My car ate my homework

Christ on a bike I should have just run out of here when I had the chance this morning and all the management team were in a meeting. There are millions of them about today, we’ve got the full regalia of managers and supervisors in my department, plus visiting managers from other offices and even the CEO popped in earlier! They might as well be patrolling with machine guns at this rate. I ran out of work to do at approximately 10am today. I have been vigorously thumb twiddling since then and stupidly thinking I could find something else to do. That was both a pointless and fruitless task and now here I sit at 1.38pm still with nothing to do. Even lunch time has been and gone and still no work has materialised. I have checked the book of face, my emails, my bank account, some friends blogs…I am running out of things to do that aren’t work based as well.

I have other places I could be you know, other far more interesting and exciting places where there are better distractions and times to be had. Places where I could be spending my time more productively rather than sitting staring at my computer screen and flicking between my outlook and databases to see if anything might have changed in the last 20 seconds. So why didn’t I cut and run this morning? Why did I just think “sod it, life’s too short and I’m too bored” create some wild excuse and take a sharp exit stage right? Because for some crazy and unfathomable reason I appear to have a conscience when it comes to work. Why, why, why? Where did I pick this deadly disease up from? I know I ran out early on Friday but that’s a Friday afternoon and I’d practically worked a whole day anyway (there’s my justification for it) and it would have been different to run out at 10am. But this morning when the thought crossed my mind that I could go for the day this pesky little elf sat on my shoulder telling me that maybe this wasn’t the right thing to do, maybe Moody would need me for some urgent work today, maybe I shouldn’t ‘rob’ my employer of my time.

SHUT UP ELF!

Someone who doesn’t appear to have this problem/elf when it comes to work commitment is CJ. She was late in again this morning for a change and Kirstie and I are now starting to tott up the excuses she has for when she is tardy. This morning she rushed in at 11.15am whimpering something about a car crash on the motorway. I ignored her – as I normally try to – but Andre wheeled herself over immediately keen for the gossip and drama. What had happened was that in slow traffic (you know, the start, stop kind) on the motorway on her way in CJ had gone into the back of someone when she wasn’t concentrating or possibly eating a banana or doing her accounts for Q1 at the wheel. The other car was fine but hers was a bit, well, fucked and she still decided to drive all the way to work anyway. It’s currently parked up in the car park behind my office and she keeps pointing it out as evidence even though you can’t see the damage from here.

I should feel sympathy for CJ, she’s all shaken up and has practically written off her car (apparently) but it’s a little bit too familiar to me. I mean her car has been an excuse for her lateness on a number of occasions – the headlights have gone, she’s pranged it in the ice, she needed to get the MOT, a new tyre etc etc. Kirstie is sure the ‘accident’ excuse has been used before and it may well have been done. Now she is in she spends the first hour explaining the accident and that she has to wait for the recovery people to tow it to anyone who will listen, I even catch her in the kitchen telling the reception ladies while I’m getting my sandwich. Then she calls up some guy in the legal department who drives in from the same neck of the woods as her (and somehow manages to get in for 8am every day – amazing, how does he do it? What’s that? He gets an early night and then gets up early to miss the rush hour?! Genius!) and asks for a lift home. Turns out he is leaving at 4pm so she’ll be heading off then too. Well she will have been in the office for at least 5 hours at that point, she’ll be tired bless her. Ever heard of something called public transport CJ?

Finally after lunch she turns to me and says “Oh I won’t be in tomorrow”. Right. Why’s that then? “Well I had this accident this morning…” I cut her off quickly telling her I am aware of this as she has relayed the story to everyone who has come to her desk or called her today. So her insurance company are providing a replacement vehicle, as they do and they’ll only deliver it to her home not her work address so she now has to wait in for it “and who knows when it will show up!” Handy for you CJ, another day off of work? Well it is unlike you not to be in the office.

I’m amazed she can get away with shit like this all the time. I wouldn’t be so flabbergasted if she didn’t do it all the time and this was a rare occurrence. If she’s not sick, it’s snowing, and she can’t work from home because she’s poured water all over her laptop or she can’t get out of bed because she’s tired or she’s had a dingle in her car, I’m interested to hear the next round of excuses. Perhaps she could have a ‘family emergency’ or lock herself out of her house or have a gas leak or be held hostage by gunmen or have a hospital appointment or prang her car (oh no, sorry she already did that didn’t she?) or get abducted by aliens or lose her sight or get lost on the way to work or stuck on a plane in Barcelona or get struck by lightening or loose a finger in a freak fun fair accident or was picked for the winter Olympics and is running late or lost her car keys and couldn’t possibly find her way to the train station or slept through her alarm or is starring in a West End comedy and has a matinee on a Thursday to attend or broke her mobile or her dog is sick or it’s Q1 and has a lot of paper work to do?

Kirstie and I are going to start up a spreadsheet of excuses and tick them off as she comes up with them. We might create some nice pie charts and diagrams from this information and maybe even categorise the excuses in to areas such as ‘car’, ‘house’, ‘act of god’. I will of course publish the results and they shall appear on the blog before then being submitted to the LSE. Actually that could be a good way to kill the 3 hours remaining of my work day….