“Frontier Psychiatrist” by The Avalanches makes my room feel like a comedy sketch of a scene from the Gunfight at the OK Corral… “You’re a nut! You’re crazy in the coconut! What does that mean? That boy needs therapy,
I’m gonna kill you, that boy needs therapy. Ranagazoo, let’s have a tune…”
In the run up to Christmas, shopping days are running out faster than stocks of the latest toy craze and I am still left twiddling my thumbs over what to part my hard(ly) earned money with to bring festive joy to my brother, Kev. Being too old to enjoy toys and too young to appreciate strippers, I scratched my head, with the feeling that my long hair was getting in the way of my thinking. It was swaying and making the motion of my thoughts look insignificant. I am derailed and start thinking about my hair as I twirl it around my index finger, pirouetting like a ballerina that had given up its life for dance. I then realise my hair at that very moment had been at its longest in a very long time, with each fleeting second leaving an old broken record in its wake. I’m going to have to get my mum to dig out old photographs because it’s been years since I’ve sat down and looked through the albums. I suddenly remember my carefree days of sipping orange juice with my dad at the pub and the face I must have pulled upon curiously sipping from his beer glass. It was a moment preserved in amber nectar and my tastebuds never did warm to the taste of fermented yeast after all these years.
My thoughts continued to skip like a stylus precariously negotiating heavily scratched vinyl for a while before regressing to their original flightpath: what do I get Kev for Christmas? At that moment, he waltzes into my room and barely makes eye contact as he drops a shop brochure onto my lap. He points to pictures of two items in succession with his finger utlising the same hereditary flourish evident in my own digits. Problem solved.
In the last few days at work, I’ve been consistent with meeting my targets for the day so to prevent me from falling comatose, I’d been asked to help team-lead the new folks on the team. This is what I like doing best and it always keeps me stimulated, because after all, satisfaction comes from helping others, right? This enforced the previous cognitions that I played ball with in my mind; that I did not belong in a laboratory. I belonged in an office environment, where laboratory benches, stools and chemicals are replaced by leather chairs, swivelling seats that recline, and printer ink. Being in management is like being the one holding the lantern in the gloomy world of foolscap paper, staple ammunition and a system of prison-like hierarchy. It’s like playing the light-bearer in the midst of the ongoing war between incontinent machines (e.g. photocopiers, computers) and the human race (assuming people who work in an office are human and indeed racing). Casting the metaphors aside, it boils down to one thing: showing the misguided how to become better at their job whether they wanted to or not.
I have had lengthy conversations with H about office ethic and the breed of human replicants abundant in the work place. Her current job is her first ever job and upon hearing her 3rd or 4th story disguised as a rant, I had decided her workplace was shrinkwrapped from the same factory that dispatched my own workplace. The officeplace is full of weird people. If you’re disagreeing with me, chances are that you’re one of the aforementioned. The things that some office-workers class as normal behaviour go as far as surprising me and in the more extreme cases, make me pause with a shock that could be mistaken for fear. I can only honesty say that I can have a proper conversation with a handful of people in my workplace. The rest would stare on and dismiss ME as being abnormal. H was trying to think of new excuses for everytime she was asked by her coworkers, “Why are you working here when you could be on a graduate program?” I told her the answer was simple. Tell them “It’s a socialogical experiment. I am researching the dynamics of the workplace for a thesis.” She might as well be doing that. I would say between 70-90% of the employees in an office have a clearly distinguishing feature that indicates they should be in a different and much safer environment, like say, a straight jacket.
In the alternative dimension where I was a social worker, I would be helping the emotionally fraught and those dependent on outside suggestions and direction. In this plane of reality as a team-leader, I was doing the same. In all fairness, there are a few workers who work really well and for all comparative purposes, are sane. Consequently and contradictorily, these good people should not belong in the office space (time continuum). These few exceptions are the yardstick brushes that illustrate the kind of people I’d consider as friends, as opposed to work colleagues. The difference between the 2 is that only my friends phone me up because I wouldn’t dream of giving out my phone number to any of the toony tunes humming in my workplace. With so many crazies, the office party on Saturday is going to be a blast!
Label them freak or unique, but I love some of the conversations I have with office workers, even though most of them don’t pick up on all my jokes, subtle teases and general slinging of puns.
Older Co-worker: Everytime I eat a banana, it makes me feel crazy.
Me: So in other words, bananas make you feel bananas?
OC: Yeah.
Me: Well, you know what they say… You are what you eat.
OC: {Changes the subject}
I get along fine with the OC and he seems to think highly of me just because I have degrees in Genetics.
OC: I have a lot of respect for geneticists because you guys are just Gods.
Me: We’re not Gods. Gods can create life. Geneticist can only dictate how that life will develop.
OC: So you’re basically a genius.
Me: Yup.
I get called a genius at least a few times a day by him. I think he’s been watching too much science-fiction.
The most interesting conversation/discussion today was initiated by one of the new girls in the office. The topic was Supermarket Dating (a concept new to me). Basically, there’s an unofficial day called “Singles Night” at some of the 24/7 supermarkets where unattached folk gather and presumably pretend to shop for groceries. My new co-worker said that she’d been in the supermarket late at night (towards the morning) and the guys just walk around with empty baskets, just staring at the women. This phenomenon was backed up by another colleague (male) who said that 24/7 supermarkets are a great place to pick up women, especially after the clubs have closed. Like disorientated moths, the post-boozed-out wasted youth are drawn to the bright supermarket lights to fill the empty void formed from ingested alcohol and try to effectively kill off the munchies.
Apparently, scientific research has shown that relationships formed between 2 people last significantly longer if their initial meeting was in a supermarket or library, compared with meetups in other establishments. This is even more true if the initial contact is specifically made whilst in the queue. Thinking about it, this makes sense because these are 2 places where people are at their most human and vulnerable states; places where you are browsing for items you wish to consume later. It’s strange because asides from University libraries, I want to be in and out in as quick a time as possible. Just go in, get what I want and then leave, whether it be a textbook or a pack of biscuits. I don’t expect to pick anyone up and I guess that is why these relationships might last longer; because we are not attentively looking. In clubs and bars, the loud music, short conversations and even shorter skirts do well to distort a person’s view of the world and purge any appetite for an earnest relationship. The high stools and alcohol are merely shopfronts for a meat market where the meat walks, talks and even attempts to dance. In this enclosed world, no one is a vegetarian.
In club/bar atmospheres, people look and stare with their eyes moreso than they normally would elsewhere. They underanalyse the conscious objects colliding into each other to a point when they just become one single object. Become one piece of meat. The same piece of meat, but with many faces. Meat that doesn’t have feelings, only the urge to taste pleasure in its raw, uncooked form. For them, delusion becomes a tangible form of reality.
I could imagine the kind of people parading around in those supermarkets on Singles Nights. The girls would be the ones wearing the tight figure-hugging two-pieces and mile-high leather boots in a bright finish that would make the Fauvism movement jealous. The guys would be the ones wearing striped shirts that fluoresce under the bright lights of the supermarket, armed with starched collars that could poke out the eye of many stone gargoyles. Shoes would be buffed to a high mirror shine and equipped with heels that could tap “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” in the club style. All and all, their personalities affected with the critical Tedious Delirium virus. OK, call me cynical.
Me: I can’t believe guys even go to a supermarket to try to pull girls. How old are they, 50?
Older Co-worker: No, not that old.
Me: Why, how old are you?
One of the team-leaders at my workplace can be a bit of a ball-buster at times. Give him an iota of responsibility and he turns it into a military operation whilst retaining the drill instructor demeanour normally left behind when you pass boot camp (let’s hope no one buys him a whistle for Christmas). One of the new girls picked up on this and said she was not surprised that the general concensus was that he was a dick.
New Girl: He really needs to lighten up.
Me: He sometimes has his power trips, but underneath that he’s actually a nice guy.
NG: He’s got like this big chip on his shoulder.
{He rises from his seat and staggers past us as though he was wearing lead underpants}
Me: Yeah, the chips have gotten so big over the years that it’s started to affect his walk.
He came by and reminded us that tomorrow was a casual day i.e. no need to come suited and booted. Wear anything you want, as long as its tasteful (it was going to be a casual day for me anyway, in both senses since I have tomorrow off to go shopping and hang with Chris and Al). Concensus dick came over and made a few remarks at the clothes we were wearing in office style banter, which in a street environment could have been interpreted as being derogatory and insulting. We laughed and he tugged at the back of the collar of my Banana Republic top to check the label. This kicked off a mini discussion about American clothes labels.
Me: You’ve heard of Banana Republic, right? It’s an American brand, but I think they sell it over here.
New Girl: No, is it like Gucci?
Older Co-worker: No, but it’s a classy brand. There are some other good brands from over there, like Abercrombie and Fitch and there’s one called BUM
NG: Bum?
OC: No, not ‘Bum,’ but spelt B, dot, U, dot, M, dot.
Me: Yeah, I saw that brand when I was over there. BUM Equipment. They make sports and gym wear, right?
OC: When I was in the US for a while, at Christmas I would ship BUM out to my cousins and friends over here.
Me: You shipped out Bum?! You’re such a pretty guy, I bet you made a lot of money in a short amount of time doing that!
NG: They ship out Bum over here too, in the right places like Soho and the Red Light District.
Me: Yeah competition must be stiff because you’re not the only one shipping out Bum.
OC: You’re both terrible.
The new girl is quite a laugh because she’s got a sense of humour that danced erratically on the thin line between Eclectic and Eccentric. It’s always refreshing to see humour of that ilk coupled with the character of a normal person. I try to make everyone laugh whilst they are on the phone and with her it doesn’t take too much effort. She was giggling like she was still in school and even said that she had never laughed so much in a long time. I’m sure she meant it (her hysteria was a big give away) and maybe she didn’t know it, but that meant a lot to me. It feels good being acknowledged for passing around packets of laughter in the workplace. It’s the best medicine to cure the depression brought on by laborious routine and it hurries along those moments of the day that sluggishly amble along in the big race to the “shift end-time.”
I snickered at my desk whilst reading e-mails today, without too many people aware that it was my penultimate day there. It’s semi-officially my final day on Monday and I’ll miss working with some of the people there. I will keep in contact with the few I’d class as friends whilst the others fade away into the recesses of peripheral memory. Just as life goes on, working life also goes on. As the end of another era loomed in the horizon, I reread the last group e-mail that Vicky had sent 2 days ago, when she was still on English soil. The final line of her letter summed everything up for me.
“Have fun and remember that the best days are yet to come.”
Quote of the day: “We are the cheeky girls, we are the cheeky girls. You are the cheeky boys, you are the cheeky boys” - Dad singing his rendition of the Cheeky Song by The Cheeky Girls, to my mortified brother.
