Hello again my lovely little cupcakes,
It’s time for your bi-weekly dose of angry subversive drivel!
This is a story about being forced to sit in a dingy, depressing office wasting precious hours of your life doing repetitive pointless shit until your brain starts to melt and it dribbles out of your nose.
I have some exciting news to share with you very soon, so please stick with me and put up with my disjointed aimless rantings.
Thank you all for your time and for reading my work,
Gx
You can talk to me on all this mad pish:
http://www.facebook.com/thelitbeast
Email: [email protected]
A Pro-Active Golden Thought Shower
Now I’m sitting in my utilitarian, semi-ergonomic chair facing a flashing computer screen, as usual. I sit right next to the office printer so I am constantly bombarded with noise and the putrid smell of hot ink as it spews out pointless memos and emails and agendas and “humorous” intranet forwards that my colleagues insist on pinning to any notice board that has the misfortune and carelessness to be nearby. A nearly empty coffee cup sits by my hand, but I can’t even muster the strength to reach out for it. It’s probably cold now anyway. I am convinced that the clock in the bottom corner of my screen has been stuck at 3.51pm for at least half an hour and it is laughing at me. I am also sure that my standard-issue plastic office telephone is breathing and pulsating. My stomach is in knots and my left eye insists on twitching involuntarily; just to irritate me. I’m probably developing a brain tumour. How inconvenient.
A garish wooden picture frame stands by my poorly appointed workstation with the original, pre-packaged picture of an exuberant family on a beach in it. At the time I was trying to be ironic, but I realise now that it is only there so people at work think that I have some happy looking relatives who enjoy wholesome outdoor pursuits. My job is predictably unfulfilling, repetitive and involves crushing boredom. We design; manufacture and market medical supplies. I am a valued, motivated member of the team. I am a valued, motivated member of the team. I am a valued, motivated member of the team.
Our most successful product is a self-monitoring device used for testing the blood sugar levels of diabetics. I find it hilarious that our best-selling product is designed for stabbing people and drawing blood. As you can imagine I am under stimulated, my talents are being wasted and I fulfil every tired cliché of a frustrated office worker. I can actually feel my brain cells dying. My gums bleed from too much sugar and caffeine and my nails are bitten and ravaged so they are ugly and red and wounded.
This is the epitome of a modern workplace and people use empty and meaningless phrases like ‘proactive’, ‘group brainstorming’ and ‘blue sky thinking’. These are terms invented by liberal-minded men in reasonably-priced, wool blend suits who drive economical cars, read the Guardian and are faithful members of the Caravan Club. We are always subject to the tyranny and self-righteous judgment of the bearded cardigan wearers. They intersperse everyday conversations with sentences such as ‘Let’s strive to set our target priority parameters for this project’ or ‘Shall we employ the strategy canvass managerial technique to this challenge’. They are so shit-scared of offending anyone or, god forbid, sounding like they are trying to get anything done. And of course the operative word in this phrase is ‘challenge’ since this is a preferred euphemism in place of ‘problem’ which portrays a negative image of a situation to our peers, our contemporaries, our colleagues and our co-workers. What a load of pish.
Within these antiseptic walls, you can be cushioned from harm within the self-contained confines of your poorly-ventilated workstation. You are a drone. Devoid of identity and personality, deprived of innovation, with appropriate, but not comprehensive health and safety measures, exemplary equal opportunities legislation and emblematic charter mark awards. Ultimately, this creates a nice, productive little time-bomb where we can replicate more men in reasonably-priced suits, who read the Guardian and eat organic vegetables.
Please continue this pattern until you get so nauseated and frustrated you develop the strong and persistent desire to leave your tastefully furnished apartment one morning and go to your place of work with a freshly sharpened axe in the boot of your economical, low emissions, reduced carbon footprint utility vehicle. Or at the very least you tightly clench your jaws and cry yourself to sleep on your 380 thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets with the dancing images of your co-worker-associates lying bleeding life onto the polished wooden floors. Please remember Reductio Ad Absurdum are not just pretty words my darlings, this is the unbridled elation and ecstasy of office life.
So, shall we give a Strategic Overview at this stage, or would Sir like to refer to the Executive Summary with some light refreshments? This convoluted process of apologetic smiles, gentile chuckles and ‘With all due respect Sir’ result in watered down, poorly formed and badly executed ideas that have been achieved through the magical, enigmatic and ineffectual machinations of the ‘Committee Decision’. What a triumphant rampage of collective thought and democracy in action, culminating in a profound and unifying mantra: No Risks. No Recriminations. No Results. Now lets all celebrate with an over-priced iced, skinny latte with cinnamon sprinkles from Starbucks. Jolly good show boys! Now let’s all go home and beat our wives since we feel emasculated because we have no job satisfaction and we haven’t climbed the ladder further than Junior Vice Executive of Foreign Industry and we can only afford an Audi instead of a Mercedes. Although these individuals can sleep easy in their beds of Scandinavian pine, safe in the knowledge that they have the added super-deluxe-golden-bonus-talisman of being made the Health and Safety Officer for their floor. That will be a good one to mention in the annual Christmas letter. Many fvcking thanks.
The wall next to me is gun-metal grey, just like everything else in the room. The fluorescent light above my head pings continuously and it is full of the carcasses of dead flies. Even the people around me are grey. Their faces are lined with stress and they complain they are tired, underpaid and at 2.37pm on a quiet Wednesday you can actually watch their self-worth draining through their hand, into their mouse and onto their screens. Their eyes are perpetually glazed over and there is no longer any laughing in the smoke-filled staff room. So much for the fvcking smoking ban. The woman opposite me is grossly overweight and when it is a hot day she sweats like a pig. She makes me feel physically sick. You are a drone. She is always stuffing her face with the latest superfruit she read about in a vacuous magazine.
She eats pumpkin seeds, reduced fat yoghurt, sun-dried mango and dehydrated platypus for all I know. Whenever she puts these healthy little morsels into her mouth she nibbles at them infuriatingly and the bits are constantly falling down onto her keyboard and she just leaves them there, getting stuck under the keys and gathering dust and mould. I sincerely hope that she is eating herself into an early grave. There have been numerous occasions when she has forced me to choke back the bile from the tip of my throat.
I recall one occasion when she was gorging herself on a packet of pistachio nuts and she spat out a shell drenched in her glutinous saliva. I nearly vomited into the recycling basket by my desk. I have to fight against every urge in my body not to reach across the desk and ram them down her disgusting fat throat and hopefully suffocate her with them. She insists on telling me about her children and her relatives who I have never met and that her eldest son had chickenpox and won’t stop scratching them and that he will end up with scars if he is not careful and that her cousin is doing really well since he started his mechanic apprenticeship 3 days a week and that he has managed to restrict his recreational drug use to the weekend and he hardly ever takes money from her bag when he is over, not like he used to anyway etc etc etc. It is scandalous that my precious sanctuary should be disturbed by her inane babbling and all I can do to assuage this verbal assault is grit my teeth, try to ignore her and give her the occasional ‘Mmhmm’ to convince her that I care about her fvcking inbred, degenerate children.
To pass the time I dig my nails into the low quality MDF of my desk and pick at the flakes and fibres that come off. In order to maintain my sanity for the next hour; I sign into my online email account and send another disturbing anonymous email around the office. They are becoming the talk of the daily coffee breaks and there are numerous theories as to the culprit of these peculiar and unsolicited communications. Of course I am the prime suspect since I have the tendency to sit with my paper companion in a secluded area and refrain from joining in the frivolous office chat about the latest celebrity couples and speculation about what overpaid cretin Arsenal United are currently trying to sign. I am the subject of vicious rumours anyway so at least this way I am giving them some fuel for the fire and bring a little flavour to their otherwise perfectly ordinary and generic lives. I am quite proud of my latest propaganda message; I believe it to be some of my finest work:
Your malignant suicide face sickens me.
Abortions and acid rain run through your veins.
Spineless shrines to a wooden womb.
Devotion to an exposed messiah.
With intricate, charged melodies.
With deranged, blood shot words.
It is statuesque, haunting and painful.
Choking on this artificial asphyxiation.
Resigned to a blade and nothing more.
The sun is gone and our eyes are bleeding.
This is the funeral silence.
This is the ungodly hour.
Black marble and the body of christ.
Black on white with white on black.
White on black with black on eternity.
They don’t really mean anything, but they seem to make people uncomfortable, so this gives me some limited enjoyment. I also massively enjoy sending emails from this account relating the shameful details of the Assistant Managing Director’s marital indiscretions to his beloved wife at her ethical and altruistic charitable organisation. I’m not entirely sure if she has read any of them or whether they have been filtered out by a caring and conscientious PA, but I love watching the ignition and conflagration of consternation on his face during his early morning personal calls, when he thinks no one is watching through the iridescent glass of his office/temple door.
He doesn’t even know I follow him down to Blythswood Square when he is surreptitiously picking up a hooker just like any other John with a 100k salary. Then I watch him as he takes them to the Radisson hotel in his big, shiny Mercedes and treats them to a night of champagne cocktails, debauchery and humiliation. He seems to like the young boys best.
She probably always knew, but she tries to deny it and tries to live her life in an echoing penthouse apartment in the Merchant City surrounded by pungent fresh, but dying Lily arrangements, with heart-rending Rachmaninov playing on the Bang and Olufsen. At least with the information I provide her she will hear it from an objective observer of the truth, rather than having to rely on her own intuition and the inferences she has made from his cold lack of affection and the occasional explicit magazine she has found secreted behind his golf clubs. I am fully aware they will eventually trace the IP address and I will get caught, but I really don’t care, this is the only entertainment I can derive from this chasm of monotony.
Then She walks in and She is excruciatingly beautiful, as always. She is an immaculately-dressed, intelligent and articulate beacon of unwavering light. I can feel Her radiant warmth. She is a goddess on a short pilgrimage across the office floor. I am convinced Her eyes meet mine for a transitory moment of rapture.
My celestial vision of Her blurs, vibrates and falters. She soothes the dark recesses of my soul and alleviates my suffering. She reduces the incomprehensible pressure behind my eyes and for once I can see clearly. She elevates my vision to a new plain of perfection, beyond the zeros and ones and bank accounts and spreadsheets and notepads, far beyond the ordinary and the generic. She grants me access to a transcendental world of ideal forms, where a myriad of unimaginable colours blend to create images of flawless beauty which have never before been comprehended by human eyes. Everything Her angelic fingers touch turns to fiery gold. We lie together and we become one symbiotic entity as our bodies entwine. The clocks stand still as we float inside our single, shared consciousness and bathe in our inalienable mutual understanding. She strokes my hair and my pain subsides. Everything is calm, serene, peaceful. Time is meaningless and irrelevant. It bends and breaks and disappears. Our minds and bodies are fused for an eternal moment of infinity. The chaos subsides. We look down and watch the stars shining in the undulating heavens. Universes burst into swirling life and then die in insignificance. Nothing can reach us. Nothing can touch us. Nothing.
There is always one in every office and she is mine, all mine. Even the material of her skirt moves through the air with grace and poise. I hate the people who look at her. I want to hurt the men who have unclean thoughts about her. I will leave them with nothing but bloody stumps. He doesn’t deserve her. He doesn’t understand her like I do. He doesn’t love her like I do. He doesn’t need her like I do. He has everything he could possibly want from life, sitting in his comfortable office sipping cappuccino and chilled sparkling mineral water. I am the only one that knows they sit across from each other avoiding each others gaze over a low carb dinner, unspeaking. Even now they exchange some detached, strained words. Only I can see her sadness.
She is pure and perfect and she makes my stomach ache. She has never been defiled by him. Her soft skin has never been raped by his callous touch. I remember once our hands touched when I was passing by, just so I could smell her sweet fragrance. So I could breathe her in. I could feel her electricity pulsing through me and I knew that she felt the same way. I know she can save me and guide me away from the seditious thoughts that contaminate my mind. She would understand my problems unlike anyone I have ever met and she could cleanse me of this virus and absolve me of my sins.
He has the vile audacity to cheat on her when I’m watching him. I see his deep breathing and his inexcusable atrocities. He betrays her with the sinewy, blue-eyed boys. He hurts her with the unclean things he does. He is a demonic, sub-human. I fvcking hate him and I will have my vengeance. His face fills me with white-hot fury and I want him to suffer the pain he causes her. I can taste his broken jaw bone and his black contusions. I will be her redemption and she will be my saviour.
And we will be together forever.
