Have a New Year (with my compliments)

Have a New Year!

If there’s one thing I hate more than people wishing each other Merry Christmas (and Carols by Candlelight rates a mention here too), it’s people wishing each other a Happy New Year.

The first few days back at work and all you hear is “did you have a good break?” and “happy new year” like anyone actually really gives a fuck.

How someone spent a few days off work for a while and then decided to come back is of little consequence to me personally. I imagine that in some circles it might be considered impolite to reply with “look, I couldn’t care less whether you lived or died,” but that sort of laconic honesty would no doubt see you meeting up with the HR manager for an impromptu conversation over “respect for the individual” or some other such American bullshit we’ve assimilated into our way of life.

Today’s modern office place has become a warzone albeit carried out beneath a thin veneer of feigned civility.  Although I haven’t actually watched it yet, had Game of Thrones been set in the 21^st Century I imagine it would not be too dissimilar to the travesty that unfolds in our office on a daily basis.

The modern workplace fosters a highly competitive environment where people would practically slit each other’s throats for a promotion but on the surface it’s all “team work” and “people are our most important asset” bullshit.

Fortunately, in our office we have one particular middle aged woman in a lower management position who I suspect is on some type of anti-psychosis medication, you know, the sort that keeps mentally unstable people barely connected to the real world in order that they may function in sort of model interpretation of an “ordinary person.”

She can fool some people some of the time, but having been blessed with a fairly keen insight into people’s personalities and idiosyncrasies, I can tell at a glance that’s she’s barely keeping it together.   By all appearances, she manages to carry herself off as might a middle aged librarian that’s dabbled fairly liberally in hallucinogens in her youth and is now operating in an office environment with what limited brain function she has left.

It would be unfair to single her out for ridicule simply because I found her bashing a bag of apples in the kitchen one day, or repeatedly slamming the kitchen door while calling it a “fucken cunt of a thing,” as we have other people in the office each with their own distinctive peculiarities.

But perhaps I’ll save those stories for another day.   But suffice to say, I haven’t dubbed one of them “Glenn Close” for no valid reason.