Thu 9th April 2009

Last day of work for five whole days! Thank you baby Jesus for dying so that mankind can have a few days off. All year round we think about the little jobs we have promised to get around at some point; and thanks to you there’s a few days to fully procrastinate about them at punishing length.

As this was officially the last working day before the Easter holidays, we were allowed to bring games in. Ok, that’s a lie - we weren’t allowed to bring games in. Sadly ‘the man’ and the right-on brigade have teamed up together and stopped that kind of pre-holiday fun, because the modern kill-joys do not consider it a constructive use of time (or they might just consider it inappropriate on the grounds that I’m a 31 year old man). But we did make our own kind of light-hearted office-based fun, which was possibly one-step lower in the maturity stakes than a quick game of classroom ‘Junior Dingbats’. It consisted of sending various puerile SMS messages to each other’s desk-phones. I know on paper this doesn’t exactly sound like a barrel of laughs, but there is something I find genuinely amusing about the emotionless, mechanistic voice which reads text messages through the landline receiver. It has perfect diction of individual words, but an ill-fitting expression of the sentences as a whole. Dialogue-wise, the whole thing is probably best described as sounding like Moira Stewart doing an impression of Borat.

And there’s something genuinely quite sinister about it too. If you know any very young or very old relatives who are going to be on their own over the holidays and who do not have a savvy grasp of modern phone technology, why not text something along the lines of “Tonight I plan to slice your neck open, hang you upside down and watch your guts spill out” to their landline? Thanks to Moira’s chilling delivery, they’ll be absolutely terrified. It’ll be hilarious! The more vulnerable the recipient, the better.

So there’s one activity for your Easter break. You can have that for free. But should you need other ways to procrastinate your way out of the impending odd jobs, I’m afraid you’ll just have to think of them yourself.