cathjanes.co.uk - Freelance Journalist - Award Winning Writer » Janesy’s Duvet Day Dictionary

Absenteeism

Cath — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 13:47:25 +0000

Well that’s a fitting first entry to my duvet day dictionary isn’t it, hm? Fitting because there’s nothing more scabrous than someone who throws a sickie just because they can’t face another meeting with the bearded consultant who’s charging £2000 a day to tell you that there’s no I in ‘team’.

Of course, the word scabrous doesn’t apply to you. After all, you are geinuinely in need of RnR. In fact you are also genuinely in need of being sofa bound with a family pack of Jaffa Cakes and episode 47 of Diagnosis Murder.

Your colleagues aren’t though. No, they think they are but they aren’t. What they’re in need of is a kick up the arse. What’s all this crap about doctors appointments and school sports days? And since when did having to wheel your elderly mother into bypass surgery constitute a reason fit for carer’s leave? And you thought that throwing a sickie was pushing it? You mean you might actually go into work and mix with these slackers?

Look, save yourself a pinch of dignity and stay at home. Loose Women is on in a minute and you wouldn’t want to miss Coleen Nolan banging on about thigh chaffe would you?

Acting managers

Cath — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 09:58:31 +0000

Now here’s a reason to stay under the duvet: acting managers. You get one of three things when faced with an acting manager. Either someone so gimpily feckless that they’re unable to punch straight holes or someone so besotted with his own accidental rise to seniority that they make Hitler look like a grieving widow. The third option is even worse. It’s the two cretinous beasts melded together like some lascivious, filthy, barn-dwelling, bell-faced chimera.

Jesus Christ, the latter is the scourge of humanity. I know because I used to work for one. A jumped up tit of a man who genuinely thought his rise to corporate fame was sealed by stepping into the shoes of a bloke who was having his hernia tinkered with.

You’ll know one just like him. He waltzes to management meetings like a guy on a promise at the Playboy mansion. His pustule-like ego makes him walk with stick up his arse. He even takes an unhealthy interest in your to-do list, pointing out the beedin’-obvious before pissing off back to his fleeting lair. Worse, he’s crap at it. And by crap I mean that his desperation to grease his way up the pole blinds him so completely that he looses every ounce of his corporate worth. He has the management prowess of a chimp and his staff meetings resemble the worst BBC comedy.

And to top it all off you have to witness this vile debacle knowing that you’d do a better job of it even if you were dangled by your knackers from the Blackpool Tower while seagulls pecked at your rectum.

Oh, just get back into bed, will you?

Agendas

Cath — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 09:58:05 +0000

That’s right, agendas. You know, the lists that purport to be precise reasons to meet, only that the carefully crafted schedules are rendered utterly meaningless exactly 36 seconds after the start of said meeting when the navel-gazing gimp in the corner takes umbrage at the way a comma was used in the latest set of minutes.

The result is a four hour melee of useless opinions that suddenly take on greater importance than the urgent matter of the sexual harassment that is raging through the accounting division.

Course, it doesn’t help if the chairman has all the control of a melting jelly and the room is bewilderingly over-stuffed with preposterous, be-suited egos.

The answer is to not so much write agendas as chuck names into a hat and let those plucked out prattle on endlessly about how things worked in their day or why the annual summer barbecue discriminates against Cumberland sausages.

You could save the agendas themselves for those vile evenings when everyone goes out for a post-work sniffter only to bang on about failure of the health and safety officer to remind staff that the building is on fire. Never happy, see.

I don’t know why you’re even thinking of taking off those pyjamas.