I took the bike into work today as I knew the roads would be quiet as it’s Good Friday and because it means I can get in before the bosses turn up, and away before they annoy me too much. The ride in is functional, but not particularly enjoyable as there’s not much to look at on the way. On the way back through I took a detour out through the botanic gardens, Kirklee and even as far as Anniesland Cross just for the sheer enjoyment of riding around in the spring sunshine.
And then I noticed the hipsters.
The Botanic Gardens were riddled with them. HUNDREDS of them, all dressed up in their strangely similar, but allegedly “individual” manner and almost all of them were wearing glasses with plain glass in them. It was a moment of realisation akin to that point in Invasion of the Body Snatchers when Donald Sutherland realises everyone around him has been replaced by alien pod people.
At that moment I had a quick JD from Scrubs style daydream where my bike became a monster truck, and the gentle clicking of my free-wheel became the pleasing sound of their trendy bones, macbooks and iphones being ground under my massive monster tyres.
I can’t be entirely certain, but I think I suffered some kind of emotional or psychological breakdown in work today after being handed the umpteenth retarded flap-task. Afterwards it took me a few minutes to realise that something wasn’t quite right, and I think at think that was the veil of mental imbalance departing.
It seemed like a fairly ordinary morning. The boss was sweating it over the latest thing that her boss, and her bosses’ boss had gotten their expensive gold plated knickers in a twist over. It was something trivial and inconsequential, hell isn’t it always, but they had to have spreadsheets of data this instant.
I’m fairly sure it’s at that point my brain just shut down. Like I said, I didn’t notice personally, but one of my workmates brought it to my attention that I had just spent ten minutes staring at the computer screen, rigidly locked in the FPS player stance of left hand on the WASD keys and right hand on the mouse.I wasn’t doing anything, or saying anything. I was just sitting, staring blankly through the screen as though the world wasn’t there.
I hadn’t even noticed.
Incidentally I hate the mentality of many middle managers when it comes to coordinating staff and assigning tasks to them. In the example above I explicitly told them I didn’t have enough time to do their regularly scheduled flap-tasks/business activities and their latest flap-task-of-the-moment. The boss looked a bit blank for a minute, and I thought maybe she was going to reconsider. How wrong I was.
“I’ll need to authorise some overtime then to let you get them both done,” The Boss said.
“Well no, no you don’t, because I’m not doing overtime,” I said.
At this point I think her brain seized up. I could hear the cogs turning as she tried to fathom why I wouldn’t want to sit in the office for another three or four hours bashing out some asinine report that they’ll probably forget about. This growing presumption that employees should be so grateful that they have a job that they’re willing to work whenever and for as long as necessary as management require just at the mention of “overtime” really gets my goat. It’s especially galling when it’s accompanied by an undercurrent of “you would do this if you were a team player.”
I’m sure I would…
I’m in a foul mood today. I’ve just found out that one of my friends from The Work has been “dismissed” for, and I quote, “ongoing Attendance Management issues and failure to comply with said policy.” In tribute to his love of dance music I’m going to refer to him as Mr. C for the duration of this post lest someone out there finds it and it counts against either of us in the future. I’m not sure how much he’ll thank me for drawing links between him and The Shamen, but I enjoy the wordplay too much to change it now.
Now the fact is that Mr. C is a gentle, happy soul that hasn’t done anyone an iota of harm in his life. He’s always been happy to have a laugh, a joke and shoot the breeze with anyone. Sure his health hasn’t been the best in recent months, and his sickness record has been fairly poor, but I believe that a common root lies with the way The Work and employers in general treat their workers. The team leaders and managers at The Work seem to have a very definate idea of what kind of person they want in Mr. C’s old department and I can break it down like this: Woman, aged between twenty and thrity, blonde or bottle blonde hair, neddy voice and a can-do, in your face attitude. In short they seem to be trying to construct some kind of 1950′s era typing pool rather than a modern skills based office.
Fundamentally Mr. C didn’t, and really couldn’t have, fit the mould of the kind of person The Work is looking for. Now that he’s been “dismissed” they can return to the status quo of talking endlessly about the X Factor, Lady Gaga and all the other mass market crap that they all enjoy so much, and I feel a little sadder that a good friend and a good man has been forced out of his job. All the whispering, droning on about time keeping and so on eventually got to Mr. C and his health has been suffering for a while as a result. The office seems a little poorer, a little quieter and a little dimmer without his happy go lucky smile bobbing around.
So here’s to Mr.C. May you find a better path, and a cause to smile everyday. He says what he thinks and means what he says. His only real crime in the eyes of The Work appear to be that he differed from their accepted ideas of fitting in.
