And finally, news broadcasts get even more frivolous

SHERMAINE WILLIAMS

A writer’s lot is a hard one. Why are you scoffing at the back? Well, I suppose it does all depend on the type of writing that one undertakes and how successful they are, but I reckon most writers are in the same boat.  

While everyone thinks that ‘writer’ means you’re getting paid like JK Rowling or Stephen King, the reality is often that a ‘proper’ job is also required in order to ensure the bills get paid. Oh yeah, this industry is all about the glamour.

One of the worst things about writing for (something of) a living is that switching off from work is like attempting to stop the wind from blowing. The laptop is always there no matter what you are doing, taunting you with its ability to travel ‘look at me—I’m portable!’

Leisurely lunches: the enemy of customer service?

ROSIE  MCGEE

You can hardly turn on the TV or open a newspaper without someone banging on about we’re losing the ‘work-life balance’. Apparently we work longer and harder than lots of our European neighbours getting fewer public holidays to boot. What with the added trauma of a recession causing people to fear for their jobs it’s easy to conjure up mental pictures of masses employees being chained to desks for anything up to the maximum 48 hours a week toiling ceaselessly in exchange for a few pennies to keep the bailiffs from the door.

As someone blissfully excused the horrors of working in an office I always have a great deal of sympathy for those who do. There’s lots about it to hate and everyone who endures it has their own personal favourite. Back in the days when I did have to, mine was always the totally unnecessary stress of trying to get anything done in your lunch hour. Seemingly innocuous tasks would turn into one of the labours of Hercules if you needed to perform them in that precious 58 minute window between a morning of drudgery and an afternoon of willing the clock forward.

Fat facism in the workplace

SHELLY BERRY

It is the Friday evening following an exceedingly long, arduous week. I have just gobbled down half a humongous bag of Doritos and some Minstrels, washed down with a bottle of Becks. Still on that sugary high, the guilt has yet to set in. But it will.

Unfortunately this week has been particularly wicked when it comes to the calorific delights that have passed my lips. Having attended a handful of networking events over the last five days, I have been tempted with a wide range of naughty nibbles, from mini sausage rolls to chocolate crispy cakes and scones. With jam. And clotted cream. High levels of stress have prevented my usual willpower from kicking in, and one slice of pork pie has lead to an iced bun, bag of crisps and an egg mayonnaise roll, all in one sitting. Oh dear.

The office: a small-minded space

MARTHA CASEY

There are many things that frustrate me about the workplace. I won’t start listing them because, frankly, I need the material for future posts. But perhaps the thing that bothers me the most is the tendency - and I don’t know if it’s a recent tendency or if it’s been happening for years - for the processes that keep places running to be needlessly complicated and fiddly.

And you go through with them anyway, because if you point out to the boss that there’s a quicker way of doing it, they might agree with you and hence realise they don’t need you around any more. As an example, let me talk you through the process one was forced to go through in order to purchase stationery at one of my previous workplaces, which happened to be a library (one of several I have been, er, privileged enough to work in).

Tapping at your last nerve: two perspectives on the pitfalls of office typing

NAOMI SAFFERY

There are many, many reasons why working in an office – any office – can be a challenge for those among us who would rather be lounging by a pool, with a cocktail in hand and generally enjoying a life of decadent debauchery.

One reason why working in an office is so challenging is the furious – nay, frenzied – speed at which people type. Is it just me or are there people in offices who genuinely feel that waving their administrative schlong around via typing at warp speed, will land them in the boss’s lap, complete with promotion, bonus and an all-round pat on back?

Job hunting isn't half hard work

SHELLY BERRY

A few weeks ago, I watched the last ever episode of Ugly Betty. And cried. I admit I was touched by my little Mexican friend’s optimism about life, and was genuinely happy to see her succeed. It gave me hope that one day my labours of love will become fruitful, and I too will have my dream job. Then reality kicked in.

You see, like a lot of people who work in the public sector, I might be facing redundancy. Bummer, I know. So, along with everyone else in my department, I am frantically applying for one of the few jobs that will be left come April and keeping my fingers crossed that I will be one of The Chosen Ones. But, let’s face it, I can’t rely on a position in my current place of work for much longer. So, I must look elsewhere.

The problem is that looking for a job has suddenly become a lot more complicated. Gone are the days when you bought the paper, kept your eyes open for notices in the window of local businesses and popped down the job centre. Oh, no. Things have got a bit tricky.

Whereas in the past I used to buy The Guardian on a Wednesday and forget about my endeavour to find employment for the rest of the week, I now feel obliged to check their website at least every three days. Their search options mean that if I leave it longer than that I have to search every single job on the entire website, which can be an awful lot when you are searching as broadly and desperately as I.

Then there is the plethora of other job websites which I dare not ignore just in case something well paid and lovely comes up. By the time I have searched Indeed.com, lgjobs.co.uk and a handful of other sites that promise me the world, it is half-past midnight and the closest I have got to a new career is stacking shelves at Aldi.

It doesn’t stop there. Next on the list of tasks one must do to get ahead is social networking. And no, I am not talking poking your friends on Facebook or following Stephen Fry on Twitter. I am talking grown-up networking. As in, professionally. This is not the time to be posting photos of yourself at NYE with a glass of Cava in one hand and a Harvey Wallbanger in the other. In my opinion, this makes the likes of LinkedIn not only dull but a little bit confusing. What on earth am I supposed to put as my status update if I don’t slag off the office bitch and moan about Him Indoors leaving the toilet seat up?

So, those of you in steady employment or lucky enough to be a student before a degree costs the same as a small fleet of Ferraris, think of me as you snuggle up in front of the telly with a glossy and the SATC box set as I trawl the net looking for my lucky break. As for the rest of you? I wish you luck. But please, whatever your circumstances, don’t tell me about any other websites, forums or networks that I need to join to secure my future happiness. I don’t think my Favourites can take it. Read more by Shelly.

One is certainly not on work experience!

MARTHA CASEY

Like many people, I have a job. I’ve had a job for several years, and before that I had a different job, and another one before that, all the way back to the shelf-stacking I did in Marks and Spencer’s when I was 16. (And there are years of pent-up rage in that one, but for the moment, let’s move on.)

Having a job is something that many people do, and as people go, I think I do fairly well at it. For instance, I arrive at work on time. I sit at a desk and drink cups of coffee and own a stapler. I have an extension number and a professional email address that is based on my real name. I do the tasks I’m paid to do (and sometimes, when I’m in a really good mood, I do things I’m not paid to do, because I’m just that nice).

I don’t insist on turning up to work wearing my pyjamas or a Spider-Man costume or a t-shirt with jam down the front of it - and if I did want to wear any of these items, I would simply do so, and not throw myself on the floor and scream until I threw up to ensure that I was allowed to. (And, to be perfectly frank, I work at a university, so given the presence of hippy students and slightly mad academics I probably wouldn’t look especially out of place. I digress, however.) I even go to meetings, although I confess I’m still not entirely sure what they’re for.

The point is, at the age of 28, I appear to be doing a fairly good job of masquerading as a responsible adult. So why have I noticed certain older colleagues treating me, and talking to me, as if I’m somewhere between six and 16 years old? Put simply, why does everyone seem to think I’m here on work experience?

 

This annoying phenomenon manifests itself in mainly subtle ways that I suspect go unnoticed by others, even by the people doing it. The tone of voice that people take when they ask me to do something comes laced with the tiniest hint of condescension. The tasks I end up with, more often than not, are closer to “alphabetise these three items” or “break down this box” than to “use your gigantic brain to build a robot”. When my closest colleague (older, and a parent, and a driver, and other things associated with being an adult) goes above and beyond the call of duty, the grateful recipient might bring him a bottle of wine as a thank-you; when I do the same, I’m more likely to get biscuits. (I mean, they tend to be nice biscuits; we’re not talking Rusks here, but still.) 

Sometimes it’s even more explicit: a few months ago I greeted an older colleague as I passed him in the corridor, as one does. He stopped, and turned, and looked at me while half-smiling and frowning a little, as if trying to place me, then snapped his fingers and said: “Of course! You’re Alan’s daughter, aren’t you? How’s the work experience going?” It’s not as if I was still new at that point, either - I had been doing my job for at least a year.

It happened at my last job too; in particular, I noticed that colleagues who were employed to do the same thing as me, sometimes who had started later than me and had less knowledge of the environment, would feel justified in talking down to me and passing on to me the most brain-meltingly tedious work, simply because they were older and therefore “in charge”. Never mind that in many cases I had more experience, better qualifications, and a more thorough understanding of practice.

 

I’m not the only person I know to have experienced such a phenomenon, either. Take my friend Lisa: she is 28, and a university graduate, and has been in employment for over a decade. She currently works in administration for a research centre specialising in cancer patients. Recently, a new colleague, a middle-aged woman, started working there too. On her first day, she turned to Lisa and with a beaming smile, asked her: “Is this your first job, dear?”

Like Rosie, I’ve been told that I look younger than I am (also like Rosie, I am regularly told I can’t buy that bottle of Fair Trade red wine, despite the fact that no self-respecting underage drinker would choose to drink anything other than White Lightning and nail varnish remover - although I suspect I may be veering off my point). So maybe it’s a simple misunderstanding and these people genuinely believe I need babysitting. Or perhaps it’s some bizarre biological instinct that makes these people talk to me this way; if I’m young enough to be someone’s daughter, then my presence provokes some dormant evolutionary urge, and if I wait long enough then they’ll start regurgitating food at me or something. 

But, deep down, I can’t help worrying that this happens because they’re seeing through me, because I don’t actually feel like a grown-up at all, and maybe they can tell that. Maybe they know that while I sit there and nod and say things like “I’m not sure that’s workable” and appear to take notes during meetings, I’m actually doodling crudely-rendered male genitalia in the margins of the agenda and wondering if it really matters that the name of the committee was changed but not everyone was consulted. And one of these days I’ll be discovered, and I won’t be allowed to have a job any more, and I’ll have to spend all day watching children’s TV and wearing Spider-Man pyjamas.

... What was the problem, again?

Birthdays are not always a piece of cake

SHELLY BERRY

BIRTHDAY SPECIAL

Birthdays. Anniversaries. Christmas. Every year, they come around, and every year, they fill us with expectation. Excitement. Hope. Panic. Fear. Dread, even. Not necessarily in that order, but each of these emotions is sure to creep into our consciousness, despite our best attempts to drink ourselves into oblivion and numb the pain by eating our way through the huge box of chocolates our aunty sent us.

First there is the expectation. You WILL have a good time. And everyone else who shares your birthday celebration with you must have a good time too. No pressure. This Saturday was no exception. A matter of days after the first birthday where I felt compelled to lie about my age, I had arranged a night out in Angel for curry, beer and music. A relatively quiet affair, deliberately designed to be as little hassle as possible for me. It was easier enough to organise but there is still that niggling need to have a really good time. And not just yourself. Everyone else has to have a wonderful evening too. Otherwise you are a social failure.

Almost as devastating as flat conversation over your Korma is a poor turnout. Silently dreading the last minute ‘can’t make it’ text messages that make you feel like a Billy no-mates you sit in the middle of a crowded restaurant with your mum and the office geek. Then, just when you were starting to relax, there is always the fear that your chums from work will irritate your uni mates, your boyfriend will say something totally un-PC to your socialist vegetarian friend and your best mate will end up telling your boss how much you hate them before throwing up all over their Prada handbag. Then someone will get food poisoning. Another person will hate the music in the pub. And your sister from the sticks will get mugged outside whilst having a fag. My God, my hand is trembling at the thought of it as I shove another chunk of birthday cake into my mouth.

Then there’s the morning after. You have a hangover. You’re a year older. You feel pretty crappy. The fact that your chum from Manchester has just bought a new house, your old roommate from uni has just had their first novel published and everyone else has a baby/cat/Mini convertible doesn’t help. You start to question yourself. Where has the last year gone? What exactly have I achieved? Why haven’t I got where I want to be yet? When am I actually going to grow up and get my act together? WHERE IS MY LIFE GOING?

Today is the morning after the night before. Amazingly, I have emerged relatively unscathed. Admittedly it was a relatively tame night, but everyone seemed to have a good time. It did take us half an hour to sort out the bill and the pub was a bit noisy and crowded for some people, but only one person didn’t show up (flu is an acceptable excuse) and no-body got arrested- despite some attempts from the boys to con a free beer out of our waiter.

As for my self analysis? Well, the last year hasn’t been too bad. No, I don’t like my job and am still devoid of any real status symbol (unless my new fandangled digital camera counts – thank you Mum, Dad and Him Indoors), but I have three quarters of a novel and a new qualification under my belt, have nearly paid off my student loan and managed to save almost enough money to pay for a deposit on that oh-so desirable first flat. And, you know what? I have survived another year in this crazy world. And that is something worth drinking to. Read more by Shelly.

Kindly spare me the details

ROSIE MCGEE

Minutiae, oh how I hate it. I’ve never been one to get bogged down in the finer details or spend an especially long time dotting i’s or crossing t’s -much to the chagrin of my former employers. Instead I tell myself I’m a concept person, all about the big picture, the big idea and the bottom line. Of course there have got to be box tickers lurking around behind the scenes making sure all the various admin gets done, papers filed and so forth. But let’s be honest, who really wants to hear about that?

I doubt you’ll see a new glam TV show premiering soon chronicling the trials, tribulations and love trysts of a bunch of office assistants. Not exactly cliffhanger material; Joe Public is highly unlikely to tune in each week to discover if that stationery order did come in on time and whether in fact there were enough green biros in it. No, instead we want to know about life and death, courtroom dramas and what the thin, pretty, suntanned girls from somewhere wealthy in California have chosen as the theme for their next school prom.

So we’re agreed, life’s little tedious things exist and have to be done but people are not interested in knowing all about them. Or are they? I can only assume the answer to be yes, as everywhere I look, turn or listen someone is either banging on about their lives in mind-numbing detail or worse still, encouraging me to talk about it. There’s small talk which I’m fairly partial to. Life’s too short and too tiring for big talk all the time. A gentle bit of conversation about not very much, especially with someone you don’t know terribly well, is a civilised way of interacting. However, there’s got to be a line or at least a sliding scale. What I’m complaining about here is the minniest, teeny-tiniest of talk. Chatter that makes discussing the weather look positively highbrow.

I’m sure anyone who has ever had the misfortune to work in an office has encountered one of the worst culprits of this horrid phenomenon: one half of an overly communicative couple. This is the person who rings their co-conspirator at lunch time (which they spend sitting at their desk surfing the internet and always look noticeably awkward when you invite them to the pub). The conversation, which is held in a whispery voice (you may well be ashamed of yourself), goes along the following lines: “What are you having?” Pause. “A sandwich.” Pause. “Tuna.” Pause. “Cucumber.” Pause. “Chocolate bar.” Pause. “Kit Kat. What are you having after yours?” Kill me, kill me now, or at least tie my arms so I can’t seize the telephone receiver and batter them to death with it before explaining down the line what I’ve done, blow by blood-spattering blow.

Since when did true love mean recounting the finer points of every morsel of food you’ve eaten that day? Or in fact ever? If that’s not bad enough then there is the person who questions you about the downright mundane, forcing you to come up with something to say about which there is nothing. “How was the supermarket?” this person will ask as you march back in with a carrier bag in your hand. It was a supermarket: irritating in its own right but also handy as it sells food. Then it moves onto: “Did you get anything nice?” Before you know it, you’re going through the plan for tonight’s dinner as if it were a military operation. 19.12: turn oven on to 180˚C, and so on.

And the whole time I’m thinking to myself that the other person cannot possibly be genuinely interested in my responses to these questions and is therefore either buttering me up for some truly horrible favour or having a bet with someone over how long they can keep me gibbering away. Either way, my gut instinct is to get the hell out of there and run for the hills.

If, by some miracle, you’ve survived the whole day of such torment, then it continues on the way home. Get people on a train armed with a mobile phone and they love to ring home (the place they will be in about half an hour) and go through every single tedious, uninteresting thing that happened to them. The outcome of the marketing meeting, how someone double booked a meeting room and what Jo from Accounts thinks of their new hairstyle ... and so it incessantly continues. In short: verbal torture against the eardrums of other hardworking, tired people who do not give a damn about your day.

Small talkers extraordinaire, please, stop invading the commutes of others with information you can easily discuss when in the privacy of your own home instead of instinctively turning the TV on and proceeding to ignore each other all evening. Or, maybe spend your journey reading a newspaper or a book so you’ve actually got something of interest to discuss. Or even better, meditate for a little while on why you’re so empty and needy you have to fill every waking moment with stream of babble about nothing very much. Read more by Rosie.

Let's rescue the king of beverages

MADDIE YORK

Oh, tea. It really is quite a drink, isn’t it? It has such a marvellously comforting quality, particularly when it’s just right. For me that means real leaf tea heaped in a chunky teapot filled up with water just at the moment it boils in the kettle, stirred, left for a few minutes to brew with a tea cosy on, on a tea tray with gorgeous cups, a tea strainer, milk, sugar for those partial, and a spoon. Then, it’s poured into the cups through the strainer, milk is added, stirred gently, and it’s ready to drink, all steaming, strong and powerful.

Yes, there’s quite a lot to making the perfect cup of tea in my world. I’m OK with teabags, just about, and there are certainly ways to make the most of a teabag brew so that it creates almost the same effect as the real stuff. Putting the teabags in a pot and leaving them in there to brew helps, for starters, instead of allocating one bag per mug and doing that vaguely depressing thing of prodding the teabag about in the water, scooping it out and plopping it in the bin or, worse, on the sideboard so that it sits there sweating its sad little cold life away.

The way you involve the milk is crucial, too. With a teabag brew, the only acceptable way to do it is to get the tea to the full strength – whether that’s through said prodding/plopping action, or through brewing it in a pot and then pouring it out – and then, only then, adding the milk. Sorry, but that thing people do where they add cold milk to the teabag before pouring the boiling water in? I don’t know what to say, actually. It renders me aghast.

Tea is ritual, first and foremost. It’s not actually a functional drink. Fine, it’s hydrating, but its purpose is so much more than that. If you’re thirsty, drink some water. The whole point of having tea is that it’s more fun. It’s about mood. And it’s about sharing, getting together and having a chat while it brews, pouring it out from the communal pot, and then going back for a second cup just because you can, and it’s nice.

So, office tea rounds really are one of the most depressing things I’ve ever encountered. And, actually, they are one of the principle reasons I don’t slot easily into the office environment. There’s just no place in the corporate world for a girl who wants tea time to involve pots, strainers and cosies, is there? Unless you make the bold decision early on to be the office nutter, winning yourself an irritating tea-based nickname like Loopy Leafy and being sent incessant internal emails and YouTube videos that have any slight ‘hilarious’ reference to Mad Hatter’s Tea Parties for however long you stay with the company which, because of the tedious tea nutter role you’ve assumed, will feel like approximately forever.

The worst thing about office tea rounds, for someone like me who is massively controlling and prescriptive about how tea should be made, is having to relinquish control to the person doing the round. I can’t say “Oh, that’s fine, you make everyone else’s; I’ll do my own” because that’s just rude, selfish and sounds nutty, and you certainly can’t follow your colleague into the kitchen and hover over them giving pointers and complaining when they’re doing it wrong. And you can’t always be the one to make the tea because you end up looking like the company skivvy. So, you either have to opt out of tea rounds completely, or allow the tea to be made for you in full knowledge of the atrocities happening behind the office kitchen door.

And eventually your tea arrives on your desk, and you just know from its appearance that it’s had almost no attention paid to it. It’s quite clearly a drink that’s been bunged together: bag, plonk, milk, slosh, done. It’s got a slight film of unstirred milk floating on its surface. It’s pale and not steaming: you suspect the milk’s gone in before the water. Horrifying. Instead of flavour – you’ve taken a sip to give it a chance – it has the sad non-taste of a drink prepared almost with disdain, as though the person resented the time it took even to brew it for 10 seconds. And you drink half of it, out of politeness, and if the tea maker passes by your desk you make a big “Oh, what am I like?” pretence of having innocently forgotten it and let it go cold.

Dear, oh dear. It really is unbearable. I just can’t see the point of drinking tea unless it’s made properly. I seriously think the office workers of this nation may as well just do water rounds and have done with it. At least there’s less room to make mistakes in preparation. I wonder: would everyone start jealously guarding their own particular water glass: one person with a tumbler, one a pint glass and another a hi-ball? I’m sure office politics would ensure that even water rounds would become a ridiculous song and dance, possibly leading to memos from HR about how best to transition an effective water preparation strategy going forward to ensure hydration buy-in from all team members.

But, it would still be preferable. Frankly, anything to protect tea, the king of beverages, from this ongoing, needless abuse. Read more by Maddie.

Image (teapot): Suat Eman / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Image (mug): www.freeimages.co.uk

Administration is the redundancy of the mind of woman

SAM PECZEK

It’s getting past the point of ridiculous. You know the place; where the other people are starting to glance at you only ever from one side, when they think you’re not looking. And not always when you’re mumbling tricky things in a delicate tone. Sometimes it’s all the time. Do they know? Oh gosh, maybe they know.

I’ve noticed an increasingly pesky pattern to the time that’s unfolding itself all around my humble existence. It’s as if my mind has been split in half, like in a Stephen King novel that’s been ripped off by one of those other ones - Koontz, or Layman; those guys you tend to reverse back over when you accidentally pulverise them in your vehicle of choice.

So, week one, it’s all OK. Things may well be rolling all over the place, but mostly you can see which ones to grasp at. Week two, and everything is broken, mashed and rotting into the floorboards. But that’s okay; week three will roll on soon, and the mess will be covered by a thin veneer of Try Again. Week 17 and the tedium of hopeful week/car crash week is beginning to chew away at the fraying seams of your soul.

And so you’re back inside the working walls once more. You sort of know things are not off to a promising start as now your left eye is twitching along – though not in synch – with your other eye. The right one. But they’re both maddeningly wrong, what with the twitching. You’re probably quite tired, but it’s gone past the point of fatigue and into that dangerous territory that deceives you into thinking you’re hyper awake and ready for every little thing willing to throw itself in your path. Reality is lurking in the sidelines, sneaking glimpses of your symptoms as they stumble over each other in a lovely pile of all that has gone so horribly, horribly, wrong. Your brain has slowed down; concentration has been obliterated; and the twitchy eye thing is lending a menacing air to your not so calm façade. That’s a lie; you don’t have a façade to shield yourself with anymore. You probably dropped it somewhere in the debris of the previous bad week. Twat.

You know things have taken an all more sinister turn when you struggle with the sort of tasks that maybe you’re not meant to be doing anyway, like opening a bin liner and HAVING TO ASK FOR HELP. You know there are more examples of your brain decay meets workplace humiliation that you could list, but they’ve already slipped away into a dark place, where they belong.

Things take a less heartening turn when you start typing things like ‘early onset dementia’ into Google, and in more desperate moments, ‘stop eye twitching’ (they refuse). Turns out that your collection of symptoms - the shoddy memory, shameful attention span, the general slowing down of the inner mind cogs – are mostly down to that delightful mix of tiredness and Gloom. This might also, you hope, account for your seesawing perspective, which is starting to edge its way that little bit closer to a not so temporary species of madness.

So take heart, my unemployed friends; those jobs you’re lusting after are in the reassuringly incapable hands of people just like me. With each day my grip loosens it becomes a tiny bit easier to pry my fingers out of your way, before swooping in to show them how it’s done. You know, by someone in possession of proper IT skills and a peppy phone manner. Things I may have pretended to have at some point, or maybe even did have, but exchanged for the myriad joys that being an idiot brings.

Just wait, five months down the line you’ll start to flag and flail; that spring in your step will slowly slide into a limp, and you’ll find yourself on the verge of a nervous breakdown because you suddenly find yourself totally unable to open a bin liner. My advice? Keep schtum; don’t let them know that it’s taunting you. Try to overlook that fact that it’s not biodegradable and will outlive you by a trillion years or so. That’s a hollow victory, and after all, you’re better than a plastic bag. Probably.

Chin up.

Read more by Sam.

Image: www.freeimages.co.uk.

Good manners are a piece of cake

ROSIE MCGEE

Small, seemingly insignificant, acts of selfishness are the bane of my life. Often tiny, they fill me with an immeasurable irritation. Unable to let them go, I replay them over and over in my mind, brooding. It’s made even worse when they are in direct response to an act of kindness, like giving someone a beautiful little cup cake.

Last Sunday, once the tedious admin of life stuff was under control, as a treat to my inner child, I made a batch of cupcakes. Covered in coloured piped buttercream icing, they looked even more attractive than I’d expected. However I knew if they stayed in my house throughout the week I’d slowly eat my way through the lot, consuming some 20,000 calories and enough butter to give myself an instant heart attack. So instead, being nice, I sent them to work with the other half. If I was going to have enough restraint not to stuff myself silly then the least I could do was share.

The remaining pretty, petite cakes went out the door and I hoped that they’d find good homes. When other half returned home the insecure part of me had to ask: “Were the cupcakes eaten?” He nodded. “All by 11am, I didn’t even get one.” I allowed myself a little smile. With the topic almost forgotten he added: “Oh, someone scraped the icing off. It was smeared it all down the inside of the bin.”

Initially I felt mildly offended – what was wrong with the icing I had lovingly made? Within a few minutes that offence had hardened to rock-solid indignation. I sent 10 cakes to an office of roughly 40 people. By my basic maths that means there was enough for every fourth person. Now, why, please, I’d really like to know, why would you take something clearly in limited supply only to throw half of it away?

A cupcake comprises two constituent parts: sponge cake and icing. If you know that you don’t like 50% of something, why take it? Especially as this deprives someone else of having one, you selfish, self-centred, greedy person.

“Since when is it acceptable to use a handmade cake as prop in a demonstration of how embarrassingly immature you are?”

This is typical behaviour of the sort of people who never think about how their egotistical actions impact on others. They’re that person who always takes the last item off a sharing platter without asking if anyone else wants it. They’re the person who’s always at the pub for the first two rounds and then silently slopes off. They’re even the person who refuses to buy the designated driver a soft drink because “it’s not like they’ll get me one back, is it?”

Thoughts of this lowlife pestered me all through dinner. Eventually anger overcame me and before long I was calling for the installation of CCTV, disciplinary action and immediate sackings. At one point I even said “Heads will roll!”

In my defence, it brought back painful memories of a birthday party I attended a few years ago when, too broke to buy a gift, I took a cake. Carrying two sponges filled with handmade crème patisserie and covered in thick chocolate icing I teetered all the way there, holding it like an unexploded bomb. The birthday girl was chuffed and placed it, reasonably, on the buffet table.

The evening wore on. With about a third of it eaten, the overly-silly-drunker-than-everyone-else-party-guest, as part of a squabble, rammed someone’s face smack bang into the middle of it. It took all the self control in the world to stop me screaming in her face. Since when is it acceptable to use a handmade cake as prop in a demonstration of how embarrassingly immature you are? Aside from the time I’d spent on it, it was a gift to someone else who would now not be able to enjoy it.

Where have people’s manners gone? I can clearly remember my mother regularly barking at me: “Don’t take it if you’re not going to eat it all.” After a while I never did. And it wasn’t just her. Teachers, friends’ parents and every dinner lady in the world were chanting the same mantra. Has everyone else got a nasty case of selective amnesia? Or is it more convenient to forget it and to think about ourselves at the expense of others?

If you don’t want something, or don’t like it, it’s fine to politely refuse. But be mindful that when someone has cooked something, they’ve spent time, energy and money. Under any circumstances, it’s a nice gesture and to squander, or even destroy that, is nothing less than the worst possible behaviour. Read more by Rosie.

Image: Suat Eman / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Office etiquette stinks

ALICE LINLEY-MUNRO

I have few pleasures in my working day because I am a slave to dull administrative tasks and now, apparently, petty rules. The management team at my nameless, faceless place of employment has decided today that the best way to spread Christmas cheer and winter warmth through the office is to ban the consumption of hot food.

No longer can I spend my lunch hour supping homemade soup with a nice crusty roll while catching up on blogging or internet browsing at my desk. No longer can I walk the three steps from my desk to the office microwave to heat up delicious leftovers for sustenance. If I want hot food now, I either have to go out in the cold and battle against the hordes of students all craving hot lunches in the wintry climes or I have to schlep halfway round the building to find another microwave and then go and sit in some dark and poky little room entitled lovingly and creatively The Staff Room

Apparently there are people who work in my office who find the smell of hot food offensive. I am really struggling to get my head round this; that someone could be so pathetic as to be offended by their colleagues enjoying winter-suitable lunches. The other reason being bandied about by the management is that we’ve received complaints from students who come into our office for assistance – the very students who spend at most 10 minutes each at our front desk whilst we listen to them bleat on about their problems and then do our utmost to send them away happy and sorted. Surely that should be the crux of our interactions with them, not whether or not one of us has last night’s leftovers warmed in tupperware on our desk.

They haven’t banned hot drinks, though, so the managers who brew up cafetières of expensive and frankly stinky coffee are fine to continue. The lady who has Cup-A-Soup is also allowed to continue supping her warming liquid because it is in a cup and therefore a drink. On that principle, I am going to start drinking my homemade chunky soup from a cup. I might even go as far as blending my solid leftovers into a drinkable substance.

Frankly the whole thing stinks; as will the Camembert, Limburger and Stilton sandwiches that will replace my lovely warm lunches. Read more by Alice.

Image: www.freeimages.co.uk

The plight of the unemployed

BY CAT TUSTIN

Becoming one of the 4.5 million UK unemployed has been frankly my most humiliating experience to date. And no, not because you can be spotted popping to the corner shop at midday in your pyjamas to buy a pint of milk for those endless cuppas, but because of the wholly embarrassing process of dealing with recruitment agents.

If you are a lucky enough – and it is pure luck – to get a call from one of these heinous monsters, they will chatter incomprehensibly down the phone to you before asking you to attend a meeting in approximately 15 minutes, on the other side of London.

You arrive in your suit, either because you have been outright told to, or because it is assumed you will, to find some run-down rabbit’s warren of an office on the fourth floor of a crumbling old building, usually in a swanky part of town. They greet you in practically their slippers and a dressing gown and from the word go you feel overdressed, out of place, and a total pillock.

They will ask you to complete a form which tediously contains identical information to that of the CV you have just emailed to them, but is apparently much more useful in your own illegible hand. I can only assume at this stage they are trying to weed out the candidates who eat the clipboard and stick the pen up their nose.

Then the real humiliation begins ... They plonk you in front of an antiquated computer and subject you to mind-numbingly banal or ludicrously impossible tests, and often a combination of the two. 15 minutes copy typing the six rules of good communication and they have the audacity to ask if you maintained full concentration throughout!

Then the outrageously obscure commands on Excel and Word which you are expected to perform instantly. Amazing that I have survived to the ripe old age of 24 without ever having created my own digital certificate for self-signing a macro before! Or my personal favourite: “Are the numbers 114286 and 114236 a) the same or b) different?” I only wish I were joking.

So you endure this torture, often receiving diddly-squat feedback, which really hammers home how utterly pointless the exercise has been, before the consultant sits you down and patronises you by telling you how perfect you are for this role, or for a role which may or may not appear on their desk in the next 12 months.

“You may well be rejected for a job you could do
with your eyes closed, hopping on one leg
eating a Curly Wurly, with a hangover.”

Now, I may have been sucked into this approach if whilst I had been taking my moron and/or computer nerd test the recruitment agent had not given precisely the same spiel to two other candidates who walked into the office to apply for exactly the same job! These creatures are notoriously two-faced, but telling three people they will definitely get the same job in the space of 15 minutes in front of each other takes them to a whole new level of despicability.

And if you do eventually secure a couple of measly interviews from all your draining persistence then you will endure the further degradation of having to reinvent yourself to suit the firm’s poxy values and ultimately abandoning all that you hold dear. You will lie and hear yourself do it and wonder how you will sleep at night. You will politely reel off facts and figures from the website when they are self-righteous enough to ask you “What have you managed to find out about our company?” And you will inevitably emerge feeling dirty and used.

To add insult to injury you may well then be rejected for a job that you know you could do with your eyes closed, hopping on one leg eating a Curly Wurly, with a hangover. “Another candidate’s skill-set matched our needs more exactly” – which essentially means they have a two-month GNVQ in photocopying rather than a cripplingly expensive degree from a prestigious university.

And you know what? They’re right. I certainly know which of those two candidates is the brightest.

Better dash; I have to complete an online hula-hooping test for an audio typing role based in Bromley. Read more by Cat.

Image: www.freeimages.co.uk