Dec 3, 2018
The Daily Blog #3
The apple-polishing early bird
I know that the daily blog title might imply that this is an everyday thing, but I’m kept buoyed up by two things. The first is that nobody is reading this — so it doesn’t matter, and the second is that I make the rules.
If I decide that I’m not going to do it one day, that’s fine. Things start, things stop. When it comes to the weekend, it becomes a matter of time. Do I want to spend it writing this? Do I have the time?
The answer on both counts, is no. Do I spend my time on the solitary, chin-scratching activity that writing presents, or do I spend time with my kid? My son wins everytime.
So, we’re back to the early morning train and me tapping words into a smartphone, after a weekend entirely free of those things.
The platform this morning is funereal. More so because it’s early, you can still see the upturned crescent of the moon and the stars and, for some reason, a UFO parked high above us, watching the bleary-eyed shuffle past one another and order coffee from the station kiosk. Probably a drone. Everything’s a drone these days.
I’ve come to the mainline station in the hope of getting to work early. I’ve set off half an hour earlier than usual.
Why? You ask. Am I trying to curry favour with the boss? Am I excited about the prospect of another day of existential purgatory?
No. I forgot something. The thing that I forgot, is the thing that I remembered on Saturday night, just before I got into bed. I then lay awake for hours, pissed off about it.
It was the subject of an irritating email that was sent to me on a Thursday afternoon, an email reminding me to set up a new starter for Monday morning.
The ill-feeling I hold for the sender and the general disdain I hold for the task of setting up IT equipment are what caused me to dismiss it and go back to whatever I was doing, but at this point anything I might say would sound like an excuse. Let me own this one: I simply forgot.
It’s not the first time either. I have arrived to the office in the past to find a fresh-faced stranger sitting at an empty desk and somebody asking me a question — the answer to which is obvious.
Did you set up so-and-so, like I reminded you? In that email? A week ago?
No. No I fucking didn’t.
There is a curious mixture of resentment and sympathy around the IT guy. He is, by design, a man on his own. Instantly forgettable. A man trapped in the menial labours involved with allowing you to do your job (the only job that really matters). He is just the facilitator. You’re sorry that you had to watch a grown man crawl under your desk to locate a spare socket. You want him to plug your computer in and then fuck off.
Perhaps that resentment is just around me. A guy that doesn’t want do his job. A guy who doesn’t want it so bad, that he ends up not doing it at all, and then he has to become an apple-polishing early bird to make up for it.
Sidenote: there’s no apple-polishing at my job. For the first year, I used to arrive half an hour earlier than everyone else and leave half an hour after everyone else had left. My thinking was that just like anyone else who has done this before me: my hard work will be noticed (and hopefully rewarded) by someone. Nobody noticed or gave a shit about it. So then I purposefully began taking the late train in, arriving ten minutes later than everyone else. After a week of this, I was told to “get here on fucking time, please.”
London Bridge. Not busy. Christ, I’ve got the worst headache. The weekend hangover. No alcohol consumed, just an over indulgence in all other things. Trying to fit a life into two out of seven days.
The funny thing about all this is that I’ll get in, I’ll spend five minutes setting up the computer for this poor chap, and then I won’t have anything else to do all day. That is the hope anyway. I’ll just be left alone to nod my head along to the sound of nothing while I read.
On Friday, I arrived home to find the living room filled with decorations, a two foot Christmas tree stood on my kid’s table, complete with fairy lights and a star. It’s not even December, yet.
My time for the decorating is as close to Christmas Day as possible. This has a lot to do with the penny-pinching antics of my parents, I think. They were always driving about in the freezing cold a day or two before Christmas trying to locate Christmas trees being thrown out for nothing.
It drove them a little mad, I think, to spend money on something that would take considerable effort to transport back to and carry into the house, would create nothing but mess for the time that it was there, and that they’d keep for a week and then throw out.
Weird to think back to that time. This generation - my generation, we’re poorer than our folks. The cost of living now means that I can’t think about buying a real Christmas tree. The true Christmas miracle is when I reach the end of the year and I’ve managed somehow to keep a roof over our heads yet again.
I don’t even know where I’d put an actual tree. Kind of odd if you think about it…cutting down a tree and bringing it inside your house. Better just to leave it outside. It’s alive out there.
Christmas is a gift in itself for my wife. She throws herself into it at a time when I’m shutting down for the winter. The spectacle is still a novelty for her, I think. She never had Christmas growing up. She disappeared for a few hours on Saturday and when she returned, there were cards all over the floor, each in the shape of a snowman, and she was there, decorating them. I thought she might have gone off for supplies, sustenance, something to tide us over for the winter months. Instead, there was a little snow globe on the table and some more (more!) fairy lights. She was applying glitter and felt buttons to the snowmen.
Putting glitter on something that will be thrown out by the receiver in January. I shudder at the unnecessary expense. My parent’s curse reflected in me.
An hour or so after that, and my kid is scrubbing the glitter off the cards, so that he can apply it to my face. He has already knocked the tree off the table twice, causing the angry cancellation of Christmas each time, and the disappearance of the plastic tree off upstairs, for repair.
I think I’m just glad to have a couple of people around who are at least preparing for the festivities in some meaningful way, people who can mask or throw attention away from my discomfort.
Maybe that UFO above the mainline station at dawn was Santa in his sleigh having a similar crisis. I imagine he’s had enough.
I’m ten minutes away from my date with an empty office, an ethernet cable and the back of an iMac, time to sign off.
God, this blog would be good if it was interesting.
Thank you, as always, for reading. The gift for me is that you found these words and they found you at some moment in time (due to the chaotic pace of modern life, it’s likely you were in a toilet stall somewhere, that’s okay, that’s just fine) and we shared a brief connection with one another. Please, always feel free to leave a comment and know that I will do my absolute best to respond.
