It’s odd leaving a routine that you’ve had for a sixth of your life. Something you’ve been doing for three quarters of your working years. There’s a mix of excitement, emptiness, confusion and the sense that time is moving at different speeds on an hourly basis as you approach omega. I’d engineered my last week in such a way that I didn’t really have to do anything. It feels odd to be in an office full of busy people, with nothing much to do. No pressure. No real responsibility. Kind of nice.
Some people say that there’s some kind of protestant work ethic that should make one feel guilty about being lazy, redundant. Maybe that’s why we treat old and retired people badly in the UK. (Though I’m told that it’s more likely to be because old people smell of wee). However, I can quite categorically say that spending three months drinking myself into a stupour in South East Asia last year has disabused me of the notion that doing nothing makes me feel bad. I think it’s just a switch that needs flipping in me – I’m either flat out and busy, or quite happy to mooch around doing nothing useful. I’m in need of flipping at the moment. To come down from the frenetic activity that has characterised my work.
So I found something to keep me busy in the office. Something that I can measure the progress of. A goal. It also makes me look busy in the office, which is almost as important as being busy. I have started converting all of my compact discs into mp3s. It’s tedious, but has a purpose. It isn’t overly complicated, but I can see the pile of unrecorded music diminish. I have found my meaningless repetitive task – this will keep my mind off life’s imponderables – a bit of drudgery to keep me busy. More grist to the mill.
However. I do plan to finish my worker-bee-like droning tomorrow. And then I leave the company I have worked for over the last five years. There’s surely some drinking and lazing to do after that. Watch this space. Could it be the resurrection of the Loughborough Helicopter Display Team training I considered last year? Marine conservation in Honduras with Coral Cay? Maybe just living in a hedge near an off-licence in a small town in Leicestershire. Decisions, decisions. But no netdecisions.