19^th August 2014

Work is a a four letter work. Or so they say. But it’s not like fuck, cunt, or twat. I must spend most of my day swearing about work, swearing at work (very quietly), or thinking about swearing about work.

I’ve just come back home from work. I say, home when I mean a hotel 300 miles away from where I live. It makes me wonder how many people travel 300 miles from where I am now, to a place nearer to where I live. And perhaps our jobs are similar. We could swap and save the travel time an costs. But there is a cost. In one hotel I have gold elite membership, and in another I’m platinum. There are loyalty points to collect and holidays to plan with all my lovely points.

I realise that I may have jumped in far to soon with what looks like a great benefit of hotel points, free alcohol, and room upgrades. However, there is a point here. It is working, but having nowhere in your own company to work. The days of having an office and a place to make your own are long gone.

Desks have a price. A few years ago when I worked in London, the cost of a desk was £100,000 / year. That meant that the desk was earning three times what I was earning at the time. And what did it do? Nothing. All it did was sit there all day when I was expected to be busy all the time. It reminds me of the old line that goes: “If a bus station is where a bus stops, a rail station is where a train stops, is a work station where work stops?” I’m beginning to think so. In short, your employer generally doesn’t want you to work in one of their expensive offices, that they are probably renting. Instead, many people are expected to travel and be come corporate cuckoos and work in someone else’s desk, in a rubbish office.

Office design has moved on greatly in recent years. From somewhere you could work, to somewhere where concentration without music plugged in to your ears is almost impossible. It may be impossible for me and not others. Some people have poor hearing and slightly lower on the autistic scale than I am. That’s to say, I like some type of routine, at least in a day, and I find random noises and unexpected bouts of soulless office laughter quite disturbing. In my view, there is nothing worth laughing about in the office, especially when it is about work, and even worse gallows humour about work.

Perhaps, in the days before head phone sockets, people just had to be quieter. Nowadays, open plan offices can sound more like a Weatherspoons pub. There’s no music to drown out the cackle, and no-one runs the office. It’s just a bunch of strangers forced together in what is loosely called a Team. It’s not really a team, but someone always needs to be in charge, even if they don’t act like it.

But work is good for you, right? For one it gets me out of bed, feeds me, and gives me something to moan about. It even kicked me in to action to write again.

However, there are downsides such as finding yourself at the bottom of a corporate food chain. Even though, it could be considered that I have a half decent job, that many people would aspire to have. There’s doing pointless things because you’ve been asked to. Working with people who are just not your type of people. But I could be considered as not being a people person. When in reality, the days of looking for the good in people are long gone. Now I look for the bad, and how it is going to ruin my day.

My plan is to spend as little time in the future at work. I could even become good at something, where I only have to work half as hard, or half the time. Then perhaps, I could become creative, relax and be happy. But no! I’m in a customer office, and they are paying for a full day.

That’s enough for one day. And reminds me to remind myself that My Words are no intended to be a diary. This time, when it ends, it ends. My 400 works no longer seems to be a problem and I’ll type until I’m done. Even if the piece is only half done. And tomorrow is another rant…….