Day 252: I Receive A Mysterious Note

I like being non-working. I don't mean literally not employed, or drawing on the dole with a crayon, or sponging off kind benefactors; non-working (as regular readers will be aware) is a state of mind; a state of mind in which one is constantly aware that everything else is more important than what happens in the office.

In fact, it is often more than OK (and usually necessary) to go to work to earn money, or to keep your mind lively, or (in the very best of circumstances) to do something you enjoy with people you enjoy working with. But work is fraught with danger, and in the choppy seas of happy working relationships lurk the sharp fins of psychotic cunt-dom, ready to slice off the limbs of decency and disable the flippers of reason.

I have worked with people who have shades of cunt about them; a tint, perhaps, about the sideburns. I have met those who leave a waft of cockmonkey behind when they leave the room. I have seen people behave like cunts whilst knowing that really, they are not cunts at all. I have seen people get away with being cunts because they are very good at what they do, or spectacularly bright, or extremely funny (and sometimes, all three at once). But to come across someone who is a cunt for the sake of it is like finding a Dodo in your dry cleaning.

The story isn't interesting, so I won't tell it*. I had to go for a walk. I whistled a bit (for, as everyone knows, it is impossible to cry if you are whistling), remembered that I was "a freelancer", looked at the canal for a bit and wondered if my new suitcase would fit in the overhead locker.

And then I went back to my desk and I found a mysterious yellow Post-It note written in an unfamiliar hand. And the Post-It note said this:

THIS IS SPORT
NOT WORK

REMEMBER.

UR A NON WORKING
MONKEY.

X.

A rare combination of amusing, kind and heartening! It is difficult to find this combination in the life, let alone in the workplace, left anonymously and with no signature. I do not think it was the cleaner (who wipes our desks with an oily rag and refuses to load the dishwasher); it would not have been the 25-year-old French Nick Drake lover; it was not, I know, the Roman with the broken printer, for his hand loops and swirls in a rococo style and the anonymous writing was more straightforward.

Perhaps the leaver of the note will make themselves known; perhaps they will not. In the meantime, I will keep the Mysterious Note about my person at all times, and refer to it when I forget to be essentially non-working in my heart.



* "Why start now?", I hear you squeak.