Thanks for the laughs and being true (cheers for all the Nandos!)

It's midday in a suburban Tasmanian shopping centre. Emboldened by their pension, old people are slothfully walking through at zombie tempo, revelling in no longer caring they are in the way. A woman has McDonald’s ice cream dripping down her chin - her friends simply don't tell her. There's water cascading down the floor in a slow moving torrent. No 1ne seems to be in a hurry to fix it. I've spent a lot of the last few days in the strangest funk. I don't know why - it's not all Milo Bar related. I've been feeling physically spry but I can't get into any kind of gear. To try and work it out, I made a brief mental list of all the things annoying me in a single day. None seemed to be any more important in the scheme of things than slow moving cars, computers that didn't work or bewildered Grandpa Simpson style pensioners shuffling in carpet slippers into my path. It's hardly buzzbombs, rickets and rising damp. I'm sure someone from Wartime Britain would slap me in the face for my middle class concerns and angst and then hustle me away for a talk on stiff upper lips. Doesn't mean I'm any more alert though. They bought me a present today at work - a cute toy to try and cheer me up. I don't know how the complex emotional swirl of human life can be fixed by the purchase of a pig with a cheeky face but I guess that's where we are as a society. Plus, his face really was cheeky. I didn't even notice I was being grumpy. They then tried to name it around me. My e-mail box flooded with stupid cheer him up jokes...it didn't work, needless to say. The new girl got a Facebook message from the guy she was stalking which she took as a suggestion she was dumb. She was grumpy all day, chewing on chocolates in a depression. Needless to say my ironic ex girlfriend continues to not talk to me all day long unless it's necessary. She swishes past my desk and then walks past and swishes past it again to really emphasise that she isn't talking to me. She sometimes gets absolutely no work done with all the swishing. So here I am - one of my co-workers is eating chocolate in emotional desolation, another that I have had relations with is swishing past my desk endlessly in a sort of post break up swirl of hairspray and bitterness - and here I thought I was being mature, with my Chunky Kit Kats and chin up tiger pep talks - and here I sit with a pig with a cheeky smirk on his face for company. Welcome to Thursday...you don't have to be crazy to work here...

Away from all the swishing and consumption of chocolate products - I believe Sartre was mis-quoted; hell is being trapped for all eternity with the scent of hairspray - I'm able to escape into the middle of the shopping centre with coins jangling in my pocket and the merest hint of my first jaunty step for the day. The girl at Banjo's promises to toast my toasted toasty and then spends the next 5ive minutes talking to her friends and completely ignoring me while I stand hopping bored from foot to foot. I say talking - there's a loud gothic girl with overly dyed black hair in a hooded top that screams black from the top of its black lungs who continually says the girl behind the counters name, while her little gothy acolytes say things like oooh and wow. Well ooh, wow and the repetition of her name aren't toasting my toasty so to speak. What to do...make eye contact with the fat lumbering girl with the floury fingers to get some action? Sit down on 1ne of Banjos increasingly stained seats and hope not to catch anything? Bribery? Drink my Pepsi Max and hope to be noticed? If you picked I just stood there while the fascinating conversation went on around me...well, for some reason, I had had enough today. Maybe the torpor briefly lifted, but I was off, not quite on gossamer wings, but certainly on gossamer Clarks shoes. The funny thing was, after I put my Pepsi Can onto the counter and walked, the fat lumbering girl told the girl who was having her name called out off in a really angry voice for not having toasted my toasty in an acceptably toasted time frame and losing a customer. Having scored a victory for the invisible overlooked masses against the forces of franchise based corporate indifference, I then ruin it by ploughing shin first into a lousy punk kid...when I walk past later, my Coke Zero can still stands there, a silent monument to some1ne who couldn't take their indifference anymore, who stuck it to the man...until tomorrow at least. Yeah, cop that franchised bakeries...

Back to Hairspray heaven for the afternoon, and yet more swishing. I'm too tired for swishing. I'm officially an anti swishing zone. Maybe I should start swishing. No I'm not cut out for swishing. Not that I'm doing anything productive with my day beyond looking at Fantasy NBA scores and trying to look busy. There's a girl in the office that used to work here. She was a horrible person. Ugly on the outside and inside, she used to take the chocolate biscuits at the office she managed and lock them away on days she wasn't in the office. She'd write little notes on the pens saying things like "my pen" without even the slightest implication of an inter office joke, she bitched about everyone endlessly, and was generally a horrible person. Don't say hello...don't say hello...damn it, I said hello. Of course I did. The girl with the mod haircut is trying to get her boyfriend to take her to the movies. We're having an endlessly boring conversation about movies. The strange thing is I've repeatedly said to everyone I don't like movies and yet people keep asking me if I've seen any good movies lately...is anyone listening to anything I'm saying? The crazy lady who brings us in chocolate from god knows where has brought in some Xmas chocolates. The girls in the office are now huddled around the chocolates bitching about men. I might get a run in this conversation soon, judging by the intensification of the swishing offensive. The only other sound I can hear is the gentle rhythmic swaying of the Zumba Class up the road. They've started early, and their trainer is yelling out enthusiastic sayings in a loud military voice over the loud thumping beats of The Black Eyed Peas. He sounds frightening rather than motivational. The tape then skips violently. It sounds like anarchy, a Zumba uprising. I look at my screen. Where I'm supposed to have finalised a report, I've typed the phrase Zumba anarchy. I consider leaving it there to see if anyone reads these reports all the way through, but I don't want to know that. Every1ne needs to feel important. Maybe that's where I went wrong - thinking my care was implied, but maybe I needed to say it more. All I know is thank goodness I don't smoke. With the amount of accumulated hairspray around my desk, a mere spark from anyone could set the whole branch aflame. Thank goodness that spark, as they say in the classics, is long extinguished...

It's hometime before I know it. The girls in the office are having a conversation about the boss’s wife. I suspect I won't be able to join in. I don't have an opinion on the woman. So I go home. My ironic ex girlfriend is smoking outside a shoe store. There's a temptation to swish past her with my nose in the air, but it's too far to walk. The girl who used to work with us is looking tired and exhausted as she lugs some heavy shopping bags down the road. She stops for a moment, seemingly about to topple over. We 1nce went for a training course and in the rush for the bus home she almost collapsed in an unfit heap into the gutter just from some running. I can't imagine that plus shopping bags. A kid with a Dale Thomas haircut and a jaunty baseball cap is over vigorously pashing his bogan girlfriend to try and show his friends how much he totally digs her. Personally I think he's looking at his best mate a bit too much when he's doing it, but there you go. I leave all of them in the distance as I walk to my car. I guess it's not so bad - in the other office, they don't even get out for lunch. Their lunch is bought for them so they don't leave the office and continue to write reports no 1ne will ever read. They don't see the cheerful face of a ceramic pig at any stage of their life - you don't have to be deskbound to work here, but it helps. Tomorrow night, I'll be safely inside a pub recounting all of these issues with my friends in a chatty conversational low pressure environment, only competing against the soothing sounds of low frequency acoustic rock for sound rights. Maybe the girl with the mod haircut will finally get to the movies, maybe my ironic ex girlfriend will get back together with the man with the scrunchy face, maybe the new girl will put aside her feelings of stupidity and re-concile with the man she's stalking, and maybe I'll get a sandwich in a snappy moment of service delivered with crisp alacrity and the minimum of fuss...that's the thing about tomorrow, there's always the chance to shake off the slumber. Or maybe tomorrow will be more of the same. I'm already 6ix seconds into my drive, and a slow witted, slow moving Torana is blocking my path, unsure of whether to indicate or just be an idiot slowly moving in concentric circles until time expires and we all die in a football oval car park...yes, it could just be more of the same...

I don't know why, but for the first time all day, I'm excited to find out...