra day of fun with him, but with a slightly deflated 'Oh - well I've got lots of jobs to do today'. Fair enough I suppose - I do rib him a little about his part-time status and sometimes his level of achievement on his self-employed days, but I remember when I used to have time on my own in the house to do all my jobs when he was at evening rehearsals, time which was suddenly snatched away from me when he started rehearsing in the day, and wondered whether I have made a grave mistake. Instead of offering to share those jobs, which are incidentally not just my jobs so much as household chores that the Boy Wonder is mostly unware of, I just moved them around so that I get them done in stages rather than a blitz one night a week. Ok, if I'm honest, some of them don't get done that much any more at all, but it goes to show how little you really need to achieve if you want to get away with the bare minimum. So, he got on with doing something incomprehensible with solder which will apparently revolutionise the studio in the spare room upstairs by requiring much shorter lengths of cable. I mustered up as much enthusiasm as I could, and it still wasn't enough to see any way in which this development would benefit my life, but inspired by his sudden enthusiasm for achieving things, and feeling as though I'd better pull something pretty good out of the bag in order not to be the lazy couch-potato on the sofa watching day-time TV while the Boy Wonder was in a creative world of success, I hit upon the most tragic brainwave I have ever had. Instead of getting the wellies back on and braving another dice with death in the beautifully snowy, but ultimately pretty shooty woods in the village, I hit on a desperately well-conceived plan to defrost the freezer, making full use of the snow to maintain the temperature of its contents whilst I fought with the sheets of ice which build up when the Boy Wonder absent-mindedly leaves the freezer door open overnight. I unpacked the food into carrier bags, plonked them in the snow, covered them with a bin bag to stop the new snow getting in, and then spent a happy couple of hours making ratatouille in between bouts of kettle boiling, floor mopping and finger shredding for the cause. It was a wildly successful venture and one which left me with a pleasant sense of multi-tasked achievement. However, there was a moment of sadness when I realised what had happened - instead of flinging myself into the white stuff for snow angel creation and snowman construction, I was excited about the idea of being able to defrost the freezer without ruining the food. I don't know when this shift towards adulthood came about, or even whether I would have noticed it had it not suddenly snowed, but I think it might be a step towards my apparently inevitable maturity. Having said that, as a child I remember having to spend a snow day when the school was closed ringing parents of the children who had not made it in to let them know the school would be closed the next day too, so maybe it's my Mum's fault for teaching at my primary school - it sucked the fun out of the rarest of treats, the school closure, and left me with a distinctly unhealthy approach towards the practical applications of snow.

Snow!

When it started snowing yesterday I thought it might be a bit icy this morning, but by the time we went to bed quite a lot had settled, so this morning I wasn't entirely surprised to see about 4 or five inches on the roof of my car. Now I am sitting at work, where we have been given a time at which we are allowed to leave, so I'm hoping that it at least doesn't get worse before then as I suspect it won't go down too well to just bail and go home. However, I suppose if it was that important to me, I could just leave and take the time unpaid, so I can't really complain...

Twitter - Shitter more like

I just don't get it - I know that it's supposedly a great marketing tool, and that you can use it to send up to 140 characters of information about your life to any number of people who might not otherwise know what you were up to all the time. But I don't get it - I can't follow anyone unless I know their e-mail address, and if I knew their e-mail address then I'd probably just e-mail them to ask what they're up to. I know my brother 'tweets', and I am constantly reading long earnest articles about how important it is to avail yourself of all the social media you can get your hands on lest you miss some important snippet of information, come late to a discussion about your niche or find that someone has tweeted something you disagree with and you're not the first to comment. I am sure I will get into it - it's my first day after all, and because I am doing it for work, I can't really just get fed up and jack it all in, but I really can't believe that it's more efficient just to e-mail the people you know and tell them that you're 'feeling slightly sick' or any of the other gems I have seen on there so far...

Losing my trousers in my lunch hour

Over the last couple of years, I have been making an effort to discount 'fear of looking stupid' as a reason not to do things. It's something that I feel has probably held me back at some points, and although I am not really shy, there are times when I have stood on the sidelines of something I wanted to join in with because I was worried about looking a tit. A look at almost any photo of me will reveal that this fear was entirely unfounded, as I have realised that I spend a large amount of time looking like a tit anyway, because my face does complicated and unwarranted things when I am not paying attention to it. But when I started swimming in my lunch breaks, there was no such fear - I worried that I would run over a small child as I drove into the car park of the school where the pool is, but I think that's relatively rational. I didn't worry about losing my trousers though, which is why I had no action plan when it happened. I went swimming as was usual, got changed, got in the pool, did some lengths and got out again. It wasn't until I was actually standing in a top, a towel and a pair of flip flops that I had a rummage around for my trousers. Assuming that I must be missing them somehow within the confines of the not entirely roomy canvas bag I take swimming, I had another rummage. 'Doh' I though as I abandoned the changing room to find the locker where I had stashed my stuff during swimming, assuming that they must have worked their way loose and escaped while I was trying to pick up all my stuff without getting it all wet. They weren't there, nor were they in the locker below, or any of the adjoining lockers. I went back into the changing cubicle for another fruitless search of my bag. I then began to wonder whether it wasn't that I had somehow managed to lose my trousers, but that someone had stolen them. I decided it was very unlikely that there is a pervert in the changing rooms who only likes trousers - my underwear was in there, so I figured the chances that someone would choose to steal my trousers were pretty minimal. So after I had looked in all the lockers in the changing rooms, all the cubicles and various other areas where I thought trousers might lurk, I decided to ask at the front desk, so I shuffled out into reception in my top and towel, only to find that instead of a friendly receptionist there was a group of school children waiting for their lesson. Evidently, I looked quite amusing but after bearing their sniggers for a short while, I decided to go and have a really good look in the changing rooms again, in case a pair of chocolate brown trousers had somehow been camouflaged against the white tiles or grey locker interiors. I had just decided that the only course of action was to flee to my car in my towel, ring work and tell them I was feeling suddenly sick, and then go home and try to avoid all our neighbours between getting out of the car and making my way into the safety of the house. I was happy to admit that I had lost my trousers, but I wanted to be there when people found out as I could only begin to imagine what would be said in the office if I wasn't there to answer questions. Fortunately, as I completed one final sweep of the changing rooms and gathered up my bags I saw one of the boys who works there wandering around and collared him. My relief was short lived as I tried to ask if they had found my trousers without sounding like a complete tit - I'm not entirely sure if it's possible to ask for missing trousers without sounding like a tit, but I am entirely sure that I can't. But the boy produced the trousers from under the counter and asked if they were the ones I was after (how many pairs of trousers did they have back there?), and I made my way back to the changing rooms with my trousers and the new-found love I had for my trousers and made my way back to the office without having to make any excuses. I did subsequently tell people about the mishap, but at least I was there to explain that it's a lot easier than it looks to lose a pair of trousers over lunch...

More thoughts on the world of work

Wouldn’t assigning volumes of work rather than working hours be a better way of working? You do the work and you get paid the money that the task was considered worth, rather than turning up at an arbitrary time and having to take ‘time off’ for boring things like waiting in for a plumber, coming home early to let in the chimney sweep or taking a car to be serviced.

Ironically, the plumber, chimney sweep and garage all work to the system I aspire to – why don’t we insist that a plumber turns up at 9 and stays till 5.30? Because we have agreed to a price for having the job done, and we don’t need to see them there to believe that they are doing what they need to be doing.

All this is leading me to believe that I am not cut out for a job with working hours – my life is more important to me than money or the illusion of security and I would happily work through the night occasionally in order to be able to take time off when I need it without asking someone’s permission. Do I feel like a responsible adult when I am expected to work on Christmas Eve to satisfy a whim of someone who doesn’t really understand my job? The thing is, even if I did work through the night here, I would still have to explain that to someone to justify then reclaiming that time during the ‘normal working day’.

It’s not even as though there is much security – if I am ill for more than 8 days in a year I can expect to go unpaid for those extra days. It’s a system which I find particularly unappealing given that the sick time is calculated on a calendar year, meaning that in the winter, when you’re most likely to pick up an infection (especially given that it seems to be considered the utmost virtue to come into work when you’re ill here) and have unusually high outgoings over Christmas, you are also most likely to find that you aren’t being paid for any time you take off sick. I cannot work out why people do come in when they’re ill – I assume it’s either a misplaced sense of being irreplaceable, a desire to avoid taking unpaid sick leave in the future, or the wildly mistaken belief that anyone is impressed with your hacking performance in the corner of the office.

Basically, the conclusion I seem to be reaching is that I don’t really like having a proper job. I could easily live with the insecurity of unemployment if I was doing something I liked, and perhaps that realisation is one I have needed to spur me into action. Maybe I should stop writing this blog, and start writing something which could potentially be a source of income which would enable me to pursue the writing of this blog without any guilty feelings that I should be wasting my time doing something more profitable.

So, watch this space – if this is the last entry and you suddenly find that a new witty novelist has broken onto the scene, then assume that the witty novelist is me. Otherwise, I have failed as a witty novelist, and not even been inspired to come back here to bemoan my fate which will mean that the sentiments conveyed above have not been realised.