Living the office life

Slimmer. Friendlier. Drinks balloons. What's not to like about my stand-in?

Many of us have to spend much of our week wedged into a small space with people we didn’t choose to sit with.

I’ve had desks in all sorts of places over the years. Computer centres, airless open-plan offices where you couldn’t hear yourself think; draughty warehouses with broken windows – I’ve sat on chairs with varying amounts of wheels on in all of them.

I currently share an office in a glorified shed with two other departments. I say departments – due to the small size of the organisation I work for, the three of us make up the IT, Health & Safety and Marketing teams between us.

Two of those vital sections were on holiday this week – not together, as far as I know - so it’s been rather quiet in the Man Cave. Although it would be irresponsible and very un-blokey to admit it, I have rather missed them. A bit. Don’t tell them, though.

Excluding weekends, I spend over 8 hours a day with them. When you deduct the time I’m commuting or snoring, that’s more hours than I spend with my wife. Handy, then, that we get on.

It does help enormously to have colleagues that can keep you entertained, be that by drying their nether regions with a fan heater after being caught out in the rain, or foolishly admitting a fondness for a passion fruit-flavoured liqueur called Passoa.

They even attempted an intervention when I got stuck in a 4 hour meeting, by signalling to me with a torch. It’s quite tricky to talk Search Engine Optimisation when someone is using Morse Code through the window behind your audience.

In a truly impressive feat of creativity, I returned from holiday one time to find a scale model of me sat at my desk. Hat, jacket, trainers - ‘I’ even had a cappuccino in ‘my’ hand and a speech bubble with some of my stock phrases written on it. Apparently, ‘I’ was more helpful and less grumpy than usual that week.

There is a slight feeling that we’re inmates in a kind of office-based detainment centre, where the dispossessed get banished to reflect on their past misdemeanours, but without hot running water or anywhere to make a cup of tea that doesn’t involve going outside first.

The somewhat pre-fab nature of our shed also means seismic shifts in temperature, but a gritty determination to protect the battered fan heater for the greater good prevails – it has to, or I’d have lost toes to frostbite first thing on a January Monday by now. No-one has said “I’m just going outside – I may be some time” yet, but all it needs is a particularly cold snap this winter, and one of us will have to make the ultimate sacrifice.

So, it’ll be nice to have them back on Monday. After all, I’ve had to make the drinks all week, so they’re massively in Brew Debt. The slackers.

This post first appeared as my 'Thank grumpy it's Friday' column, in the North West Evening Mail, on the 12th of August 2016, where it was retitled as "Don't wanna be all by myself".

Purely by chance, I discovered that the NWEM had put it online... but whilst it exists, it isn't listed on their Opinion page, which will make it a teensy bit tricky to find, I'd imagine.

This one had lingered for a long time in my notebook of column ideas. If that sounds like I'm actually quite organised, rest assured that I hardly ever look at it, as the next one usually comes to me on the spur of the moment. On the odd occasion that something feels like it might be good at some point (usually when I'm bereft of other ideas) it goes in the notebook. Presuming I can actually read my own handwriting and that it makes sense months down the road.

Anyway, all hail my office chums MikeyMike and The Gazbot for making life at work amusingly tolerable. Cheers, Gents. White, no sugar. Ta.

(CD A-Z on hold, whilst I listen to a new They Might Be Giants collection, called "Phone Power" which arrived yesterday. Hurrah!)

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