it's how you play the game without getting caught

I’ve given up pretending I care and am now wearing sneakers to work, during work and leaving work. None of this ‘work shoes under the desk’ for me bollocks.

Given the whirlwind of drama and stress outside the office due to the impending show, I am actually ‘not hating’ this job for it is only in the hours of 9-5 that I can actually relax a bit and not put my mind to any task (the lack of mental ability required for this job leaves me constantly surprised that I continue to meet interesting and intelligent people who work in similar roles).

Discussing the psychology of what makes people attend a show with another performer last night, I promulgated a theory that the reason people don’t take up free ticket offers a lot of the time is that by giving something away you are devaluing it and causing the receiver to wonder what is wrong if it has to be given away rather than sold. The best marketing I have ever done for the show has been to walk into a shmoofty boutique store and try on an expensive item while casually leaving flyers on the counter in order to have both hands concentrating on touching something I have no intention of buying. The nice-but-ditzy sales staff invariably prick up interest when they see something that isn’t being offered to them and then of course get all excited when I mention the show – although I still don’t offer much information. The exchange ends with me leaving without expensive item and them being left clutching a flyer in a precious fashion which they wouldn’t have looked at twice if it had been shoved into their face while they were walking down the street.

This is a good theory and it seems to apply to this job. Because, if you may not have already deduced from previous posts, I don’t like this job very much. If this job were a person, I wouldn’t piss on it if it were on fire. I will turn up and do the work for money but if I was fired tomorrow I wouldn’t particularly care. Actually, I lie. I wouldn’t care at all. And I think that because of my utter disregard for this position, my bosses respect me a little more than the staff who run around in constant fear of reprimand for not having done something properly. See, I don’t follow processes. I don’t give a shit about company policy. If something is to be done I will do it, but I will do it my way and not the way it is laid out in the firm manual. And I have never, ever been told off for this. Meanwhile, my comrades, past and present, have fretted and fussed about the right way to send a memo or a letter or how to stamp an envelope – and have invariably attracted trouble and attention in the course of clucking around for approval on due process.
Now let’s talk about the internet. In my entire working history I have never met anyone who has abused office internet ‘privileges’ more than me. I will look up anything and everything in order to not feel bored. I will check my email accounts about 7 times a day, I will look up my favourite websites, I will play ‘who is the most shaggable’ on internet dating sites, I will check my friends’ blogs and I will sometimes accidentally stumble onto a sex-related site and then not-so-accidentally have a very quick browse just to see if http://www.fuckmypetgoat.com/ is really all about the title. And I have never ONCE been reprimanded. And it’s not because no one notices I’m on the internet. Oh no. My desk is so open plan that people walking up behind me have a 5 metre uninterrupted view of my screen. My boss can see my screen from his office. The guys in IT have a list of every single website I’ve visited and I’ve never had a peep out of them. Even when they had to come up and change my hard drive because I’d downloaded so much shit from the internet that it fucked up all the internal programs. I’m sure that if I had more regard for this job, I would have been reprimanded a long time ago. But it seems that some kind of law applies where the regard for the job is indirectly proportionate to the amount you can get away with. At this very moment I am writing this on work time, with my boss on the phone behind me.

The few times I have been fired from jobs is when I've been really worried about being fired from them. Now that I don't care it's almost like I have a cast-iron protection clause that prevents me from being fired or even told off. Not bad for a permanent staff member who wags her own performance appraisal reviews.