When the going gets stuffed

The pressure's on chez-work at the mo.  One of my junior colleagues has gone on a pre-nuptial bender with six-dozen of his closest male friends.  They've jetted off to eastern Europe for this sojourn - naturally.  Haven't the huddled masses of Slovakia suffered enough ferrkrissakes?  So while he's away chugging rubbing alcohol and getting his chin tattooed, I'm having to perform his duties.

As is always the case with office work these days, his work is exacting and emetically tiresome.  It's a real test of character getting through eight solid hours of nip-picking when you have total responsibility but zero power.  The very best that can happen is that you're ignored by the great and the good around the office.  That means your mistakes are sufficiently meagre to have escaped their notice.  It's like being a toaster; the only time anyone pays it any heed to it is when they're beating it with a pool cue for having carbonised a breakfast muffin.  Other than that it goes about its duties invisible and unmolested.

The trouble with nooks in the corporate cliff-face like this one are that it requires a Herculean effort to move upwards.  You're beavering away full-bore just to get through the days; this leaves scant energy for weaselling your way into the affections of anyone powerful.  It also means you leave the office every night with a cracking headache and a desire for self-immolation.

The wise junior functionary placed in a thankless situation like this self-medicates to get through it.  The ones that refuse to (Mammys' boys or health nuts for example) end up taking hostages, or obsessively filling their homes with newspapers and perishing in the inevitable and tragic inferno that follows.

I've managed to bypass becoming the office Aunt Sally by being silent and sarcastic.  Bosses tend to mistake this as a sign of prodigious native intelligence and give me plenty of slack as a result.  The upshot of all this is that I'm left to my own devices for the most part, and have managed to carve out a pivotal role that I can perform standing on my noggin, but which to the untutored eye looks impossibly technical and demanding.  Onwards and sideways!