Working

My least favourite birthday was ruined by work. I wasn’t working on it. Don’t be beige, laddie. I was listening to someone to talk about work in a car park. The car park is unrelated, apart from its purpose in setting a puce coloured scene that will indicate how boring this person’s job was. Now most people’s jobs are boring, but this took a bourbon. This human, this idiot, this regulation-trouser, fringe-touting, brunette-coloured, laced-up shoes Parkin worked in admin. Admin? What even is admin? Admin is a way of saying that you are fluent in Windings. You type Windings onto a page, that one day, Barbara from accounts will attempt to read, and then will press the funky paper clip assistant and get distracted. Someone will make a GIF of the Windows paper clip, circulate it around the office, and then Barbara will become CEO. Feck, why do the neon post-it notes have Windings on them? You’ve made neon terracotta. You are a hieroglyph of whelk. Eff the post it notes. Eff the admin. Even more so, eff the bloody idiot who thinks their job is important enough to bore everyone else about it in the first place.

I am going to bore you about jobs I had, in the first place. All of them have been terrible, which is typical for a Cancer. We’re hard on the outside, soft on the inside, and we hate working shit jobs. I wonder how long it takes to train to be a crab, actually. 3-5 years in Engineering to develop an exoskeleton, with an MA in costume design to contour those pincers the way that daddy always wanted. It will be better than the pea factory. It will be better than recruitment. It will be better than ringing Zak Starkey in the dead of night to see if he wants to update his life insurance policy. When I quit my first job, they threw the book I read on my breaks in a bin. The shop was next door to an Oxfam book shop.

I like my job best when I tell myself it’s not a job at all. Obligation is where dreams go past their sell by date. A three minute early release is such a turn on. A deduction from my wage slip for a pension I will cash when I am post-living is not. Office parties are only worth having if someone has sex whilst throwing up in a bin. In a bin in the office. In front of everyone. Whilst doing karaoke. Don’t ask me for money for milk, Sandra. Just ensure you’re wearing the appropriate footwear to kick Gary’s shrivelled dick with. Casual Fridays are not casual. They’re the illegitimate cousin of party invites that ask people to dress smart casual. Smart casual doesn’t exist, it’s not even a state of mind. Bad jobs are real and they’re smart. They’re smart because we probably have to have one. When the only attractive person in the office cannot dress for their skin tone we need to ban codes of dress altogether.

LAUGHING!!!!! Humans are so very good at lying, so be a fantastic one and don’t blow that spoiler open. Keep that Audi a pushbike on that grit-vomit ground. We humans like to feel different. Don’t tread on my fourth-floor, Systems Inc Co toes. Halt that lift and cut the ropes. When we hear the gutturals clogging up your throat as you tell us how much you hate your job, how your boss wouldn’t know a crab from a Kardashian, how Gary only has one testicle now and you ended up paper tutting someone’s toes with a stray post-it note, it tells us one thing, and one thing only. It tells us that you are the sort of person who tells anecdotes about how much pudding you allowed your partner to eat after dinner.