“HAVE CYCLISTS INFECTED HOUSE PRICES WITH AIDS?”

My working day

I come in.

I copy a file and send it to China – this takes 5 to 6 minutes.

Then I check facebook.

Then I check the BBC web site.

Then I check facebook again.

Then I get a cup of coffee. And try hard not to look at facebook. [Seriously why am I on facebook … please don’t answer that, I already know it’s because I am losing my grip on reality and instead prefer embellished sound bites of needy people who aren’t actually part of my organic world]

Sometimes I get to reply to an email or listen in to a telco or copy a graph into a report.

Then something awful happens. I get bored, and I end up reading the daily mail web pages. The daily mail keep its finger on the pulse of Britain by often inaccurately reporting on the gritty social affairs of celebrity weight loss, reality television couplings, the royal family and their fashion choices. It interjects sporadically with attention grabbing headlines such as “Mama Mia! Most popular pizza in Italy is actually manufactured in Lancashire... by a German company” [HOLY SHIT this changes everything!] and “Hidden heart risk for cocaine addicts even if they feel perfectly healthy” [Next they will be telling us that smoking causes cancer or something such crackpot idea].

I found this  daily mail headline generator and generated the following attention grabbing headline  I knew it was the cyclists fault. Bloody tree huggers.

“HAVE CYCLISTS INFECTED HOUSE PRICES WITH AIDS?” ….

So back to my working day.

My ex boss has even less of a reason to exist here at work. So she keeps herself busy by spying and snouting on me and her old team and trying not to get caught browsing the internet.

She also uses English last seen in colonial pre war film. If I ring in sick she emails my entire floor with ‘Lilly has taken ill’. I wish sometimes she would expand on this single line and add ‘she has an attack of the vapors’. In confidence sometime ago I was airing a particularly grievous opinion. Her response was ‘As women we are prone to outbursts and emotion and hysteria and you must learn to act more like a man’ [Hello … Hello … It’s Emily Pankhurst on the phone for you from the suffragettes asking WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU SAYING???]. My favorite is when she asks me ‘to do the needful’. I fight the urge to go and wee in a corner.

Back on topic.

So I sit at my desk. Discretely watching 4OD or i-player. I can see how retched this is. Pointless even. I have been exceptionally outspoken about this situation and those who manage me know I am doing literally nothing. There is the knowing nod that work is around the corner but in the meantime I’m attempting to fly beneath the radar

OOOoo facebook – I haven’t checked that in 40 minutes. Someone may have had their hair cut. Or be making a sweeping statement about how all immigrants should go home and stop living in 6 bedroomed houses driving jags and draining the NHS.

It’s really rather like being in the 6^th form common room on study leave really. Only I’m 35, with stretch marks and fewer spots and a massive mortgage.

4pm … I’m out of here.

The SHINY list

Life, being the unpredictable beast it is, has been kind to me. I have often wondered if anyone would realize I am a fake. I’m largely mediocre at everything, and hideously self-conscious, and seriously unqualified in my area of work. And yet for 14 years I’ve sort of sailed on through with no one noticing. I sort of took the money and hid. Now though, my large company is terminating its R&D presence in the UK. My job is moving to China. Pretty soon, by Christmas or next March the bubble will pop and the end will come. It’s all ok. It’s a relief to tell you the truth.  Fiscally speaking I won’t actually require gainful employment for 18 months or more.

Ultimately I have always felt rather short changed. The eternal compromise of being averagely middle class-ish took away my ability to just be a mum, I had no choice but to work. The precious hours between work and sleep don’t allow me to complete every chore or explore all the fun things I know and want to do. So I have my household rules which consist of the following:

-          The toilets are spotless

-          The cats tray is clean

-          We eat good, home cooked food [of clean plates too – get me!]

-          Personal hygiene

Other than that i fill our lives with love. Although consequently my washing pile resembles an obelisk, I half expect David Bellamy to appear from my overgrown erm meadow like back garden and I haven’t hovered the stairs in well over a year.

So … decisions decision decisions.

I am making a list – I can’t think what to call it. Hmmm. How about my Shiny List of happiness. Yes, from hence forth this will become my Shiny list.

So in the following order this is my Shiny List.

-          To take 4 – 6 months off work to be a mum.

-          In that time I want to

o   Drop off my son and pick him up daily – although in order to guarantee my gold dust child minder will still be available when I have to return to work I need to keep on paying her. Sigh.

o   Redecorate my entire house AND visit Ikea when few other people are there.

o   Work on my illustrations and stories and web site.

o   Take my husband and son away on an incredible holiday back to my husband’s country of Malaysia.

I don’t see my situation right now as being one I need to worry about. For me, I haven’t had a day out of employment since I was 12. I went from paper round, to dishwasher in the local Italian restaurant to working for several shoe shops to bar work, club work, cold calling double glazing sales person [for that I will always be eternally sorry] and finally I graduated and became somehow involved in IT. A natural progression, I feel, after obtaining a degree in politics. Obviously.

So having a certain pot of money to live off that if well nurtured and invested could last 2 years + leaves me in this stagnant void.  I think I should rename that to a happy pause, as I am happy to be out of the rat race. The festering landscape of repetition that accompanies a ‘career’ in IT will soon be landscaped into a life free of futile life justifications and the eternal compromise that every working mum knows about.

Albeit temporarily.