Sweet Jesus, this month is dragging. My last month of work, you see. Working my notice, counting the days, hours, minutes to the 31st of July. Then it’s over. The nightmare that has been my time with my current employer will be at an end. Perhaps when I’m out of legal range, I’ll regale you with more detailed tales of work-woe. Perhaps not though - you’re not interested and I’d rather forget the wasted years.
So then, at the end of the month, I’ll be gone and a big chunk of virtual-cash will be transferred to my bank account. I’ve given some thought to my options:
- Get another job immediately and invest the cash wisely.
- Blow it all on sweets and bubblegum.
- Buy a motorcycle and travel around the country helping people. Sort of like a two-wheeled Littlest Hobo.
- Eke out a frugal existence and stretch the money as much as possible while desperately trying to think of ways, legal or otherwise, of earning a steady income without having to do the rat-race thing. A bit like Hugh Fearnly-Whittingstall but with less offal and fewer book and television deals.
Obviously 1 is right out. Ditto, 2. Number 3 has a certain attraction so I’m not ruling it out completely. Number 4 however is the main contender at this stage.
As you can imagine, this decision finds Mrs. Jimmy Page’s Trousers beside herself with joy as well as fully behind me - sort of a co-location, happy/support thing.
The builders are in.
Perdition Inc. are refurbishing the large office area just next door to my area. The usual residents of the to-be-refurbisehd area have all been shoe-horned into other areas for the duration of the work.
This project leaves me with a dilemma. Should I continue to use the toilet located in builders’ ground-zero or should I go to the toilet downstairs?
My usual toilet will now be frequented by those here to do the work and bitter experience has taught me that builder-poo is none too pleasant. On the other hand, the downstairs toilet loses points by being downstairs and farther away. Also, the evidence seems to suggest that, on a nightly basis, someone goes there and stuffs a handful of human hair into the hand dryer.
So then, the smell of builder-poo or of burning hair?
I have news. Big news. For me.
My boss called me into his office for a chat a few days back. Out of the blue, he told me that there are a limited number of voluntary redundancy packages now available and asked if I would be interested in availing of one.
Now, despite the fact that I despise my employers with a passion that is difficult to express, and despite the fact that for the last two years I have wandered about the place saying, “Jesus Christ, I wish I could be made redundant”, my first reaction was to be slightly offended. What had I done to be singled out for this? Why me? Are you saying I’m not doing a good job?
After this initial shock however, I came to my senses and said I’d give it some thought. I didn’t need to, but I did need to discuss it with Mrs. Jimmy Page’s Trousers. She, having barely persuaded me, one Sunday three months ago, not to go in the following morning and resign, wholeheartedly agreed that I should take the money and run.
And run I shall.
Under Operation Bad Apple, I will receive a wad of cash just to go away and stop bothering good employees with my negative vibes. I’m happy. My boss is happy (as he’s currently paying me one twelfth of a wad of cash every month to do very little). Everyone’s a winner. Having done some sums with a clever bloke from the financial company responsible for handling my employer’s many financial doings, I am happy with my Bad Apple Bonus. Papers have been signed (by me) and will be countersigned by the company tomorrow. Barring any nastyness, I will be a free agent come the end of July. Hurrah and huzzah! As mentioned in the title, I have made up the Redundo-Jig. It’s a sight to behold.
I have a worry that it’s all a trick though; a nasty ploy to break my will. Like in that film where the Russians told a prisoner he was going home, let him have a wash and shave, gave him back his civvies and walked him to the gate only to then drag him back to his cell.
I wouldn’t put it past them.
What little pinpricks of light that existed last week as I returned to the day job, have begun to dim as the gleam on the barely-polished turd that is Perdition Inc. fades. Week one - not much happened. Chatted with old friends and colleagues, caught up on office gossip (nothing happened) and ‘processed’ six months worth of emails (deleted - if it’s important, they’ll mail again). Week two - things are getting a bit more worky.
As I mentioned, my boss, Dolphin Skin, had a new assignment for me and it actually sounds interesting. I met the person supposed to explain what’s required and that didn’t really enlighten me. To make matters worse, he then scheduled a conference call for 4PM on Friday afternoon. Doesn’t he know what Fridays are for? He then sent me about forty emails, each with snippets of information that may help decipher what I’m supposed to be doing. It’s not looking good so far though. Still, even being the boy that oils the general manager’s collection of gimp masks is preferable to the wasteful tedium of my previous assignment so things could be worse.
They could be better though. I realised last night that, for the last six months, I’ve actually looked forward to Mondays. I didn’t realise that such an odd thing had occurred until it had passed. While I was on my sabbatical, Mondays meant that Mrs. Jimmy Page’s Trousers popped Baby Trousers in the creche and proceeded to her place of work leaving me completely free to do my own thing. Five days of doing my own thing lay before me. It was great.
No longer though. Sundays are back to being a slow grind into inevitable gloom as the day progresses and Monday inexorably approaches. I hereby name this feeling, ‘Songs Of Praise Syndrome’ as it puts me in mind of miserably scrabbling to do my homework on a Sunday evening as some God-fearing congregation sang Protestant hymns on the telly in the background and I anticipated drudging to school on Monday.
Shit.
Working from home today. First week back, it felt a little cheeky but what the hell. Dolphin Skin has told me that my new assignment means that I can work from home as much as I want so I’m getting into practice. Hurrah.
I’m not entirely convinced that it’s a good idea though. This soon after my sabbatical, my mind is still in the non-working mode that it has occupied for the last six months. I keep thinking that I’m still on a career break and that I can just sit down and have a cuppa and read a book. And, while I could do that, I suppose that I should try to pay some sort of lip service to actual work.
I’ve also got a few things to finish in my new kitchen that I could sneak off and do instead of working. I won’t though. I’m being diligent - at least until somebody in the company does something to annoy me. Give it another week. For anyone that’s interested (i.e. only my mother really and she doesn’t read this), my kitchen is all but finished. Kitchen/dining room wall is no more and we’ve now got a nice big room. I fitted the kitchen, which was a complete nightmare. Apparently, when building houses these days, right angles and straight walls are considered something of an outdated concept. Instead, shoddy workmanship and laziness seem to be the order of the day. Were I a wandering kitchen fitter, fitting kitchens for people other than myself, I might have just shoved everything into it’s approximate position and hammered a few crooked nails into them. As it was my own kitchen though, I took some considerable time to modify and adjust things so that they actually sat snugly in their oddly angled, bellied walled places. And I swore. A lot. And cursed the cowboys that had built my house in the first place. And their children and so on. For four generations. I am a vengeful kitchen fitter.
The irony of stating that I am a diligent worker while posting blog entries is not lost on me. Nobody’s perfect.
Back to work that is. It remains to be seen if I’ll renew my previous posting regime or whether I’ll lazily coast along with a blog post every three or four weeks as I did for much of my, now sadly ended, career break.
Here I am, though. Back at my little section of desk in Perdition Inc. (our desks are like the little pie shaped things that you get in Trivial Pursuit games). Nothing’s changed - not that I thought it would have. As much as I hate to use a cliché, I can honestly say that it doesn’t feel like I’ve been away at all. I could have left last Friday and returned Monday for all the difference six months has made. Still, at least it sounds like I might have an interesting job to do for the next month or two. My boss, Dolphin Skin, has sorted me out with something more taxing than my previous role - he’s a good egg really.
Before I left for my first day back last Monday, Baby Trousers asked me why I was going back to work.
“Because I have to”, I replied.
“You don’t like work”, she said. She’s an astute little thing.
“Not really”, I said.
She handed me her blankie to make me feel better. I’d have brought it to work if she had let me.
Please feel free to leave messages of condolence or offers to pay my mortgage below.
Last week, I popped around to meet some of the crew from work (well, from when I was working and not career-breaking). Met for lunch and it was very nice to see them again. Despite my hating work and the company for which I do it, these particular few are a good lot.
Anyway, during the course of the lunch, I was told that they thought I was dead. Literally.
It seems that Dolphin-Skin, our manager broke the bad news to one of my colleagues in a meeting with her a couple of weeks ago. “I have to tell you that Jimmy Page’s Trousers is dead”, he said. “Apparently he died suddenly yesterday”. Needless to say she was a little surprised. She passed the news on to some other colleagues and they hugged and then sat in quiet reflection (I’m guessing) for a couple of hours until Dolphin-Skin came back and said he’d been misinformed.
There is (was), you see, another person working in Perdition Inc. with the same name as me. I know this as I sometimes got his emails by mistake. It seems that he was the one that died suddenly and not me. Dolphin-Skin’s manager had told him it was me and he told the others. Oddly, he apparently lived in the same suburb as me, further confusing people. Weird, huh?
On the plus side, no more misaddressed emails.
I am not in work. It is Tuesday and I am not in work. I do not need to go to work for five months. How joyous.
It is Day #1 of my career break (as yesterday was a bank holiday, I would have been off anyway and so I’m not counting it). So far today, I have not worked. I have slept until 10AM and have arisen and partaken of a leisurely breakfast of Superquinn’s very tasty smooth white pudding (lumpy bits in pudding are the work of the devil) mashed up on some toast with a little ketchup. I have read some of my book and have done very little else. This afternoon, I am contemplating some sitting and perhaps a magazine, but I don’t want to set any rigid plans.
I made it through my last day of work relatively incident-free. I had a regular monthly meeting scheduled for 9:30 with my boss and some colleagues. I looked disinterested and annoyed all through, as I have for all previous iterations of these meetings. Had a nice long lunch with the few people there that are actually like real people instead of the myriad tossers that occupy the rest of the work population. I handed in my badge and gun to Dolphin Skin and he reminded me that, should I return, my work would be rich and rewarding and would not be the mindless drudgery that has occupied me for the last six months. Then, to my colleagues for fond, if slightly awkward, farewells. There were some hugs and some manly handshakes.
And that was it. So begins the next five months. A new chapter. A glorious, glowing, incandescent chapter, full of hope and smooth white pudding. A stress-free chapter of lie-ons and good books. It’s going to be great.
So where’s the fucking sun gone? Bloody Irish weather.
It’s arrived. The last day of work before my career break. After today, there looms five months where I don’t have to set the alarm clock. Five months of not having to drive to this stool-tube of a company. Five months of not putting on trousers unless I am feeling particularly formal.
In detective and war movies, this is typically the most dangerous day however, and so I am being extra-vigilant. Even as I write, I am scanning the doors and the instant message logged-on list, ever watchful for the surprise meeting or the Columbo-like ‘one last thing before you go’ job.
How will this blogging lark be affected by my absence from the workforce (if only temporary)? I’m not sure. On one hand I will have a lot more time to waste on informing upwards of six people about the trials and tribulations of my life. On the other hand, I won’t actually be working so my life will be less trial-like and will have considerably less tribulation. A lot of my posts have been related to work and my hatred thereof. There is, perhaps, only so much I can write about drinking beer in my underpants.
I have resolved to read Non-Working Monkey’s old posts (her early work, before the absinthe took its toll). I need to discover how to mesh the, seemingly unmeshable, activities of blogging and not working. Then, in preparation for my return to the workplace (although hopefully not the same workplace), I will study her sterling work on the apparent dichotomy of how to work while being non-working. I feel it may well take the span of my sabbatical and some deep meditation to fully internalise this tenet. I can only hope that that her wisdom and my beer are not mutually-exclusive.
Still denied. After my chauffeuring of some bloke to the client’s site yesterday and my spending the day there, I went to work today safe in the knowledge that at least the remaining four days run-in to my sabbatical would be a breeze.
Apparently not.
When I got in I found that a monthly meeting, supposed to be happening next week (therefore after I leave) was, while I was incommunicado on the client’s site yesterday, brought forward to today. This meeting is, at the best of times, a completely pointless, shambolic waste of everyone’s time as the chair (a ‘manager’) is a useless tosser. Three hour meeting with at least 30 minutes faffing about with him trying to locate the various attendees. I thought that last month’s would be my final meeting but they obviously decided that I wasn’t looking miserable enough lately. Arse.
Secondly, there was no Earl Grey in the canteen - they’d run out. What a jip. I need my Earl Grey as their normal tea tastes like gusset-washing water (not sure why).
Lastly, the vending machine stole a euro from me. Put in a two euro coin for a seventy cent pack of mints and it gave me thirty cent change. Even the machines are ganging up on me now. Except that there was a bloke behind me waiting to use it, I may well have inserted my foot into it. Thieving, sweet-monger bastard.
Someone’s taking the piss. They have to be.
