Look out upon the myriad harbour

This day started off weakly, my mood a bit off, and then some minor detail in a news story we’re publishing caught my eye and drew me further into my funk. The story uncovered all the ways in which people avoid work, particularly on Mondays, and how businesses were suffering because of this initial lag.

I find this Dickensian outing of unmotivated staff really depressing. It’s not enough that a job eats up huge chunks of your week and most of every day in between; now they want to forcibly squeeze every last drop of productivity you can reasonably muster in that suffocating timeframe.

Sometimes the only way I feel like I can keep walking in the direction of work rather than turning on my heel and walking straight back into bed is the notion that everyone feels the same fatigued apprehension about turning themselves on for another eight hour slog. Or most people do anyway. The rest saunter into their £100,000 per annum seats at 11 a.m., juggle their gaseous strategies and then have a four-hour lunch meeting about it.

Then maybe they’ll read that bit of news and furrow their brow and wonder how they can determine who in their organisation might be trying to cheat them of precious revenue.

As always, though, the motivation to actually care about your job is self-driven, and the only thing it’s driven by is a slow climb up the hierarchy and a promotion. What on earth am I doing here?

Earlier on Friday Films

A production company was filming a crowd shot along the South Bank this morning. They were making use of pedestrians heading to their various offices, indicating by way of a large sign that we should avoid looking directly at the camera whilst they were filming.

So I negotiated the narrow passage between a park bench and the filming camera, taking great care to avoid looking at the director. Part of me liked the idea that all I had to do to ruin their shot was turn around like some dumb asshole and smile into the camera. But an even bigger part of me wants to see my pill-balled black tights and crumpled a-frame skirt on a screen one day so that I can say, “Hey, that’s me! Well, part of me anyway.”

Just now

I looked down at my shirt and noticed some soup there. I said a bit petulantly “Nobody told me I had soup on my shirt.” Some random someone apologised and handed me a wet wipe. I guess I’m still in a bad mood.