Okay, so this isn’t a blog about walking in the countryside. It’s about being stuck in an office all day long with local radio blasting away in the factory next to said office. Which is the opposite of the original idea, but if I ever flesh out my ramblings (pun intended) and get them published elsewhere, it will all make sense. Trust me.
Through a chance internet search for jobs I found a link to a company in Chartham. The link didn’t work, but suggested that they had a vacancy, so I emailed them my C.V. I attended an interview for a job I knew nothing about, and a few days after that, it was mine. Unfortunately, my job is sitting in front of a pc all day typing numbers into spreadsheets. These spreadsheets are a lot like Lost, in that I see what they’re trying to achieve and get these glimpses of greatness, but ultimately they are messy, frustrating and rely on nonsense that could be interpreted in any number of ways. Not that I have a problem with nonsense but there’s just so much of it that I end up staring at the screen in a daze.
If my job were to make amusing observations about my co-workers, then I’d be sorted. Steve pronounces ‘punnets’ ‘pannets’, which to me sounds like ‘pallets’ and adds to my confusion as we deal with both and my job depends a lot on me not fucking up the info I’m processing. Ivan pronounces ‘ankle’ ‘uncle’ and the other day asked Steve if he had hurt his uncle. Natalya just misses out some words altogether and today asked, “Are you taking piss out of me?”
I don’t like local radio. It encapsulates everything that is wrong with the music world and having to put up with it every day is a real pain for a music lover like me. Normally I’ll be generous and say that everyone can sing, it’s just that some people don’t have a good voice, but whoever gave Mika and James Blunt a record deal is an evil cunt. That, and this bizarre Eighties revival continues apace. Music made by people who don’t remember the decade. The new retro. Style over substance. For those born at the end of the 80’s, it’s all cheap Day-Glo clothing and bad haircuts, if current fashion trends are anything to go by. To add to this, the Radiohead/Travis/Coldplay/Keane lineage continues with an evermore-diluted bloodline of whinging singers and a musical style that’s just an emotional shortcut for selling people more of the same shit. Listening to Invicta FM, you’d believe that REM and Blur only ever recorded two songs each in their entire careers. Yet Oasis slip through with lyrics about getting high and they play “There She Goes”, oblivious to its inspiration.
I get a half hour for lunch, which sucks, but apparently isn’t illegal, though certainly infringes my basic human rights. I can’t see the outside world from my desk as the windows are small, narrow and high up. At least I could look out at the bright sky this morning, until some fucker drew the blinds for no good reason.
The people (or ‘students’ as they are called in the company gumpf I got on my first day) on the factory floor get a couple of breaks during the day, which are signified by a bell going off, at which time all the workers rush out as fast as possible. All they need now is a playground and a tuck shop. It really is a bizarre sight; Pavlov would be proud.
Observing this and rewatching the fourth season of The Wire, I have concluded I still have the classroom mentality. When it gets to five o’clock, I don’t want to be there, it’s time to go. If I get stuck there beyond this time, I get agitated and angry and have no interest whatsoever in my work. But now I have to pretend to give a shit for a bit longer otherwise the people who pay me might get upset.
And that’s the great irony of all this: the best paid job of my ‘career’ thus far and I could really do without it. I just want to be out there wandering around in the fields.
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