I have been less sprightly and in-the-pink of late than I would have wished. So I am now Officially Eating Healthily and, terrifyingly, Cutting Down on Coffee. Today’s caffeine intake amounts to one (1) cup of tea. Oh, and decaff filter stuff. But decaff not only does not count as coffee, it anti-counts, I swear. Each cup is draining a little more life-blood from me. Therefore, my notes for this entry so far resemble a ‘this is your brain on drugs’ poster. Shall I just wing it, and see where we end up? [and how would this differ from your usual method of working? - Ed]
Not all of us can sit at a desk in the spare room crafting prose all day. Or even some days. Or even one day a week. Pets, offspring, spouses, all demand unreasonable great chunks of our time. And the spare room probably has kids/ guests/ boxes/ no coffee facilities in it. And then the weekend is over. Now, I can’t help you if you’re a neurosurgeon or a delivery-van driver, but if you work in an office, you really do have the time to write a novel. Yes you do. OK, so you can’t join NaNoWriMo and do it in a month, but really, neither did Charles Dickens and he damn well tried. And he was allowed to throw people out of the spare room all day long. So let us turn to the resources your average office is laden with:
1) The desk bunny’s kingdom. Look at all the lovely writery things you have at your desk. Isn’t it great? I myself have five biros, two pencils, a propelling pencil, a magic marker, three sorts of post-it note, a spiral-bound jotter and a big A4 pad of lined paper. I have seen people cosying down with fountain pens, fancy rubbers [Ahem - erasers to our Transatlantic friends. Or this could be seriously mis-read. - Ed] hard-back notebooks, ledgers and even sketch-pads. And, get this, you are supposed to write with these. And doodle. And draw pie-charts. If your school was in the least modern and up-to-date you will have mastered the art of having truly horrible hand-writing, so who is going to know you are actually planning how to murder a senator with a quoit at an orphanage fund-raiser? Who will decipher the scribbled account of sweaty adultery in a church pew while the vicar is dusting in the vestry? Well, hopefully you will, because turning absent-mindedly to a colleague and saying, ‘I can’t read this, is it anything to do with the meeting we had last week?’ will at the very least make next week’s meeting ever so hilarious for everyone else. So do it. Write. All those hours you wasted doodling or attempting work-e-mail composition in advance will be your alibi. If your hand-writing has degenerated beyond any sort of comprehensibility, or if you simply happen to be the typing kind, you can write yourself documents on your oh-so-kindly-provided-by-the-Management computer. This has the drawback of also being more legible to nosy colleagues who were never taught that standing silently behind a chap’s chair while he types is not. Good. Manners. But it does look even more like work than using a pen (why?) and anyway if you litter the screen with windows and clatter about between them a lot you stand a higher chance of a) looking busy and b) foiling the Nosy One. Or e-mail. E-mail is good. You can e-mail yourself with ’stuff to work on this weekend’. This has the added bonus of being perfectly true, and the added added bonus of seriously impressing your boss.
2) Enforced doughnut consumption. Everything I said about notebooks, post-its and jotters holds true for meetings. In fact, if you are actually writing things down in a meeting, you will unnerve everyone else and suddenly the whole thing will be rushed through in jig-time, allowing you to get back to your desk and transcribe your fabulous new haikus before home-time. Nota bene, if you are supposed to be writing in the meeting, because you are minute-taking, do NOT try and do it in haiku form, no matter how aesthetically pleasing the result. Your boss has less of a sense of humour than you might like to think.
3) Cowering the professional way. There will be times, however, when privacy is harder to come by, and your desk will not be the safe haven it ought to be. Perhaps your incarnation of the nosy colleague is actually your line-manager. Perhaps the office is a little too open-plan. You need to hide. The lavatory is traditional, and therefore to be shunned at all costs. Apart from the issues of hygiene, odours, lack of anything to lean on while you write, other people actually needing to use the lavatory and the embarrassment of having concerned colleagues asking if you’re alright, it smacks far too much of endless dreary school lunch-breaks and subterfuges to get out of Games. Be brave. Yes, the lavatory is lockable, but shun it anyway. Even the tea-room is better, though spending more than fifteen minutes at a time in there is awkward to explain away. The best, the very best trick, for hiding from one’s boss is to stride briskly about the building with a stack of paper-work. Make sure it contains a good mix of spreadsheets, hand-written jottings and things with letterheads. Try to catch the eye of any passer-by. Take your pile to colleague’s desks and ask to borrow a calculator. Look panicky. Mention your poor head for figures. They will flee from you. Even those that sometime did seek you.
Next week we will be covering the even more important topic of how to day-dream at work. Now, if you will excuse me, I am going to humiliate myself by being caught licking the packet the last lot of proper coffee came in. Kids! Drugs! Just say no!
