Welcome to the Working Week

Monday.

It sure as hell doesn’t thrill me, and I’m not entirely sure if it won’t kill me (with all respect due to Elvis Costello).

Today I have had to cope with a homicidal printer, a severe croissant shortage, and serious systems downtime, meaning bugger all to do but draft my next blog post.

I disappeared from the section for almost half an hour this morning while struggling with the most malevolent piece of office equipment it has been my misfortune to come across. It has a room all to itself (apart from an equally evil photocopier) thanks to the awful screeches it emits, like those of a dying pterodactyl - I believe the printer is from the same era as the aforementioned bird thing. I was printing a 100-page report (unfortunately, consideration for the Environment is low on the Department’s list of priorities) and the notorious temper of this printer meant I would have to stand over it, baseball bat in hand, coercing it into doing its fucking job. Every ten pages or so it jammed up and I opened the cover and side doors to see where the hell the errant pages had gotten to. Six paper jams later, my patience started to wear thin and I slammed the cover and the door as hard as possible while muttering “you fucking piece of shit!”. At one stage I ripped the jammed paper out so furiously, that a piece of it remained behind some kind of lever, so I had to try and get this out as well, getting burnt by the hellishly hot cartridge in the process and ending up with ink all over both hands and three door handles between the printer room and the bathroom.

I hope that when I retire (I just know that fucking printer will still be there in 30 or 40 years time, pissing off hundreds of civil servants) I can take it as a souvenir and kick the shit out of it in the car park, in homage to that rather excellent film, Office Space.

And then, just when it couldn’t get any worse, they were all out of croissants in the canteen. Arse. So I had to eat a scone, which, would be more correctly described as “a stone”. I nearly lost a tooth in it. I reckon our canteen would do well in Limerick, making replicas of the Treaty Stone. It was shaped like that, and didn’t taste nearly as nice.

Level of pity elicited from readers? Incommensurable. Civil servants get what they deserve.