Thursday, September 29, 2011

An approximation of a conversation I had with my boss

Boss: Tash, how are you with Excel?

Me: Um. Well, we used to have one, but we gave it to this friend of ours who lives in a commune. But I acutally don't have my driver's license, so...

Boss: ...

Me: We have a Subaru now.

Boss: (in the careful tones of one speaking to a possibly violent crazy person on the bus) No... Microsoft Excel.

Me: Oh. Um. I'm really good at it! (accompanied by an unconvincing rictus grin)

Boss: Great! Now, what I want you to do is (what followed was white noise. Something about currency conversions). Does that sound OK?

Me: No problem!

Now, you may be totally unsurprised to learn that I know nothing about Excel. I spent the rest of the day faffing around with a spreadsheet, getting ever more frantic as the hours ticked away and I had still made no discernible progress. Eventually I confessed all. My boss was slightly bemused, and showed me how to do what he was asking me to do. Which I promptly forgot, and today I had to do it all again and I was far too embarrassed to ask him for help again. 

By the end of the day today I was in the calm oasis that precedes having to demonstrate incontrovertibly that one is a total dipshit when my fellow woman employee walked past my desk. 'Oh', she said, after a quick glance over my shoulder, 'you want that to be like this'. A click and it was fixed. 

My boss was pleased.

I still don't know how to do whatever it is they're having me do with Excel.

How long can I keep up this deception? Tune in tomorrow to find out!

Hubris

It's been a while since I've posted anything here, mainly because I'd sort of lost interest in this whole thing. But now Jo is at some uni do, and the parental units have gone somewhere (who cares where? The important thing is that they aren't here), so obviously I am bored and my thoughts turn to writing something of great social and political import. 

Ummm.

Maybe I need to ease into this.

Here are some ducks that have been hanging out in the fields near my work;

Not pictured: adorable ducklings. They always hide when they see me coming.

Gosh, Virginia Woolf was right. You do need a room of your own if you are to write - if only everyone else would piss off for the evening more often. Now we're getting somewhere.

An update.

Things are good at the moment, which is probably also why there has been very little activity around here. This is my outlet for when I feel like I'm one strong drink away from obtaining a firearm and going on a killing spree. This is where I come to vent. And I don't really have anything to vent about at the moment. 

I like my job. The people are lovely and I like the actual work a lot. It's varied enough and busy enough that I'm rarely left with nothing to do. On Fridays we go to the pub and naughtily squiffy, then go back to the office to stare, glassy-eyed and headachy, at spreadsheets and order forms. There is regular cake, and there is a rumour that we may be about to get a Nespresso.

I'm healthier than I've been in my entire life. I go to pilates and kickboxing once a week, and I actually - brace yourselves - jog a couple of times a week. I'm fully vegan now, and don't drink except on weekends, and then nowhere near as much as I was when I was in my last job. And I feel great. The depression that has nagged me my entire life is sulking in the corner, just waiting for me to get lazy so it can swoop back in and make me miserable again. But screw that. I don't want to go back to wallowing-in-misery Tash. She's boring and sad. Exercising Tash is much more fun to be around. 

And all of this has turned out to be great timing, because I've just been invited to my ten year high school reunion (the horror, the horror). I thought about not going, but then I thought nah, fuck that. I'm happy, I'm proud of my life and where I am. I have nothing to be ashamed or emabarrased about (living with the parents notwithstanding). I'm going. Not in a showing off, look-at-me-now way, but with genuine good will. I'm curious to see what everyone else is doing with themselves. Who's married? Who has babies? Who's fat/skinny/much better looking/much uglier?

There are still some people who run a very serious risk of being on the wrong end of my new ability to roundhouse kick the crap out of anyone who cares to take me on. But I think I'll probably just try to avoid them and catch up with other people. 

Anyway, that's about it. Not much else really has happened, but that's the way I like it.

Thursday, September 15, 2011

Babies!

Not ours, calm down. 

But we do have two new gorgeous babies in the family, which has given me lots of opportunity to waft around baby shops, melting gently at the sight of all those teeny tiny little shoes (I'm not clucky, I'm just... starting to think that maybe having a baby of my own wouldn't be the worst thing in the world). One of the newly spawned humans is the first child for my oldest cousin and his wife, and the other is my uncle and his wife's third, and they are both absolutely adorable (the babies, not my uncle and his wife, though they can be quite cute as well). 

I dedicate my favourite Kurt Vonnegut quote to them;

Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you've got a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies - God damn it, you've got to be kind.