Jester at Work

I didn’t intend to come on here tonight. It’s late and I have work tomorrow and virtually no petrol in my car. Still, it’s a while since I wrote a blog and I thought that anybody who still bothers to come here (seeing as I hardly ever post blogs) might be interested to find out how I’m getting on.

First and foremost, I still find work immensely irritating. I don’t laugh at it quite so much, which is a shame because laughing at work makes it far more fun. I seem to be working quite hard at the moment but punctuate it liberally with chats with my neighbouring colleagues, Agamemnon and Christine. I decided to call her Christine because she is a Stephen King fan and I think I’ve just about run out of names beginning with “J”.

So work is irritating and I work hard. Strange combination but I think my bosses might finally have my number so I buckle down and work. I have recently been told I have to take my lunch and breaks at the times allotted to me by the ever present Vogons, our resource planners. This means that this week, I’m taking my lunch at 1.45pm. This is not such a great hardship because I can eat at my desk as long as I stick to finger foods like crisps, biscuits and fruit, so I can tide myself over until 1.45. Having said that, Agamemnon asked me to get her a spoon this morning when I went for my cup of tea so she could eat her yoghurt. Good lass; you see, it’s not really done to eat yoghurt at your desk at the Dark Satanic Mill.

The main problem with having my lunch so late is I can’t have lunch with Jessica, Jeannie, Mr Grumpy and Gary. That is a real hardship for me, especially because I sit nowhere near them nowadays and they are always under the watchful eye of Dalek Caan, making contact really quite difficult.

I’m also not allowed to send non-business related e-mails, which has really curtailed my long distance joke telling. Again, I can’t really complain. I know the Dark Satanic Mill’s e-mail policy and if I get caught breaking it too many times, I get in proper trouble. I’m not stupid, just rebellious.

So I’m reduced to shouting “Help, there’s a Vogon” everytime a resource planner walks by and surreptitiously telling jokes to Agamemnon and Christine and very, very quietly saying “Exterminate!” when Dalek Caan hoves into view.

I also keep my spirits up by staying as off kilter as it is possible to be without being sectioned under the mental health act. I managed to elicit a reply of “You Nutter!” to one of my business related e-mails today. That’s always a good sign. It shows that the true Jester has not been bludgeoned into submission by the various idiocies propagated by the management at the Dark Satanic Mill but merely driven underground.

And as I say frequently to Christine, “They can take my break times; they can take my lunch times but they will NEVER take my toilet times”. It’s just a matter of keeping whatever liberty you can in the modern call centre.