Well not much happened at work the past few days so I don’t have much to talk about other than the most absurd thing I’ve possibly ever seen in the office.
I was walking to the water cooler, as you do, only to spot two people sitting across from each other at an otherwise empty desk bank. Both had headsets on, talking away and that’s when I noticed it. They were in a Teams call, cameras on, etc with…each other? No one else, just the two of them, talking about their upcoming weekend plans. No one else was in the call.
These two people were in touching distance of each other. It got me thinking – is human speech now a legacy technology? I reckon by 2030, all communication will be conducted via gifs on Teams and passive aggressive status messages. I guess if you’re paying for corporate software licenses, you might as well use them. Face to face conversations are now tucked away behind a premium subscription, sadly. By 2040, I fully expect Microsoft to announce “Talking 2.0” as a paid add‑on, bundled with Clippy whispering affirmations.
I honestly spent most of Thursday and all day Friday realising how burned out I actually am. It comes in cycles – I’ll have one week where I somehow manage to blast through my work, absolutely annihilating targets, going above and beyond, and feeling great about myself. I become a productivity war criminal. A spreadsheet sorceress. A menace to KPIs. Then I’ll have weeks of feeling stuck in the mud and nothing will grease the wheels, even though I still clear my daily targets. I’ve often whined to my partner about not being motivated but it’s not motivation that’s the problem.
The spark is there but the fuel isn’t. It’s the same problem I feel at home, where I long to draw, to write, to create, yet I just…can’t. It’s like I’m stuck behind a glass wall – I can see the ideas and I know it’s easy to start but I just can’t reach my goals. The drive is there but the functioning just isn’t.
But hey ho. At least I got to spend Saturday having fun. There was a Farmer’s Market in Kilmarnock, so me and my partner headed there early. We came away with three lovely scented candles, 6 mini cheesecakes, and a whole load of clothes from both charity shops and sales, and I had four cocktails.
Saturday evening was nice – every second week, we play a DnD session and my character is literally my cat, Lola. In the Feywilds, she’s a housecat-sized Tabaxi with a chip on her shoulder about her height – she is five apples tall and furious about it. She’s a tiny anxious ball of black fur, herbalism and alchemy, who works in her sister’s potion shop (my other cat, Selena). Yes, I have essentially created a fantasy Boots Pharmacy run by my pets, complete with full lore, customer reviews, and scam products.
Now, Lola is a gloomstalker ranger, who tries to befriend every animal, drinks milk at taverns, carries the collar and bell of a fallen family member, has a catnip fish in her adventuring pouch, and somehow has a terrifying amount of strategic and tactical knowledge. She is, essentially, a tiny Victorian orphan with the military instincts of a disgraced general. Every session she oscillates between “please pet me” and “I have studied the art of war.”
Anyway, back to the corporate trenches tomorrow, pray for me x