Tip of the Week

Well, the nervous breakdown that I planned for 16:34 a week on Wednesday keeps sending me invites over Outlook - it seems to think that it can't wait and that we should have our meeting earlier. I told him that he has to wait as the exhaustion breakdown is higher up on my "to do" list. Impatient buggers, the lot of them!

I work in the orga side of the events industry. This means that everyone wants a piece of me - colleagues, speakers, delegates, paying customers, hotels, caterers, restaurants, musicians, coach companies, printers, sound technicians....you get the picture.

My two, equally burnt out, colleagues and I get by at the moment through utter hard-core bitchiness, retail therapy, coffee and sick sick sick jokes - mainly at the expense of all of the above.

*smiles sweetly

To be fair, the emails that I sent throughout the whole of Friday to my best mate (sympathy helps so much!) did reach a kind of dangerous edge. I stopped when I got nervous that whoever may be scanning my work emails may have called the German equivalent of the SWOT team. If I end up arrested and in court I will blame my friend for egging me on; "But your Honour, it was he who suggested the blunt kitchen knife to gouge out my boss' eyes!"; "Ummm...yes, your Honour I have to admit that I sent three emails, each increasing in brutal imagery on the blood bath that I was mentally preparing to perpetrate"; "Your Honour, I'm sure that you would also wish to kill X's near and distant family after he asked for the 1000th time where the paper for the photocopier is stored right when the Internet crashed just after I finished loading the new website...and lost every fucking thing!"

After I tell the judge that my boss was / is so sodding stupid that he had to send a courier to me at 22:30 on Friday night whilst I was merrily getting sloshed at a fantastically cool beach bar coz he had forgotten his office keys and couldn't lock up (he actually wanted me to come back to the office, the courier was my idea)...well, the case would be thrown out and I would be awarded so much compensation that I could retire on a quiet little island somewhere with no Internet connection.

Still waiting and hoping for the police to arrive.

Anyways...the above isn't my tip of the week on how to become a multi millionaire by the age of 30. Not a guaranteed tip and I doubt that I would get quite the same handling if arrested as an unwitting accomplice in your case.

No...my tip of the week - guaranteed to make you chuckle outwardly should you do it, and make you mentally give a one finger salute at your office / customer(s) / boss / suppliers / the world - is yet to come:

So...last week was bad. It was REALLY bad. The weekend was good (other than the shite hangover on Saturday - bleh). I wake up this morning. Eurgh, I'm feeling all funny from not-very-nice dreams. The thought of what I have to get done this week is going through my head again. On my way to work, half an hour late and I'm hoping that they fire me on the spot for it, knowing that I won't be that lucky because there's way too much to do. I actually have a quivering bottom lip on the train on the way in as I feel so crappy about work and sorry for myself. Wondering if I start howling then and there if some kind strange homeless person will cuddle me and call the ambulance. Deciding that most likely I'll be ignored, I don't become hysterical.

Get to the office and yes, its guaranteed, the first person I meet at the coffee machine is one of the perennially cheerful sales people who just got a deal in. Oh fucking marvellous. Stop
hopping around and rubbing your hands in glee you wanker and leave me alone. It means more work for me and no, I'm not sodding thrilled. Now piss off out of the way and let me get my coffee!

Turn on the pooter...Internet is down again and the new PR woman who is crap at English and demands that I proof read all of her work (and no its not part of my job description and yes, privately I get paid a mini fortune for it) does her usual annoying whispering thing asking for help. After pleasantly (well...I repressed the snarl) asking her for the 57th time to please move her head from behind the screen and actually speak with the volume of an adult, the nervous tick in my right eye starts up again.

The day carries on in this vein. Check my bank balance - the boss is too busy being an idiot to have paid us our wages and the direct debits are flying out quicker than my bank manager can write to whinge at me (yes..some of us manage to get overdrawn on our overdrafts you know - its not a special skill and see, no reason to be happy about the deals coming in which "pay" my wages). The weather outside is totally stunning. Our wonderful office on the 10th floor with the breath-taking view of Berlin through the 360 degree windows is heating up nicely. No need to whinge about the fact that the newly opened fitness studio downstairs has no sauna, we get it here for free! And no, please don't be silly...of course we don't have air conditioning!

We have yet another event on Wednesday so there's all the mind-numbing things to do like printing 100s of copies of things and making name badges...bleh. So...settle down and smile evilly knowing that it will at least piss off half of the office when I print stuff out for the whole afternoon ("Get your grubby fingers off my pretty printed pages! How many times do I have to tell you, you capitalistic, un-creative, money-grabbing oik that your pesky fax / deal will come out at the end of the print run and not half way through?").

And then....

Happily get out my lil iPod and stuff my ears full of those calming earphones which block out the perpetual panicky screams of "Poppy...I can't carry on working! I've run out of staples!! Argh!".
(Would you like a massage as I fill your coffee cup and pass you the staples whilst also wiping your backside for you, you useless Mummy's boy?)

And you know what I have playing on my iPod?

I have an audiobook. Oh yes...very calming. Makes me chuckle. And I'm oh so proud of myself for having the patience to wait 3 hours for it to download after working out how to do the whole torrent thing. Resourceful, me.

But you know the delicious thing? I'm not listening to soothing whale music or crashing waves. No birdies tweeting in the trees or cooing. No classical music or an audiobook on the topic of "10 Steps to Soothing Colleague Interaction: the Mother Theresa mantra for a healthy workplace".

No no no no no.

I sit there and happily staple piles of paper together and shove name cards into those horrible little plastic cases and listen to....

...erotic fiction.

"The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty" to be precise.

*chuckles naughtily (and anyone who's ever heard that chuckle...hehehehe)

Oh lordie...it helps!!! Really!

I HIGHLY recommend it!

Ok, I can only get away with my iPod when I'm doing shite routine stuff, but I "trained" my colleagues so that I just do it now when I need to. But the erotic fiction only occurred to me at the weekend (easier than sitting in the train and putting up with leers from old men when they see the title on your book cover). And to do it at work....sooooo good baby! Oh yeah! Mmmmm.

Not in any real sexual way - haven't gotten as far as the naughty bits and to be fair the guy reading the book makes me giggle when he speaks Beauty's part...too funny - but oh ha!

I can actually look forward to work again tomorrow and I have my giggle back. Especially as the afore-mentioned retail therapy now means that I have a brand new sparkling iPod nano: I can fit the Story of O on it too now.

Life is goooood!