Tag Archives: employment

Under threat of castration

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Against the odds, the better judgement of society and the collective will of my financial captors, I’ve survived another birthday.

The main event itself proved to be a rather hellish, godless experience in which I came to realise how far behind in the great race of life I’ve wilfully fallen. For my 24th birthday I acquired the body of a malnourished teenager with the face of Dorian Gray’s portrait glued on to the top bit that scientists refer to as the head. My facial hair is scoffed at by unnaturally haughty unborn foetuses as they stroke their mutton chops and eat out of tubes.

Meanwhile the sole of my shoe flaps in the wind, I’ve had to put crucifixes on the door to keep the bank at bay and then plaster Nun-porn all over the front door to ward off the Christian sales reps. The majority of household pets eat better than I do and my job is as stimulating as a mild static shock to a phantom limb. This has been my shambolic attempt at ageing and it feels as though the world has been trying to kill me for 24 years, yet I’m still trying to bite the invisible hand that feeds.

This same invisible hand reaches up your sphincter and ass-hooks you out of bed in the morning. It’s the invisible hand that sits you down and coerces you into forcing out a shit at a time when you’d rather be unconscious and horizontal. It’s this same invisible hand that dresses you like a well-groomed performing guppy each day, before the cage comes down for another round of gainful employment.

When you’re younger this hand has less influence and is easier to resist, thanks to that voracious appetite for life that later seems reserved for puppies and charity muggers. That energetic passion that seems to dwell in tiny humans before they establish how futile their life will become is what allowed us to stray the path and escape the clutches of the invisible hand. The hand wants you to go to school and wash after every visit to the little boys’ room, but the hand’s desires are overcome by the single-minded determination to scoop the mushy stool from the toilet bowl and hurl it at girls (who are decidedly yucky) and teachers (who are mere pawns for the hand) in an event that will later see you dubbed a coprophiliac by a state-appointed psychologist.

But as the elastin and collagen starts to sag and decay under the weight of our accumulated years, the hand becomes more potent, more ruthless and exponentially more domineering. In many ways life is like a very glitchy video game, with the first 10 to 14 years being the equivalent of the crap tutorial level where everything is spoon-fed to you to avoid premature expiration or a home visit from social services. Years later the hand decides to abort you from the comfortable womb of higher education, you’re flushed out into the sewage of the real world and all that was pure, beautiful and true in life suddenly reveals itself to have been a fleeting wet dream, but instead of a sticky wad of gunk in your bed sheets, it’s a crippling anchor of debt, a total loss of purpose and the promise of unending drudgery that you wake up to.

It is here at your most educated and vulnerable that the hand grabs you by the scrotum and pulls you this way and that until, under threat of castration, you hop aboard the unicycle and play your role in the tired old carnival of life. From this testicular stranglehold it can control your every move; before you know it you’re caring about spreadsheets, working at home in the evenings to get that big presentation just right or laughing at the jokes made by the other inmates in your workplace.

A colleague recently confessed to me that he was only at work for the money. I was baffled because I could think of no other coherent rationale for turning up every day. I don’t spend 10 hours a day inside a colossal phallic obelisk in the middle of a diseased London haggling on the phone with people who say with all sincerity “let’s do brunch” out of a chronic addiction to the company of gutless buffoons. There’s no part of my soul that yearns to be crowned with a plastic microphone headset, nor do key performance indicators induce a Ron Jeremy-worthy erection and there’s not a thing about synergistic management solutions that I even want to understand. This is all the hand’s doing.

The hand stretches out a big dumb smile on my face to mask the crushing despair that settles in every time I’m reminded that Made in Chelsea is produced in a country that possesses nuclear weapons. When you want to stand up on your desk and kick the monitor into the face of the person opposite for being such a callous money-grubbing consumer-whore, or enter into mortal combat with middle management personnel, you don’t – the hand keeps you seated, reminding you of the powerful urge to eat some time this month. It reminds you of the bills, the rent, the need for further employment beyond this particular moment of disgusted fury. And what’s worse, it paints this exercise in restraint as sanity.

Like a general of an army of one, you sit enraged in the cage to which the hand holds the key forever out of reach, and survey the battle; sustained losses on all fronts. The hand pushes you past all those dreams, ambitions and things that you once deemed important in order to further its own twisted goals, which seemingly involve reducing humanity, the world’s deadliest predator, into a collection of cash-worshipping, screen-fed mega-monkeys.

So it goes on beyond the workplace and out into the vast belching, scoffing void of life. Before you know it you’re drooling over an IKEA catalogue, perusing the turtle-neck rack in GAP in a bid to emulate notoriously celebrated child-enslaver Steve Jobs or getting an early night for the sake of a village fete cake stall that you offered to run in aid of a religious charity. The hand will push you down the aisle, will tickle your bum during the procreation that allows the minibus of life to chug on and ultimately lays you to rest atop your queen-size deathbed in your moderately priced home with the southern-facing garden and double garage.

It may occur to you at this point that you’re unsure exactly how you got here or how you ever exerted so little control in your own life, and now too in death. But by then it’ll be too late and your grieving loved ones will be greeted with the stench of shit when your bowels empty as you pass from this world.

The hand wins in the end, no matter how many fingers you think you’re chewing on.

I’d rather be Pol Pot

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Everyone’s been fired.

More accurately, some abnormally lucrative contract in this barbaric government silo has been revoked, unrenewed or disavowed, or whatever the Tories do to consultancy firms in the age of tightening ringpieces. Each of that consultancy’s steeds is to be ceremonially slaughtered in favour of a set of baying replacements from a similarly rapacious private sector drone factory in the middle of next month.

I’m not part of the ruthless gang being run out of town by the Deloitte brothers, who have begun sending in a parade of precocious children in identical spectacles to replace the overpaid adults surrounding me. My contract is unaffected and they hoped I would stick around, not least to help with the ‘transition’. That simple word was enough to send me running screaming for whichever hill from which I last saw my dignity. Adopting some combination of solidarity and fear of being set up, I’ve decided to join the rest in raiding the stationery cupboard for A4 pads I’ll take home but never use – I have quit.

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The disease of modern living

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Next month will commemorate my 24th revolution around the sun. Already my forehead resembles a weathered ball-bag and I find myself aimlessly sprawled in front of a screen more evenings than not. This never happened two years ago. Now, like some declawed beast sedated by glossy images rolling seamlessly over one another, I lounge and gape with numb abandon, occasionally flick through Facebook on my phone and wonder why exactly people from school feel the need to repopulate the Earth with smaller humans that look like them before McDonalds ravaged their bodies. This is adult life, so I’m told, and you too are welcome to the party, please make yourself comfortable and wait for the air to run out.

Everything you need to know about me is explained by the steaming pile of cat shit that has collected outside my bedroom window. This veritable Everest of faeces makes me feel at home, as does the decapitated pigeon with its guts strewn out like a meaty party popper that’s stuck outside my office, in a location that the cleaners can’t reach. It rots there, sun-baked and spoiled, festering in the British summer.

These features of my surroundings help me to keep my perspective, much in the way that drama teachers educate young minds on what shattered dreams look like. They symbolise perfectly how much we crave our precious distractions in order to ignore the grim brutalities of life: their continued existence is damning proof. Even as I write, the gangrenous disease of modern living cramps up my hand with premature rigor mortis and spreads through the veins, pumped ever closer to the brain by a palpitating aorta that struggles against the thickening walls of tar that I have cursed it with.

Gradually I too will be pacified by the epidemic that sweeps the nation. As the world hurtles down into the belly of the abyss, we will watch with apathetic disdain as the stomach acid swirls around our ankles, melding our shoes to our feet, kicking up a mighty stench in the process. By the time we’re half digested we might reach feebly for an app to save us, but it’ll be too late and when we reach the sphincter of the universe to get sprayed out into the cosmic toilet bowl, only then will we admit that perhaps, just maybe, mistakes were made. Such is the nature of this affliction.

The first symptom was an involuntary twitch of the hand, reaching ceaselessly for the mobile phone to save me from reality. My phone-orientated spasm is akin to a phantom limb, but the ever-loveable philanthropists of Microsoft recently conducted a social study on some screen-worshipping Canadians and established that the average human attention span has dropped from 12 seconds down to just 8, so I doubt I’m alone in the quarantine zone.

This mutated strain of the 80’s TV-borne virus could be seen as the next step towards in our evolution where we transcend our physical forms to live entirely digitally, floating around the ether poking at one another’s faces with three and half inch floppies like cognitively impaired sea-monkeys in screen-saver form. Or maybe it just marks the next step towards a society of preening, gurning blobs of self-absorbed cellulose, hopeless invertebrate wads that could grow a spine if only they found use for one.

Maybe I’m being unfair. Maybe our jobs really do have meaning in and of themselves. Maybe George Osborne isn’t fuelled by orphan tears and it’s even possible that Adrian Chiles and the rest of TV land aren’t just a collection of gelatinous guff-wagons constructed of meat. But don’t worry about it, just distract yourself with more words.

As the disease assaults your ability to think or even dribble coherently, the modern office does little to treat symptoms. Constant reminders from HR flow in via email reaffirming our enthusiasm for the casual business Friday dress-code and advising us not to jump from the east facing window because yesterday’s pile of mangled bodies hasn’t yet been cleaned up on account of the impossible-to-reach pigeon corpse. Whatever they bleat about it’s always in the distant language usually reserved for passive alarm voices who alert you to danger in an unnervingly calm tone. By specialising the function of the individual’s job we have become more and more divorced from the purpose of the work we do, so it’s no wonder we’re perpetually left unable to explain our jobs to relatives or friends.

Graduates are forced to fight to the death in gladiatorial combat for the chance to win an unpaid role as junior deputy assistant to the intern in some useless consultancy firm, or worse they become unthinking phone monkeys in firms with indoctrination programmes that would give the US Army a hard-on. Those without qualifications are converted into compost to grow, whilst those in jobs too long are quietly bumped off in the night by obtuse phrases such as “regrettably unforeseeable internal restructures” so they’re heaped on the cat-shit mountain as well. Our purpose in employment becomes harder to find, our days flow by in an uneasy wave of tedious confusion and we leave the office without a thought in our heads except for the rush of relief afforded by brief respite.

In a sleep-deprived stupor we’re driven to distraction, urgently seeking anything to ease our minds. It’s all there waiting for us, from kittens decorated by the mentally infirm to the online equivalent of the Dulux colour range told through pornography. And what’s more, the great benevolent dictator of the internet is only too willing to oblige us. With the frantic scurrying of a crack-addled banker trying to hide a hooker’s body we crave any blockade we can erect between the reality of the situation and the collective lie that we all buy into, known colloquially as ‘satisfaction’.

The disease of modern living is the catalysed onset of delusion, the belief that things actually aren’t that bad and that perhaps we ought to be thankful for what we have. This belief drags itself with us, a parasite on our bedraggled carcass shuffling from the tube to the bus to the sweat-stained pavements only to moor up in a desolate port with the TV on, our minds switched off and the glum cyclical nature of the horror pushed out of sight for another day as our eyes close and it’s all over.

In short, I’m becoming one of the idiots. Soon you’ll be like us, begging for distraction from the endless flurry of miseries and injustices that make up human existence. London has succeeded in dumbing me down with its isolating cost of living, alienating social conduct and the beckoning appeal to those who value money, prestige and job title über alles. We try to avoid how unfair it all seems with copies of Time Out and the latest in pop-up restaurants that only serve suffocated gelatine in plant pots and where all the cutlery is emblazoned with the face of Noel fucking Edmonds. Now I even have their haircut. It might get me a promotion.

At this rate I’ll max out a credit card on paper doilies this time next year, bragging to middle-management about the spacious depths of my new living room and how much light the bay window lets in whilst fiddling with a selfie-stick, all the time wondering why no-one can use a word of more than three syllables.

Unless we treat this disease swiftly, that is. Prognosis: amputate at the neck and leave my headless cadaver on the window ledge of a skyscraper where no-one can clean me up.

Duravit

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It’s stamped on the divider between two urinals: Duravit. Purveyors of bathroom porcelain, presumably. They must wake each morning with the pride of a thousand New Horizons engineers.

The word has come to symbolise everything I hate about my current existence, because these urinals are at the office I’m tethered to and every time I see the word I’m filled with the pain and sadness of millions of voices suddenly crying out in terror, and being suddenly silenced by some fucker saying “I’ve booked room 2 for our 10.30”. Someone could flash the word Duravit at me on a piece of paper walking down Charing Cross Road and the spirit of Pavlov would likely make me grab the nearest rifle from our freshly armed ‘terror cops’ and spree myself into the Guinness Book of Records, before leaping in front of a number 24, urinating throughout.

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Richard

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We need to talk about Richard. You don’t know him, and I know you don’t know him because next to nobody does. There is little to no possibility that he has any friends, because the mere idea of Richard having friends is as absurd as the idea of a politician not grimacing and quivering in disgust when told they have to go and meet their constituents.

Some background perhaps, since it’s now established that you don’t know Richard. I work with Richard, much to my disdain, and he is without a doubt the most boring, useless, and pathetic arsehole on the planet. He joined the office I work in late last year and it was clear from the start that there was something iffy about him. He’s old and out of touch, which can be charming in some people, like your ever so slightly feeble grandmother who sits by amazed as you pull up a picture of a pot of jam on your laptop computer.

Richard, however, is not like your hypothetical grandmother. He does something that takes him out of that category and into his own separate place that just makes you want to sigh at his pitiable attempts to join in: he tries to be relevant.

Case in point: another work colleague and I were having a conversation about music fidelity, talking about recording techniques (he has a degree in acoustics, and I am a budding musician), and getting the best sounds for different instruments. It’s quite an exclusive conversation, sure, between two people in a small office of about five people at that point, but we’re not intentionally leaving anyone out. We’re not talking loudly, or interrupting anyone else’s conversation. Everyone else is glued to their laptop screens while us two talk. And then Richard, who has been sitting in the room with us the entire time, gets called to another room, and as he leaves, utters, “So long as you have an OK computer for all that!” I look at my colleague with a look of confusion, and look back at Richard and say nothing more than “Ummm…”

“You know, the Radiohead album!” he clarifies. “Oh…”, I say, like I get it. I hope it makes no sense to you, because it makes no sense to me. When he leaves, everyone else in the room peeks up from their screens, shooting a look of confusion. I mean, what the actual fuck has that got to do with anything we were talking about? Evidently he was trying to be funny, but it’s a joke so grossly misplaced that I still sit confounded when I think about the whole exchange. But worse still, he was trying to be relevant, namedropping Radiohead like he knows they are cool with the kids these days. He might as well have just tried to start rapping an Eminem song in full tracksuit gear and backward baseball cap, and have embarrassed himself completely.

Richard doesn’t really know how to communicate, and it’s not some social anxiety disorder; he’s just such a boring fuck that he has nothing to add to anything, ever. He once posed one of the most idiotic questions I have ever been asked. I was relating to another colleague (because I never actually talk to Richard, unless I’m feeling particularly masochistic and wanted to be bored to the point of pain) that I sometimes partake in swing dancing. After said colleague left the room, Richard piped up and queried, “Swing dancing? What kind of music do you do that to?” Thinking it was a joke, I deliberately paused, waiting for him to interject and exhale that loathsome chuckle he does when he thinks he’s done something ever so clever. There was no response, so trying my best to hide my amazement at his brainfart of a question, I responded, “…swing music” with a hint of disbelief at the fact I was answering such a question. I did not talk to him anymore after that.

It’s not just the inanity of the words that come out of his mouth, it’s his mannerisms, which are so very, very annoying. He types on his laptop loudly, like he’s penning a sarcastic letter. He sticks around in the office for hours, even if he’s allowed to go home early, just to eat sandwiches that are served to us, nabbing all the ones he likes, of course. He also drinks an absurd amount of tea. Last week he drank seventeen cups of tea in a day. Seventeen. And not even respectable tea like Earl Grey or Assam – shitty builder’s tea with way too much milk. Oh, and every time he takes a sup he makes an audible slurp, like a child drinking soup for the first time, followed by a tiny, satisfied “ahhh!” By my calculation that averages about 20,000 slurps and ahhhs a day, or at least it feels like that. I’m not a violent man, and I’ve never wanted to punch a man for simply drinking tea, but oh how Richard tempts me so.

He’s also a rat, telling the boss about one of my aforementioned colleagues using his equipment incorrectly, thus getting him fired – and all because Richard was evidently jealous this other guy was getting more work than he was. Everyone in the building finds him weird, and sometimes they proclaim relief (and joy) that they’re working with me on a project and not “that weirdo”. They also come and sit with me in another room, just so they don’t have to sit with Richard.

In the rare instances I somehow get obliged to have a (always very brief) conversation with Richard, he tries to tell me about his weekend and the like. He talks about how he met a friend for a drink, but I laugh internally as the idea of him actually having friends. This is how I know you don’t know Richard, because it’s impossible that anyone with an ounce of sense or self-worth (which, dear reader, I assume you have) would want to be around such a grimy, measly being.  There’s no way anyone would want to actively spend time with such an inconsequential person, someone who adds as much to a social setting as parsley does to any meal.

Splattering the monitor

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A lot of big issues upset me, which I think is a sign of sanity. Yet I now wonder whether my riotous fury can occasionally be misguided after a recent visit to the toilet in my office building. You see, it has a dispenser of single sheets of shiny paper masquerading as toilet roll. Fuck the beheadings and retaliation bombings, this is an absolute disgrace.

These single square sheets are fucking ridiculous. The dispensers are usually gigantic and situated at such a height you have to bend down whilst attempting to gracefully use facilities, so your face is far too close to a floor that you know is covered in pubic hair and menstrual flickage.

If you feel frugal or environmental, you will pull a single sheet. A sheet that barely covers your arsehole and disintigrates within one foot of water. With echoes of “for fuck’s sake” coming from stall to stall, the sound of a hamster on a wheel begins as you all pull as many sheets out as you can. No matter how many times you pull you’ll either get two (pointless) or fifty, enough to clog any toilet.

With the wadge gathered after an hour of tugging, you then have to try to crumple or fold (if the advert is true) the paper into a mesh that wont rip if you try to use it. Flimsy loose leaves of it trickle onto the floor, either sticking to the unknown substance around the panty liner bin, or just under your shoe. No matter how many times you gather the paper, you never feel sanitary.

As everyone knows, toilet roll is also the safety net for the sudden office cold. Sitting in these germ ridden places full of martyrs dragging in their kids’ latest phlegm-intensive disease, you will at some point find yourself rushing to the emergency tissue supply. These dispensers of evil barely cover a nostril, and any blowing will just burst through, splattering the monitor.

Meanwhile the infested turn up with boxes of Aloe Vera soft tissues that don’t rub the skin from your nose like sandpaper. Will they share? Will they fuck. Instead you turn into an advert for cocaine abuse as your septum cracks and bleeds. How can this paper be so harsh yet totally useless at actually mopping up solid or watery substances?

I sometimes attempt to study this paper when seeking peace from meetings. Sitting in the toilet I hold the paper to the light, poke it, stretch it, yet I cannot determine exactly what this element is. It certainly isn’t paper in any traditional sense. It has nothing in common with pulped wood, papyrus, newspaper, even the beautiful Andrex you can only dream of.

As a poor student I used to relieve toilets of their spare loo rolls. This ‘eco-friendly paper’, seemingly the result of boiling plastic bags in battery acid, defies such support for the poor. If you handed it to a homeless person they’d shank you, and rightly so.

As much as I understand the underhand tactics to reduce our arseholes sucking up paper as we work, surely there must be another option? Even just a slightly bigger leaf of paper would be enough. Then again, that would probably quadruple an average company’s budget on what they can spare to keep their employees from self harming.

Busy times, busy people, busy minds

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A few days ago I encountered a homeless man near Moorgate Station. It was 1.30am or so, and I was there ’cause I’d completed a random shift at The Water Poet that day (7.5 pounds an hour for just collecting and washing glasses, not bad). It was too late to take the Underground, and I don’t know shit about the buses, so I just got a little bit…lost. It was very dark, I was in a city I don’t really know in a country I’m new to, in a part of that city that was completely alien to me until that day and I was nervous as hell. It may seem ridiculous, but it certainly wasn’t a pleasant experience for me.

But let’s go back to the homeless guy.

He approached me very slowly, smile in his face – not a creepy smile, really, just a warm one – and probably cold to his bones. He talked to me with a very good British accent, using a polite way of speaking, with learned words. He was short, white bearded and very thin. He introduced himself, but apologized and didn’t give me his hand because it was “too dirty”, and then started to ask me if I could buy him some food at Sainsbury’s.

But then he stopped the talk, and frowned. He looked at me and asked if I was lost.

I smiled then and, of course, said “yes”. At this point he started to apologize again because he said he was putting his own problems above mine. He started to ask me what I needed, told me that he knew the bus system, all that kind of thing.

So, at that point, I sort of stopped listening to him. I knew that he’d help me for sure; of course, he had nothing better to do, and helping me could result in a grateful person with money in his pockets. So, instead of listening, I started to think about all the other people I’d approached myself, asking for help.

They numbered five, until the homeless guy showed up.

Two of them just told me something like “busy, sorry” as they walked by, phone in hand and with the same tired face I probably had on. One of them listened to me, but as he didn’t know the place where I live, he just told me that he couldn’t be of any help. The other two didn’t even reply to my “excuse me”.

And that, so far, is the one and only fucking crap thing that I hate about London. I won’t say “people are shit”, no; the main problem is our jobs. There’s always a lot more work that must be done, at all times, in all places. Talking about London is talking about busy times, busy people, busy minds. People tend to act cold because they’re just too tired to be anything else, and only fucking homeless people have the will to be kind or careful with strangers because, of course, they don’t have a job that’s draining their entirely lives out its bodies.

It’s hilarious.

I don’t know if I’m right or wrong. And of course, I can’t say that every homeless person and every random worker is exactly like this, but the truth is that I got home that night because that guy helped me, and the others just didn’t have the time needed to even listen to my words. It was very sad. I thought of it all the way home, and not in a good mood. It all seemed sad as hell.

And yes, I bought food for the guy.

The Start-Up of You

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Quick tip for book lenders: unless someone has asked you to borrow the book, they don’t want it. They’ll probably accept it, because they don’t want to insult you or your reading habits. But they’ll resent you for it, because when they get home, it will sit in the corner, looking at them for weeks, and making them feel guilty for not having started it yet. If you begin asking them questions about it, like “Did you get a chance to read it yet?” they’ll start avoiding you like you have Ebola or something. This will be your fault.

Eventually, out of guilt and resentment, they will return the book and say they ‘couldn’t get on with it’. What they mean is, they haven’t looked at it, and never intended to. Let that be a lesson to you.

Anyway, the other day, a well-meaning friend lent me a book. Actually, it’s my own fault. Since I complain about my job all the time, sometimes well-meaning friends get the funny idea that it’s a cry for help of some sort, and not just my favourite pastime, and they offer suggestions or advice about shifting jobs or careers, unaware that for me, shifting careers has about the same appeal as selecting coffins does for someone on Death Row.

This book was called ‘The Start-Up of You’, a title which manages to combine all the things I hate about modern publishing, or actually life, in a pithy and disgusting four-word phrase. Well done. The subtitle was: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career.

Transform Your Career? Transform it into what? What are they talking about? Naturally, I was terrified, and threw it in the corner. Later on, sheer morbidity prompted me to pick it up and browse the contents page. The first chapter was called “All Humans Are Entrepreneurs”. What? Was this book written by an alien? Or are there other species on Earth who can read now? I continued. Later chapters developed the theme: “New World of Work”, “Strengthening Risks”, “Structure and Maintain Your Network”, and so on.

I’m sure you are getting the gist. The gist is, the world of work isn’t what it used to be. Gone are the days when you left school and cosily snuggled up under the protective wing of a large and benevolent enterprise, who would pay you a steadily increasing salary, plus healthcare and pension, as you moved inexorably up the escalator. These days, wages are stagnant, add-ons cost extra and, where once you could confidently say, ‘the world will always need customer service subscriber managers’, now things are not quite so predictable. Quite frankly, an answering machine could probably do your job better than you, and next week it probably will.

The keyword now is ‘flexibility’. The Start-Up of You teaches you how to think and act like an entrepreneur, all the time.  The usual examples are trotted out: that wanker who started Facebook, and look how rich he is, and what about Fuckface who invented that app nobody likes but everybody uses? How did Fuckface get to start his Fortune 500 company? Why, by exploiting his network, you imbecile. There are many other similar examples. You have to be thinking creatively, pivoting constantly, and if you do nothing, then a career tsunami is going to come along and sweep you out into the street where you’ll be eating cat food out of bins for the rest of your life, and you’ll deserve it.

The whole prospect, of course, is designed to terrify. Nothing sells like total fear, and for those of us (like me), who spent the first thirty years of life just  getting over the trauma of being alive, and never bothered about career until it was too late, the prospect of having to suddenly build network intelligence and navigate career opportunities is pure gothic horror. Already, in my reasonably steady, horrible job, I spend a fair amount of time with my hands resting on the keyboard, staring out of the window thinking, “What the fuck am I doing? What the fuck am I doing?” over and over again. In the past we were allowed to be quietly but complacently miserable. Those days are gone.

Back in the old days, you sold your soul to a company, but at least when you’d put in your working hours they let you alone, to go home and watch TV or something. Now, unless you bounce out of bed with fifteen different ideas about how you can maximise your skill set and generate career opportunities, you are basically a slacker, an old-world caveman who deserves to be swept away in the tsunami.

The world of work, formerly contained in offices and factories, has come spilling out into the streets and cafes, where hipsters line up their identical Macbook Pros and develop their profiles. Work follows you home like some blob from a 1950s horror movie, and it sits in your house, making you feel guilty for watching TV instead of expanding your network. TV is no escape. Everyone is at it on every channel – thinking like an entrepreneur. Christ, round me, even the beggars have been reading The Start-Up of You. They used to just beg. Now they all have a sideline in selling stolen books or doing performance outsider art. Soon they will be asking me to endorse them on LinkedIn for smelling of piss and drinking K cider. What chance have I got?

The Start-Up of Me makes an executive decision. I decide to place The Start-Up of You in an out-of-the-way spot where it can languish for enough time so I can give it back to my friend. Later on, I will tell him it was interesting in parts but I couldn’t really get on with it. I enjoy a horror story as much as the next guy, but some things are just too awful to contemplate.

Shot, beheaded or barbecued

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I have to admit I don’t generally keep up with the news. It’s not that it’s too depressing – the truth is, I’m too depressing, and the news just can’t keep up with me. It just constantly reminds me how much better everyone else in the world’s life is.

Unless, that is, you’re unlucky enough to be getting shot, beheaded or barbecued by ISIS. This is a terrorist outfit that simply must win PR firm of the year, or it’s all a big fix, since it’s got every media outlet in the west doing its recruiting for it. There now surely can’t be a single person in the west that isn’t aware that despite sounding like a trustworthy car hire firm, these are the last people whose car you want to get into.

What I have understood about ISIS is that they want to establish a caliphate, or Islamic state, where their particular version of what God, who may or may not be Santa Claus, may or may not have said to someone 1,500 years ago, will reign supreme. The obvious first step to achieving this goal is to wipe out the group of people whose beliefs most closely align to theirs, but who differ on certain technicalities, such as whether to throw overarm or underarm when stoning people to death. After that, they can take on the really big job, which is killing everybody else in the world. Okay, sounds perfectly reasonable – where do I get my membership card?

Politicians are desperately try to stem the evil tide. I heard David Cameron on TV calling it a ‘death cult’. Sorry, Dave – a ‘cult’ is a phenomenon or movement with strictly minority appeal – like the Conservative Party for example. Current estimates have ISIS membership at around 200,000 (though not all of them filled in their census forms on time), while the Conservative Party is reckoned to have around 150,000 members these days. That means that significantly more people would rather die in the desert than join the Conservative Party. What an endorsement. Has anyone seen George Osborne lately?

Well, who can blame them really? It is, of course, all about a search for meaning. And the meaning is: killing people is really fun. Nobody who’s played Call of Duty would argue with that assessment. Who wouldn’t want to have a go on an M79 rocket launcher, when the alternative is standing in a queue in the Jobcentre Plus with your P45 job launcher, to be asked by an even bigger failure than you exactly how many call centre positions you’ve applied for this week?

Well, I’m just keeping my head down, on, together, whatever – I’m basically staying as far away from those mad bastards as possible, and if I have to claim asylum in China eventually to escape the screaming hordes of global retribution, then so be it. Anything is better than Tory Britain.

Another five hours mate

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Money really does fuck everything up, and not always in the way you think. As people in the western world beat each other senseless in shopping centres for the right to buy that last cut-price giant TV for someone who already has a giant TV, I’ll be getting screwed by money in a wholly different way.

Someone has offered me a job for more money than they should have, and I’ve said yes. My fault, obviously. Applied for a job by accident and the bastards went and gave it to me.

The reason this website exists is because I’m keen to demonstrate I and other like-minded people don’t need office jobs to make a crust – just tell us what to write, we’ll decide where to write it, and we all win. But sometimes an idiot – most frequently the British government in my case – will say “Please sit in my little box doing half a day’s work over the course of a fortnight and I’ll pay for your next holiday to St Kitts, Nevis, or both, plus spending money”.

So here I am, sitting in a government box. Furious with myself for having betrayed my aim of doing a whole year without an office job. I’ve missed it by four days. Four remarkable days in which the man whose job I’ll be taking over in the new year, for at least three months, has explained to me that there’s not only loads and loads to do, but he’s also done most of it himself already, and there’s an almost infinite amount of time remaining to do the tiny amount that’s left.

Here I’ll sit, day after day, thinking of the money, hating myself more and more. Pissing people off moaning about it because they all have office jobs already and don’t see the problem. If I have an office job I don’t see why you shouldn’t too, goes the argument. A similar type of egotistical reasoning could well explain the spread of Ebola.

There are positives; there always are. The job’s in a superb location – Fleet Street, in the heart of my favourite part of my favourite city on Earth. Surrounded by venerable buildings, the river nearby, just about every route to everywhere within easy walking distance.

The people are very nice, as far as I can tell. It’s an office, so occasionally I have to laugh indulgently at humour a child would scorn, but these are friendly people. Not much by means of potential pub comrades, but you can’t have it all.

I’m a bog-standard heterosexual man, and there are more women to look at than there tend to be in my flat. With a nod to headlines agitating that technology is turning infants into filth-hungry fiends who see each other as nothing but objects to insert each other into, my time working at home has made it tricky not to see a shapely female trudging the corridors of the workplace without wondering how she might eat a banana. And it seems I’m no longer trained to hide that natural instinct, much to the very obvious displeasure of the recipient and, imminently, HR.

And as I may have mentioned, the pay’s all right.

Sadly none of these plus points matter a jot when you consider the same journey every day, the same seat at the same desk every day, the same faces, the same conversations, the same set of eight unendurable hours spent doing the same shit that just doesn’t need to be done here. It needs to be done, maybe, though even that’s questionable. But it does not need to be done here.

Here, which is hotter than a Moroccan’s armpit by about midday and yet still there are people wearing coats complaining it’s Baltic. Here, where every purposeless meeting is attended by eight people; one person talking, one taking notes they’ll never, ever look at again, and six embodiments of hatred wishing a fiery death on the name at the top of the agenda.

Here, where a man places a spittle-laden ball of paper over his computer screen’s clock each morning, removing it only when the strain gets too much for him and he simply must know how much longer he has to be here. Another five hours mate. This man spent days hanging on the telephone after his interview, waiting to find out if he’d got this job, and was thrilled when he did.

I’m doing this for the money, despite being one of the least ambitious or avaricious people you’re likely to meet, because I couldn’t justify not doing it given the boost it’ll give the bank balance, and because rounds don’t buy themselves. I like to think I’ll do this for the initial three-month contract and then quit, go back to a life of relative freedom, limitless creative outlets and stoutly defended mental health. It’s hardly an easy life, spending hours every day trying to eke out small monies from huge amounts of good quality work that nobody will ever read, but it’s life.

It’s an uncertain, often worrying existence, but it makes me smile wistfully to think it was my existence this time last week. Then on my very first day in this job I was told “there’s probably years of work here if you want it”, and freedom seems so far away from me there’s probably a NASA probe about to find methane on it.

It’s the ‘here’, not the ‘work’. I will do a sterling job for you people; I always have in every job I’ve had. I’m not one of those chancers who clocks in, does the absolute minimum, badly, and clocks out again, even though my having written this in work hours might suggest otherwise. I take pride in a job done well. Just pay me half as much and let me do it from where I want – can’t say fairer than that, can I?

But how can we have meetings? How can we check you’re not just sitting there beating off to work permits and Chinese visa literature? How can we justify our existence to you if you can’t even see us toil?

Voluntarily back in the rat race. Five days a week for as long as I can take it. And this time it’ll either make me rich or dead.