Thursday, December 17, 2009

DD minus 24: Dude, Its Raining

This is highly unusual. Like i said in my post of two days ago, it was 38 degrees celsius and only due to get hotter. Today, out of nowhere, i wake up to an overcast sky, steady rain and 28 degrees celsius. Ah, weather patterns - you never cease to amaze me.

So, with the arrival of a little rain, today has been a good dayto do, well - not much. I had to go out and buy a Secret Santa gift for one of my work colleagues ( my work Christmas party is tomorrow night, and i thought i'd better not leave it til the very last minute ). Only problem is that the guy i had to buy for is not exactly my favourite person in the office. And when you only work with 5 other people, being the " not favourite " is not exactly an enviable position. Anyhoo, so i gotta go out and buy a present for this guy and the only idea i can come up with is either going to tickle his funny bone or completely offend him.

See, my main problem with this guy is that he is a mooch. That is, in an office job where the hours are 9am to 5pm ( what a way to make a living... ) he sits at his desk and actually does some work from, maybe, 11am til 12:30pm, and then from 1:30pm til about 3pm. The rest of his working hours are spent " procrastinating ". You know, for lack of a better term. For instance, we open at 9am and it takes him roughly half an hour to count the cash in his till and organise the days paperwork. Then he volunteers to go and do our banking and walk to the post office to check our mail. This, admittedly, can sometimes take a while, especially if the queues at either place are long - however, a job that takes the rest of us maybe half an hour always seems to take him in the vicinity of 45 minutes to an hour.

So this gets him back around 10:15 am.ish... at which time he'll sit back down at his desk, answer a phone call or two, help a health fund member/customer if he isnt quick enough at hiding from them and then its 10:30am which is time for a coffee break. And, of course, this means he needs to leave the office again to buy his coffee and then his 10 minute morning tea break usually takes him 20 minutes. Which is how we arrive at his 11am start time.

I wont go into the details of his working day after his one hour lunch break ( dishes that need washing, garbage that needs to be taken to the bins, pottering around in my eyewear dispensary and generally annoying J and i ... ) but suffice to say his habit of wheedling his way out of actually work AND GETTING AWAY WITH IT has really given me the proverbial shits. I cant say that i'll miss having to put up with him while i'm away on maternity leave.

So, with that all explained, what did i manage to find and buy him for his Secret Santa gift ? A book entitled " The Lazy Persons Guide To Life ". I happen to find this quite funny, as does J and one of our other colleagues - giving a lazy person a humourous guide to being lazy ..... hilarious! The problem is not only is he a master procrastinator but he also has mood swings like a teenage girl on her period.... which is to say you cant predict them and they arent always pretty. So tomorrow night we find out if he sees the humour in my joke ( even though it is an actual dig at his laziness.... ) or whether he gets offended by the " lazy " tag.

Here's to a good laugh.... and a nice long break from his annoying, whining, woe-is-me, procrastinating ways.....

1 comment:

  1. It might give him more laziness ideas. If he doesn't get a good laugh out of it, at least the rest of you will. I always hated working with people like that.

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