SAY CHEESE
"Don't you miss work?"
A common enough question aimed at retirees. And you'll usually get certain set answers, such as...
"The people."
"The mental challenge."
"The sense of purpose."
"Bugger all."
And I'm in that last camp. By the time I'd left things were generally so miserable/unpleasant the only sense of mental challenge was maintaining some sense of equilibrium, and any sense of purpose, other than getting the hell out, had long since departed. My greatest joy was being able to send out, to multiple recipients (almost everyone I knew in the office) a very, very long email slagging off everything about the place. Childish perhaps, but I received several plaudits for it afterwards so totally, completely, utterly worth the effort.
As for "The people"... that's the really common one, isn't it? But it's not that difficult to stay in touch with the few people you actually liked. (Well, it is if you're as shit a friend as me, but that's not everybody, is it?) What they really mean is that they miss the sense of belonging, the casual acceptance of their presence as part of the furniture, the bored welcomes every morning and half hearted "see you tomorrow"s of people who don't really want to be there at all. Like a mildly less alcoholic version of Cheers, "where everybody knows your name", but without the visual attractions of Ted Danson/Shelley long (delete according to preference).
And, to my surprise, I've replaced that part of it with my voluntary work, where I can walk into the office and everyone says Hi. And it's only taken four years.
But I lied when I said I was in the "Bugger all" camp. There is one thing I still miss. When we had all-day meetings, or outside visitors coming to see us, there'd be an order placed with the canteen for one of their buffet lunches. There were three levels of what they laughingly referred to as 'menus', going up in price and, at least theoretically, in quality. Levels two and three included dessert. Which was fruit, and cheese and biscuits. And the latter, despite their sense of artificial reality, were really popular. There would be four kinds of biscuit. Something that seemed almost, but not quite, like Tuc; a water biscuit; a digestive; and those brown ones with crinkly edges that look and taste like salted toasted cardboard.
Then there were the cheeses, all tiny portions individually wrapped in hard-to-get-into plastic. They were religious, because the were the baby cheeses. (Sorry....) There was a triangle of something soft, vaguely Brie-ish. (All of them were a bit like the first kind of biscuit - almost, but not quite, something you actually recognised.) There was a wee tombstone of something cheddary. And little blue streaked cubes of varicose vein cheese.
Most of that lot went quickly. Except for those cubes. Who wants blue cheese for lunch? But that din't stop the canteen sending them in. Every time. This meant that, come the end of the meeting, there's a pile of unwanted, strongly flavoured, bacteria-ridden lumps, and Crawford walking out the door, jacket pockets stuffed with the smelly stuff. To be taken home, stuck in the fridge, then pulled out whenever there was a need to spruce up the taste of a soup or a stew or a white sauce. There was no end to the number of dishes that could be enhanced by one those wee fellas.
And that's what I still miss about work.
No comments:
Post a Comment