Tell the D.A I need 24 hours, goddamit

Thursdays are rich with meetings and intrigue in the office where I work.  Put enough men in a meeting room together, give them an agenda and plenty of coffee, and watch them go.  The nervous energy that gets shed here in the pursuit of trivial arguments most Thursdays would power sub-Saharan Africa for a one-thousand years.

I generally drift off after the initial sparring and verbal foreplay is done.  The rest of my colleagues, on the other hand, really get into it at this stage, brow-beating each other and trying to get the upper hand.  If it were accepted business practice to take off your shirt and beat your naked chest, most would.  Try minuting that.

I used to worry that my inability to join in the brouhaha was a failing, a sign of testosterone-deficiency or something.  But now I realise that whatever its cause, I'd sooner set fire to myself that take this stuff seriously.  I should resign and become a child.

My length of shrift I give to office blather has shortened rather of late as I'm currently reading Robert Grave's experiences in the Great War, "Good-bye To All That".  What strikes one most about RG's grimly comic memories of the trench warfare is the blasé attitude of the professional soldier to the mediaeval conditions and brutality he experienced.

Graves enlisted before it became the mandatory draft, and the career soldiery were dismissive of  newly-minted officers like him.  When one "copped it", then, they hardly missed a beat, stepping over the fallen unfortunate like someone avoiding the cracks in a pavement.  Also, the strict seniority of regiments in the British Army was religiously upheld at the time.  Men would blithely walk into certain death in order to uphold the reputation of their regiments.  Madness.

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!