Herewith In Respect Of

The workflow management spreadsheet. The performance improvement plan. The good-enough register. The fishbone diagram. The likelihood predictor. The degradation forecast. The snack matrix. The talent bugle. The resentment pipe. The multi-skilling index. The uncertainty tracker. The obedience league. The overtime conundrum. The arrears fudger. The contradiction infuser. The hangover poem. The pay freeze. The patience margin. The flexibility insister. The morale barometer. The fridge.

Fine, I'll Tell Him

Some people don't use the underpass on the way to work. They don't save any time by doing this. It's large and arena-like, with indirect paths, but on the roads above they have to wait for a gap in 40mph traffic, and get through it without the help of stop signs or pedestrian pomp. There's a story going round I haven't heard.

A man rapped his head off right in front of us. It tumbled to the front of the stage and was picked up and passed, rhyming the whole time, between three hundred pairs of hands raised high in disbelief. His body stayed onstage in a floor-length black gown, shimmying and jerking with a microphone held to its neck.

Competence

Notes: Recipient again attended interview to assess suitability to perform functions already contractually obliged to perform. Recipient approached interview with surplus of I's in mouth ready to deploy after surplus of we's deployed at other interview led to impression of insufficient individual worth. Interview performance an improvement. Again a wait and while waiting performing functions contractually obliged to perform but not deemed capable of performing. Again the assessment unsuitable. One part of second interview feedback lamenting lack of banging-on re: teamwork. Probable cause: surplus of I's taken on after previous interview feedback highlighted we-surplus and I-dearth. News this time received Thursday afternoon, reaction of recipient being immediate exit of building. Friday morning recipient booked appointment at doctor's for following Thursday and again performed functions contractually obliged to perform but twice now deemed incapable of performing. Weekend: rollercoaster. Monday morning recipient attempted to perform functions contractually obliged to perform but stopped after thirty-five minutes, exited building and went to library. At library recipient attempted to read books of familiar, soothing, perspective-enhancing nature, Tropic of Capricorn, but found library didn't stock such books or if it did they would not be due back for many terrifying weeks. Recipient went to coffee place with achievable crossword and drank coffee and didn't achieve half of crossword, finding during the non-achievement that the silent recital of the alphabet when, for example, thinking of what a half-filled word's final letter could be, didn't go like the silent recital of the alphabet usually does, sometimes skipping from f to t, sometimes just stopping, and sometimes changing into thoughts of what seemed at the time like life-enhancing physical violence. Recipient left coffee and coffee shop and crossword and went home to wait until time for doctor, the new dissonance-cocoon varying in severity but never falling away. Doctor had recipient give a first-person account of the above, and offered recipient some information and some people to talk to, and a six-month course of anti-depressants. Recipient declined and was surprised by offer of anti-depressants, and accepted information and people to talk to. Doctor forbade for two weeks recipient's performing of functions contractually obliged to perform.

Unheard-of Side

In a right-angled cavern south of everywhere, a mercilessly average film projected itself at our heads. Bees were in it so how are you going to really complain. It featured a distressingly competent actor playing identical twins with beards and coughs. And one pretty soon ended up pretending to be the other and some people realised and some didn't. And there was a plot and some vengeance and it was all in Spanish. Which probably was because the financial backers had had it all filmed in English like anyone with any sense would've done but then grew worried about recouping their dubloons and had shown a rough cut to the local ombudsman and he'd gone fine yeah guns and money I get it. But: If an English-speaking-and-hearing audience is going to leave a screening thinking they haven't been filmically nobbled by this then we're going to have to re-do the whole thing in Spanish so as to hang a thin and arty and therefore more valuable gauze between the audience and its common sense. But we'll show it in the multiplexes rather than the art-sheds. For extra because so basically I'm not very sure. But I've booked it all now and it's too late to stop. And in the taxis afterwards they'll wonder what it thought it was, and in beds they'll curse and shrug while dreams of better things run through them, and you might almost make your money back.

Abundance Somehow Crikey Furtado

The phone won. In the shop I'd gone for the cheapest but in the queue I looked at the shelves again and saw, for not much more, something-something free music and something-something touchscreen. And I thought I like music and I like touching screens. And who's next please and I pointed at it and said that sounds good, hurry up.
But the free music was like you call up your friend and she puts her phone next to the stereo of a deaf horse that doesn't have the internet.
And the touchscreen was like you try to make an omelette and end up snapping your thumbs.
And I can't destroy it because of the Congo in that documentary.
So there's a lesson there in making things do no more than they should.

Juvenile Dementia

The taxman wrote. We’d lost touch. I miss him. We’ve never been very close, but now he’s showering me with numbers. I’m not sure what he wants exactly but I’m not turning anything down. He’s full of remorse. I can tell by the lack of apologies. When he says calculations he means errors. When he says within fourteen days he means sooner than never. Maybe he’s joined a religion that requires him to make amends for everything he’s ever done.

Everybody Kurtz

The future is arriving in three days and bringing with it a whopping sense of freedom. It might also be windy. I'm getting a small tent or a jacket with pegs and pitching it in the places between places. I will spend a lot of time with my thumb out, on the side of a road, saying where is the work.
Three more days here and ten of us left. Tents down, poles bundled, pegs bucketed, bins battered. Summer left town one night last week, the next morning the shops stopped doing tourist hours and everyone had lost their flip flops. Brown leaves like baseball gloves, a praying mantis like a young banana with legs and a toad the size of your head. The future running in on cold legs. Interesting, I could write an awful book, or half a quite good one, or nothing at all. It could be like Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes, without the donkey, without the Cevennes, 100 years too late.
Work was maybe on a farm in Corsica. But the bloke has been silent.

We Are Very Happy

If it was puzzling you, we are sorry. It wasn't meant to go on so long. It was meant to display courtesy, sympathy and taste. Like in the song. We didn't want to get it all over your t-shirt. But if you're going to insist on parading it around, the least you could is shut up about it.