Tag Archives: work

Mood

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I’m in a terrible mood today.  It started with a bad dream, continued with a hideous journey into work followed by eight hours of exasperation at faulty software systems, ending in another vile journey home.  Somebody suggested that I cycle to work.  Sure! I’ll go the whole hog, get a little basket for the front of my bike so I can stop off at the boulangerie for fresh bread and pastries and roll up to work as fresh as a daisy after a nine mile ride on some of the most treacherous roads in the city.

We’re supposed to be having an Indian summer, but I missed all two hours of it because I was held prisoner in a windowless office where the only weather I’m ever aware of is rain as it batters down on the timpanic roof that covers the building’s atrium. Other than that, I am cocooned in a soulless, airless hell where, if I sit still for long enough, the lights dim and I get plunged into darkness.

Within a day of returning to work my back has started aching again, my permafrown has returned.

The dream I had last night has been with me all day too; thoughts of past betrayals coming back to haunt me out of the blue.

Frustrations with bad traffic, work technology and my own personal failures have put me into a bad humour and I’m feeling snarly and miserable.  

But this time of year scares me as I anticipate the darkness and the cold, never knowing quite how badly I’ll react to it all.  There’s a strong possibility that my recent depression has had a physiological cause which has now been rectified and I will be fine this winter, but I only have the past few years to go on and so I am naturally apprehensive as the days shorten noticeably.

I should embrace the winter months, starting with Bonfire Night.  Standing in front of a raging bonfire, holding a sausage while fireworks explode above me.  Looking up as the smoke clears to reveal a starry sky on a crisp November night.  Walks in the woods, kicking through the fallen leaves as the sun starts to set at 3.30pm.  Frost that persists all day on hard surfaces.  Big jumpers and scarves, warming casseroles and the autumn TV schedule.  Yes!  I can see how that would be lovely.

But what’s the reality?  The temperature hovering around 10ºC, high winds and torrential rain.  That’s what we get.  And that ruins everything. And the TV schedule isn’t that good when X Factor yields the same ridiculous stories each year while one contestant becomes a tabloid hate figure.

Work becomes more stressful and the journey gets worse as December approaches.  And as December approaches, you resign yourself to spending another festive period on your own, putting a brave face on things, putting on parties for the family, but they’re really for yourself.  

And at the back of your mind, you tell yourself, just see it through to March; things start to feel better in March.

Arbeit macht pfffft

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I don’t like work.  It’s not that I don’t like my job, which is actually ok, if a little dull at times.  I resent the concept of work, of doing any activity that takes me away from my home or place of comfort for too long.  The whole thing about work is just dreadful: being forced to wake up when your body isn’t ready; rushing around for forty minutes or so while you get ready; fighting whatever hideous travel atrocities you have to face; to spend eight hours with people who are OK, but you probably wouldn’t socialise with them (I don’t socialise with anybody), sitting at a desk, answering e-mails and making spreadsheets just waiting until it’s time when you can go home again.  Ninety percent of the things I do at my desk at work can be done at my desk at home.   If I got myself a new printer cartridge, it’d be 98%.

This situation is nothing new.  I have felt this way since I was a youngster.  I loved my lessons when I was at school and sixth form, even liked the environment, but couldn’t wait to get home – loved it when we got an hour off because of the teachers’ walk outs in 1985.  The same was true at university, and when I came to do my PhD, it was such a huge shock to me because I actually had to basically do a proper job for six days a week, for often more than twelve hours a day.  Well, occasionally, when I’d fucked something up and had to do it again, and again.  Because I was shit at it.

I think the only time when I actually really enjoyed working, really enjoyed it, was when I was doing my first couple of post doctoral associates positions about twenty years ago.  Even then though, I still couldn’t wait until home time.

The day is, at best, one big sigh – a big, massive pfffft.  I find myself restless and bored, unable to concentrate.  I become disruptive and petulant, like a stroppy teenager who needs a good kick up the arse.

There are two parts to this problem.  Firstly, I need something to do that will earn me money, that will challenge me, that I will enjoy doing and that will keep me out of trouble.  Secondly, I need to not leave my house to do this.  I could do fantasy dress-up sex for middle-aged men; that’d CERTAINLY challenge me, well, them: “Yes, you are definitely going to have sex, but it’s all going to be in your head and no, you’re not coming anywhere near me with that thing.  Which would you prefer, dominatrix librarian or the school dinner lady with two huge ladles?”

 

Trolololol

Maybe I could offer other services from the comfort of my own office.  I could take people’s Buzzfeed quizzes for them and let them know how sexy/clever/popular they would be if they were me.  Or maybe a useful service would be to scour people’s social media presences and give them advice on the things they might want to think about avoiding posting, over and over again.  We’re all guilty of this to a certain degree, but it just takes a true friend, out of real concern, and friendship, not annoyance or irritation or anything, to tell somebody to stop posting the same fucking status update over and over again: Oh look, another cream tea and champagne from you; Another moan about being stuck in work from you; You do realise that’s the twentieth photo of your child in the same pose in the last half hour.  To stop living your bloody life through what Timehop tells you what you did one year, two years, four years ago.  STOP STALKING THAT PERSON ON TWITTER!!! Just look at your bloody tweets!  Every single one is a direct response to the same celebrity, who by now has realised that you’re clearly insane that ignoring you or blocking you would destabilise you completely… just like all the other episodes.

When does offering people “friendly guidance” on social media become trolling?  I would make quite a good internet troll: I have the feet and hair for it.

Tuednesday

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I have discovered a new day in the working week and I shall call it “Tuednesday”. Over the past year or so, the day formerly known as “Tuesday” has disappeared from my week, to be taken over by its evil doppelgänger that masquerades as Wednesday from 8am to 10pm. The realisation dawns that “oh shit, tomorrow isn’t Thursday”, at bedtime each Tuednesday and so the prospect of reliving the middle day of the week looms on poor working souls all over again.

Perhaps I ought to make better use of the white board above my desk. Instead of the Jessica Ennis mask telling me “always make room for sausage”, she should tell me what day of the week it is, akin to the noticeboards in hospital elderly care wards. It wouldn’t make any difference though because every Tuednesday, I’d write Wednesday anyway.

What a terrible prospect for the rest of my working life. I could always change my working hours and compress them over 4 days so that I didn’t have to work on the second day of the week, but what if I then thought Mondays were Fridays and forgot to come in for the rest of the week?

Or maybe I could get out of working all together and claim disability benefits for my bizarre mental disorder.

“So, Miss, you claim that you can’t work because you’re scared of Tuesdays?”

“But you don’t get it, Tuesdays don’t exist anymore! How can I be expected to work when one of the days has been substituted for its evil twin?”

“Do you really think that the rest of us even know what month it is? It’s just another four weeks towards retirement.”

“Yes, but I’m having to work double Wednesdays, and one of those is evil, so that means that retirement is much further away.”

“I don’t follow your logic. Why can’t you just not worry about what day it is and just get on with it? On the day that people leave the office and say ‘have a nice weekend, see you Monday’, take two days off and then come back in.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, you’re forgetting the Sunday paradox!”

“Which is???”

“Sundays go much more quickly than any other day of the week, but it’s different for everyone. Some people get a four hour Sunday, others get the full twenty four, but it’s always in flux, depending on a number of unquantifiable and unidentified factors. So bearing in mind that everybody’s Sunday lasts a different length of time, Mondays never start at the same point for everybody and it throws the entire working week out.”

“Have you ever considered a career where time is arbitrary, such as in customer services? There, you can call somebody up for some feedback or be dealing with a query, tell them it won’t take a minute, but keep them on the line for at least thirty. Genius, really. Even Einstein couldn’t bend time like that.”

“Will they let me take my dog? I’ll tell them he only needs to be there for a minute.”

Break
After much postulating, I have booked a week off work for the beginning of March. I’m hoping for decent weather so that I can replant my patch and tidy up the house. I also want to do some more in depth research into the Sunday paradox to ascertain whether factors such as annual leave have an effect on the time allocation. Needless to say, I shall also be testing the hypothesis that alcohol can have a profound effect on the [time]free/[time]wasted quotient. I shall publish the results of my research in Proceedings of the National Academy of Stoneclough, become a world famous superstar and never have to worry about Tuednesday ever again.

Manners, bitch

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Rain hit my windscreen as I sat in my usual queue of traffic this morning.  The left wiper scraped and juddered up, juddered down, juddered up, juddered down.  I hate this car.  I resent it.  It tortures me on intermittent wipe with its juddering wiper blade.

There’s always a queue there, and always, I take my place in it along with many others who just want to get through the fucking lights before they… just.. go.. no… it’s amber… don’t stop!  Before they change to red.  And there are the others who sail past us all and cut into the lane at the last minute. I never let them in.  I’d rather throw myself in front of their cars than let them jump the queue.  Today, however, was different.  Distracted by the juddering wiper blade and the unfamiliarity of the radio presenter, I wasn’t quick enough to prevent being cut up by some woman in an Audi.   She’s obviously a nasty piece of work who probably does vile things to small animals, you can tell the sort.  

I spent the next ten minutes behind her as we crawled forward towards the traffic lights.  Ten minutes in which she didn’t stop fannying around with her hair. I contemplated the consequences of ramming her really hard.  Obviously a dead car and possibly a conviction for me, but at least she wouldn’t have been messing about with her hair anymore.

What is it about the back of somebody’s head that induces such violent daydreams in me? Bad manners, generally. I have an imaginary skewer with which I’d like to make a very large human kebab on which perpetrators of crimes against me meet a slow death by cattleprod.  I can’t remember who’s on there specifically, but any ill-mannered, inconsiderate arsehole should be on the lookout for my metaphorical spike.

My thoughts of an apocalyptic outcome to my commute were broken when I discovered some soft mints that had gone hard over night.  They stuck to my teeth when I chewed them.  

Why do people make things that stick to your teeth?

It’s still raining.