my final review

Do you think if you got talking to Osama bin Laden in a pub, you’d actually think he was an alright bloke?

I only ask because the one person I even remotely liked at my current job left last week. And he was a cunt.

It’s really not up for discussion. Empirically he was a cunt.

The man used to talk about the BNP having ‘the right idea’ and how he may have ‘accidentally’ hit his ex-girlfriend a couple of times.

See? Cunt.

But when he wasn’t saying these things, I really got on with the guy. He was one of the smartest people I’ve met since leaving university, and he had a very similar sense of humour to my own. You would not believe how difficult it is to find someone in my office who finds a blind kid running into a wall funny! The ill-advised Youtube clip I emailed around on my second day proved that.

And yet, as already stated, he was a cunt. Genuinely not a very nice person. So does this mean I’m not a very nice person? Is familiarity with wankers a symptom of one’s own wankishness? Essentially, do you have to be ‘nice’ to be agreeable?

I've been thinking about this a lot of late. Partly because I find it interesting, but mainly because it beats working. And I've decided that, with regards to my own specific predicament, this may have been an association born out of a lack of alternatives.

The people I work with are, for want of a better word, muppets. In fact that's the perfect word. They do share several characteristics with the actual Muppets: they’re infuriatingly wacky, they have limited appeal, and they’re heads are full of foam. Mayhaps a quick run down of the people I spend the majority of my working days with...

Like the indolent clock that hangs on the far wall, I’ll start at 12 o’clock; directly in front of me is essentially what you’d get if you took every Daily Mail reader in the country, decanted them into a baboon wearing a blonde wig and then kicked it through the cosmetics department at Debenham’s.

She is, to put it bluntly, the worst sort of person in the world; a moron who thinks they’re a genius.

People that are stupid are, generally speaking, aware of this fact and so, by and large, keep themselves to themselves. However with this particular specimen, there isn’t a single issue she doesn’t seem to relish weighing in on with her own particular brand of ignorant gob shite. It’s like listening to a fascist taxi-driver with Asperger’s. Statements like ‘I don’t believe in addiction to sex, it’s all in the head’ and ‘They shouldn’t be allowed to strike, they get paid enough already’ spew out of her mouth on a daily basis and grate the inside of my head like barbwire earbuds.

I think what really gave the game away with her, was when she told me with such sincere expression, totally devoid of irony, that she was currently writing a book of ‘philosophical musings’…

I truly hope she gets published. I could do with the laugh.

Then next to her, at 2 o’clock, is the walking cliché that is the ditsy pretty girl. As is so often the case, the combination of well proportioned features, slim figure and nice tits has created what is still fundamentally a super-evolved monkey, but one that has never needed to say anything either remotely intelligent or slightly interesting.

Instead, due to the aforementioned physical appearance of said homosapien, she manages to go through life squeaking things like ‘Oh my god! I had an entire pizza last night!’ and ‘Is £750 too much to spend on shoes?!’ and still be considered a functioning, worthwhile addition to the human race.

Alone, these two are enough to make you want to shove two pencils up your nose and head butt the desk. But together, the resulting exchange can only be described as an abomination to sense. When Barbie and Descartes start conducting their squeaky ill-informed discussions, extraordinary rendition suddenly seems like a happy alternative. Impossible to ignore, high-frequency conversations about calories and handbags perpetually fill the dull silence of the office, and make me consider hole-punching my eyelids in an effort to focus my concentration elsewhere.

It’s like sitting opposite two retards auditioning for Loose Women. Though in no way fun.

Next along, at sort of ten past two-ish, is my manager, who’s not actually that bad. He’s a smart guy and he doesn’t take things too seriously. Nevertheless, due to his direct proximity to the Venus de Thicko, he does turn into a bit of muppet when she speaks to him. In fact, not just a bit of a muppet. King of the muppets. Kermit the Frog himself.

This is understandable. This happens to men when a pretty girl talks to them. It’s genetics. Or something. However, about a month ago, the shell de jour split up with her boyfriend, and since then ‘the boss’ has upped his game to a truly vomit-inducing level. ‘What’s the matter? Did you lose your stapler? Ahhh…would you like a hug? There, there. It’ll be okay. Tell you what, I’ll go up to the stationary cupboard and get you another one. How about that? Is there a particular colour you’d like? I don’t think they do white, but I could always cover a black one in Tippex. No, no. Don’t mention it. Tell you what, just buy me a drink on Friday. Then I can have an excuse to buy you ten…’

So no help there, I’m afraid.

Then, opposite him (at about 15.00 hours) is the token office-weirdo. He’s in his fifties. He’s single. He has a pet tortoise called Penelope. And he holds his pint glass like a spastic. I could write a thousand words alone about this guy, but I’ll leave it at this: he looks like a disgraced geography teacher and very rarely provides evidence to suggest the contrary.

Next along, directly adjacent to me, still at 15.00 hours (but a closer one), is a Muslim woman who, presumably due to her cultural upbringing, does not speak unless spoken to. Un-funnily enough though, the times she does talk, she makes far more sense than the others. It’s a real shame she doesn’t speak more. And that she only works two days a week. And that she believes an illiterate, mass-murdering bigamist was a divine prophet. Still, can’t have everything.

Then on my left is the empty seat of my erstwhile colleague. You know, the cunt. His desk still cluttered with Nazi memorabilia and domestic abuse summonses, I occasionally glance over at it and remember the good times…

Finally, at about half ten in the evening, sitting next to 'the most annoying woman in the world', is 'the most boring man in the world'. What are the odds? I say he’s the most boring man in the world, I actually don’t know what he’s saying half the time because his voice seems incapable of reaching a volume above that of a vole tap-dancing in its socks. On a sponge. But then there’s the other half of the time…

A man much wiser than I once said: ‘A bore is a man who, when you ask him how he is, tells you’. This inference has never been more applicable than with this chap.

The first time I asked him how his weekend was, I was rewarded with a 20 minute spiel about how he had tried to organise a football match, but only 27 people turned up, and so he had to find another person so that they could play 14-a-side, and he phoned loads of people, but he couldn’t get anyone to play, and in the end someone else couldn’t make it, so they had an even number of players, so in the end it was all fine.

Once I’d poured my brain back through my ears, I asked him whether he’d won; ‘Oh, I didn’t play.’

Un-fucking-believable.

The people I work with are not bad people. Far from it. They are good, productive members of society. They’re just painfully, painfully average. Each of them content to live out their lives in the same way as the vast majority of people in this world; candidly, and with the minimum of impact. So pre-occupied with seeming 'nice', they are destined to continue this existence until the day they pop their insignificant clogs. They are boring and so, it's safe to say, not my kind of people.

Oscar Wilde said that 'every saint has a past and every sinner has a future’. And so it follows that the only person that remotely stood out in my office was an absolute arsehole, who now no longer works here.

So, does this make me an arsehole? God, I hope so!

And now my last day is almost here. Come 5pm Friday, it will be time for me to move on. Free to disassociate myself from bores and borderline paedophiles, I shall never again have to endure seven hours of mind-numbing small talk. That is, until I get another job.

No doubt, at the end of the week, I’ll be required at the pub for a couple of farewell drinks with my colleagues. All I can say is, I hope Osama's there.