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Crushing ennui and timelessness

It’s really rather hard to have a good old moan about your job in public without letting slip sufficient information for a very lucky, casual but interested browser of the Internet to piece together the relevant stuff, dob you in and get you sacked. To this I add reference to the dismissal of Joe Gordon in 2005 for the use of the apparently offensive pseudonym “Bastardstone’s” (amongst other things) in his weblog.
Well, that’s not going to stop me, no sir! I was musing whilst cycling this morning, dodging rashly driven council vans and bellicose seagulls on Cathays Terrace (not to mention broken glass – one could be forgiven for supposing that the student population of Roath and Cathays wish to re-enact the events of November 1938 on the streets of Cardiff every week night) that it often feels as though an unseen hand occasionally and perhaps disinterestedly strokes the waters of my existence not caring that the wake comes smashing straight into my face. I guess I’m just susceptible to physical stimuli given that I was cycling into the teeth of a gale.
To switch to another painful metaphor, it would appear that work has also been busy unrepentantly shovelling shit into the furnace of a run-a-way locomotive of shit, bearing down on me with unquenchable fury. In a demimonde of stifled creativity such as that made up of administrators like me, I am nonetheless baffled at how pointless and repetitively unproductive meetings can be, especially between academics and their support staff. I can’t be the only one to feel that the words “schedule a meeting” actually mean “drink some coffee whilst suffering an absence seizure”. I’m treading ground well scuffed by trail blazers like Scott Adams but seeing as how we’re now a nation of service providers it must be a prevalent zeitgeist amongst 70% of the population. The last three meetings to which I was sent as proxy (the boss understandably wise to the crushing ennui of such occasions and willing to sacrifice a pawn to protect the queen) left me feeling less like I had a plan of action to further the interests of the department than like I wished nothing more than to push my hand into a garbage disposal unit. Plus I’d wasted another page of my red moleskine notebook with doodles and imagined furious rampages through the corridors of power.
Ah well, at least tomorrow’s is a lunch meeting. Now all I need to do is pretend I know how to eat with a knife and fork and I’m bullet-proof.
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