more ns angst

I am hard-pressed to find a better phrase to describe that post-lunch mid-afternoon ennui, than Douglas Adams' "the long dark tea-time of the soul". The morning buzz has quietly settled down, there's basically no work – it being a Friday – and except for occasional mouse-clicks and keyboard clattering, the office is basically silent.

Friday lunches are ghastly. I have a theory: early Monday mornings, they bring in a convoy of refrigerator lorries in carrying all the food the cookhouse's going to use over the week. (And on Friday evenings they get in a convoy of dumptrucks to cart away the chicken bones and putrid unused inedible sauces and veggies.) It's basically the same ingredients, just dumped together and stewed in different combinations, week after week. On Friday, they've just about run out of ways to pair chicken wings or drumlets up with whatever crappy spindly limp vegetable that's left, and that's what you get. Plus, Fridays are porridge days, I believe because they run out of rice so they've got to stretch their stock. Friday lunches disgust me. Cookhouse food disgusts me.

-----

The main diversions in office life, besides the internet connection (spotty, erratic – but amazingly fast if you can get it – and consequently unsatisfying), are eating and drinking – although that leads to morbid obesity, as evidenced by examples all around me. So my main diversion is drinking water, which can't get you fat, only better hydrated. And of course it has the side-effect of requiring frequent toilet trips, all of which lead to more time spent out of the office, hurrah.

The toilet, though, is in bad shape. The flushes, like the internet connection, often do not work. And there're flies all over especially at the urinals, getting high on the caffeine and nicotine from the semi-dried piss they feed off. The one present paranoia in my life right now is one of those flies landing on my whatsit while I'm in the process of voiding my bladder. Like my work and the food, they disgust me.

-----

Often, people with sinecures for jobs have a wonderful self-image, which they cling on to in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, of being gainfully and honestly employed in the pursuit of some noble and heroic goal, and putting in a hard day's work whilst at it. Nothing could be further from the truth; they're surfing on the internet, playing ungratifying games day after tedious day, and getting increasingly and dangerously self-delusional.

I'm not like them; I choose to be honest. I'm in the business of drawing a monthly pittance while doing the littlest jobs that no one really cares about. "Pushing paper" as you might term it, but even that might be too elevated a term for what I do. I compile files of unendingly boring papers on matters of shockingly little importance. I fend off my superior's undiagnosed obsessive-compulsive disorder attacks with a face of sullen incomprehension. On occasion I've been asked (read: forced) to scrub the floor (yes, literally). I harbor no illusions over my job.

Satisfaction? Don't make me laugh.