Welcome back...right, tea break's over - back on your heads.

The first working day of the new year for yours truly.  It's not been that bad to be honest.  I think my absence of festive sentiment this yuletide saved me.  It wasn't much of a wrench to get back to it.  The worst part was the alarm doing its pieces at 7.20 this morning, which felt like the middle of the night to me.  Other than that, I found my trotters in no time.

It helped also that Missus O has booked loads of mini-breaks for the upcoming months.  I had a list of leave to get in the diary at work when I arrived, which was a pleasure unalloyed.  There's a part of one that weeps a little at divvying the year up like this; it's a bit like wishing one's life away.  But, let's not delude ourselves, friends, everyone dislikes his or her job to some extent.  Those who pretend they don't are joyless, friendless fcuking weirdos.  For me work's a mild irritant.  But in the past I've had jobs that I would happily have seen mown down by a runaway steam engine.  So when the opportunity to not have to attend to my miserable duties for a day or two arises, I cling to it like a starving man to a Wagon Wheel.

I wonder if I've crossed an Xmas Rubicon?  Even the removal of the decorations didn't garner a flicker of regret this year.  I've grown immune, it seems.  It's only taken 46 years.  I do hope something takes its place in my affections though.  It'll be a boring dotage otherwise.  Life's just a little vanilla when you can't get ridiculously over-excited.  I suppose that the one great thing that adults lose when they jettison childish things - over-excitement.  That and laughing, I mean really laughing.  Being flaccid and helpless with mirth.  When's the last time that happened to you?  I thought as much.  Shame, really.  I used to love a laugh, me.

Up against the impersonal pronoun singular

Super busy at the very present.  I work in a small team.  There are two of us.  That really is as small as the law of team dynamics allows, isn't it?  Any less than that, and it's all "I" in team, which nature will not have.

The reason for the professional mania is that the other 50% of the first squad is working from home for a bit, due to unfortunate family circs. that I'd rather not go into.  For as long as I've had a hole in me arse, as they say, I've been telling my alleged boss that a two-man team is fine as long as both parties are fit and available for selection.  When that happy state of affairs is undermined for some reason, it all goes to cock in a handcart.  This is the current state of affairs.  

Worse still, I'm off to Berlin for a long weekend on Friday week.  Who's going to do the needful then?  My boss?  Roger De Courcey has more chance of joining the SAS, frankly.  I don't know what's going to happen, and, more to the point, I don't care.  When all is said and done, it's only work.  Does my attitude shock you?  Excellent.  Then my work here is done.

Get Fresher for the Weekend

Here's a thought: what about a two-day working week, punctuated by a five-day weekend?  Yes, yes, we can all see the obvious, licentious advantages.  But think a little deeper.  The main advantage of a two-day working week, it seems to me, would be to clarify the mind of all the protagonists.

I contend that most of the (ahem) work in the modern office environment is obfuscation.  It's not productive or intelligent; it's simply process.  Process was invented by unimaginative office-Johnnies who have too much time on their mitts.  What better way to fill the void than with empty-headed meetings?  The clichéd apotheosis of this type of person is of course the career civil servant - Terri Coverley from "The Thick of It" for example.

But, somehow over the years, process broke free of its chains and started to wag the dog.  And as process is divorced from actual productive work, it engenders ennui.  A little is easy to deal with, as long as it is tempered with actual productive work.  However, when the balance gets out of cock, the subject is overwhelmed with feelings of intense discomfort.  Consider for example how many times you've found yourself in the executive washroom, grimacing and rubbing your eyes like an over-tired 3-year-old.  Hmm...a lot, isn't it?

If we were limited to a two-day working week, all the flim-flam would fall by the wayside.  There simply wouldn't be time for it.  We'd all be full-on, trying to get the in tray denuded before Sunday evening.  You wouldn't attend a meeting unless your life depended on it.  And even then, it would last ten minutes, tops.  There'd be no coffee and biscuits, that's fo shizzle.

Yes, it would be intense and pressured.  But as the work would be productive and the fruits of your labours patent to you, there would be enormous satisfaction also.  The boredom and associated fatigue would dissipate.  That strange feeling you get at work currently that you ascribe to chronic fatigue is nothing of the sort; that's why it magically disappears when you leave the office.  It's chronic tedium.  Imagine your life without it.  You would be truly alive.

Friday evenings would be a little glum; we'd all sit around at home watching "Last of the Summer Wine", wishing it was Sunday.  But that's a small price to pay.

I say we go for it.  Anyone?

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!

Mustn't grumble

There's a chap who works in my office who habitually looks under so much pressure that the expression on his face alone is enough to give me fantom shooting pains up my arms.  He's very ruddy of jowl too and some 14 stones overweight.  

His job requires a lot of travel, and he's never without his trusty Samsonite wheeled suitcase by his side, least he be sent to South Georgia on business at a moment's notice.  It's like a faithful hound, this case.  It's even stands guard when he's at the urinal in the executive washroom.  I dread the day I see him without it, for fear it might have been run over or put down by the council for having attacked a Lollipop Lady, and he bursts into tears telling me.

The strange thing is that despite all the effing-about he's forced to do, and the manifest damage this is dishing out to his chassis and psychological well-being, he really appears to enjoy his job.  It just serves to illustrate the truth of the old adage that pain and pleasure are but two sides of the same coin.

Tempus Fugit

We had drinks in the office last evening.  It was to mark the fact that one of our number had notched up 50 years' continuous service.  You heard me right, friend - 50 (five-o) years.  He's a charming chap, our demi-centurion, so it was a well-attended gathering.  The powers-that laid on food and strong drink in our boardroom, and a dozen or so  of us went at it.

We sat around the boardroom table and swigged from bottles of ale and swapped war stories.  I was probably in the mid-range of generations represented in the firm currently.  Despite the good humour and nascent drunkenness, I'm certain I detected a certain sadness in the room.  This was I think due to the feeling that 50 years in the service of one company, even one as broadly benign as this one, was probably one of the most unromantic ways in which a man could spend is tenure on Earth.

Now, we all of course will see out our careers in this way, i.e. as jobbing functionaries in uninspiring buildings around the capital.  But one never sees oneself in this role forever.  When one changes jobs every few years, there is always the possibility, albeit a VAGUE one, that something dramatic might intervene - relocation to the tropics perhaps, or retraining as a trapeze artist.  Our colleague's career starkly illustrated to us all that this probably won't happen.  Shit.

I left after an hour, the rest of the room moving on to the pub.  I couldn't face any more.  This morning I awoke to a partially-crushed spirit, so I phoned the office and pulled I sickie.  I didn't lie; I told them I woke up feeling terrible, which is quite true.

I spent the rest of the day painting the chimney breast in the front room, hoping that a romantic seque in life's journey might fall into my lap.  It's 7:30pm now.  The chimney breast is roasted red, but I am as-was, staring down the barrel of another dull day at work tomorrow.  Oh, well, I tried.

"Pass the Quavers, would you?  How 'bout those Gooners, eh?"

Remember whotsisname? We were like brothers.

There was another leaving presentation at work today. It was the usual well-worn path of card, whip-round and ill-chosen words. In fairness, the chap who's leaving worked in a department who all seem very close, so the address was rather more heartfelt than is usually the case in these matters. Said leavee is moving to Australia, which makes the "you must come and visit" platitude ring even more hollow. Both parties know that "must" is a euphemism for "won't".

It's strange and worrying just how quickly genuine affection for long-standing colleagues is lost when they go. You spend the majority of your time with these people. This is normally a recipe for disaster, so when characters do actually chime, you have to suppose that it's a lasting kinship. No so. Our Botany Bay emigré will be forgotten by Tuesday next week. And unless his new life hits the Aussie buffers, he'll forget us. It's a necessary evil I suppose; no-one likes a moper in the workplace.

...I wrote "au revoir" in the card initially, but hastily revised it to "goodbye". I thick it for the best.