This week I’ve left behind the glamorous world I have occupied for the last year and returned to my old job. Those of you with long memories will recall that it principally involves pushing buttons when foreign people point at me.
There have been several effects as a result of this change.
I find myself catapulted back into a life I last inhabited in January 2015. We all remember that month and everything that happened in it. For me, Uptown Funk is still at the top of the charts and Lithuania has only just adopted the Euro. I won’t actually buy the blue and green striped jumper I’m currently wearing for another ten months. I am living in the past.
I am left with a sense of malaise, which comes from the feeling that my career is moving backwards and not forward, and from the changes that have happened to my old job in my absence. I am also getting re-acquainted with many of my old colleagues which involves talking to people. I don’t like talking to people.
Others have been affected too. My beloved Crab Mug, once the darling of a major broadcaster’s master control room, has returned to my flat, where it feels deflated and redundant, but conversely my white coffee cup (ceramic with silicone lid and grip, in a design that makes it look like a disposable cup from a coffee shop) has been liberated from my locker, which had been shut for the last 14 months, and is enjoying something of a renaissance.
This has been a difficult transition for me, one whose effects will be felt through my life, like aftershocks from some sort of career-based earthquake, for months to come. Some of the results are positive and others are negative.
But one thing is for sure. Everyone I know will have to put up with me complaining about it for the forseeable future, and in that sense, they may be the real losers here.
15 comments on “Turning back the clock”
Have you been banned from the National Whinge Line again?
Do we all have to go back to January 2015 again? As if we do, I haven’t passed my driving test and should put the imaginary keys to the car I haven’t bought yet back in the drawer.
No, I don’t see why everyone else has to go back to January 2015, unless they really want to. I might spend some of my time in the last looking for more cassette tapes for your future car.
Lucky for me, the National Whinge Line is still up and running in January 2015. It shut down in late 2015 because it couldn’t handle the volume of whinging I was phoning in.
You were literally phoning it in.
Literally. Literally phoning it in.
Unfortunately the National Whinge Line has decided to phone it in.
Could your side project band, Phoning It In, play us off?
I haven’t picked up a ukulele for a while but I can give it a go. Would you like something happy or sad? I know at least four songs
Sad. Definitely sad.
Can it have a bit on the end that goes “diddle diddle dee dum de dum de babaaaa badum”?
I’m already working on the lyrics.
Can it be a song about a broken boiler?
Yes. In a thread about whinging, that seems to be a fittingly whingeable subject.
I also think it should be in the key of E.
E minor.
OK. E minor.
But the third note should be a C.
Stop blanking my texts.
Then we’ll decide if the third note can be a C.
Can everyone remember that I can’t read music, can barely play music, really struggles with music. You can reel off different notes all you want but if it’s a song by me it’ll mostly be G and C 🙂
Will it be 3GC?
Only if the time signatures allow.
(short answer: of course)