The Administrator

The rumours are true: I have returned to gainful employment (as opposed to the apparently gainless unemployment of full-time childrearing) as an admin shitkicker for a small not-for-profit company.

Mostly, it is a very happy situation.  I like them and they like me. Or at least they SAY they like me. They certainly like the baked goods I bring in and they support my use of The Chicken Of Persuasion as an upward management tool.

HOWEVER, they will not let me have my own business card. They SAY it’s because I never actually leave the office and meet anyone but *I* say it’s because they read my post-from-a-previous-life about self-laminating my business cards with sticky-tape and handing them to [famous] people. I mean, as if I’d do that. Shuh!

Subsequently, they SAY I can use the ‘generic’ business card should I ever need to give someone a business card (for example, the lady who collects the sanitary hygeine unit),  to which *I* say (while stamping my feet and pouting a little in a most professional manner) that I intend to personally hand write my name in glittery pen on Every. Single. Generic. Business. Card until I’ve made all those generic bitches my own.

Anyway.

As compensation, my boss said I could come up with my own job title. I was delighted as I’d only recently confided (read: complained) to him that ‘Admin Assistant’ was not a title befitting a woman of my age and experience (read: ego).

My face must have given something away because he was quick to add to his offer that it needed to be “within reason”.

“For example, you can’t choose a job title like ‘Queen [NDM] The Best’,” he said.

Of course the minute he SAID ‘Queen [NDM] The Best’, it became the job title I’d wanted, like, ALL. MY. LIFE. especially when I saw how good it looked in my email signature in Comic Sans font – centre-aligned, of course. And then, when I wrote it on a generic card with a little crown instead of the dot above the ‘i’ in my [actual] name, it felt like all the pieces of the puzzle of my life had come together… to form an ‘i’ with a crown instead of the dot.

In the end, however, I settled for ‘Administrator’. It must be said, though, that I pushed quite heavily for ‘THE Administrator’ (like The Terminator in an “I’ll be back… to photocopy your board papers” kind of way).

And it should also be noted that I subsequently awarded my boss a similar courtesy and allowed him to choose his own blog nom de guerre. He chose ‘Houston’. He SAYS it is in honour of the recently departed Whitney but *I* say it’s Houston as in “Houston, we have a problem… with our Administrator.”

History will decide.

The Indent’s Bitch

You may be wondering what the hell is going on with this blog.

Well, let me tell you this: instead of writing a new blog post over the last two weeks, I’ve been focusing on other, much loftier pursuits.

Why, just the other night I was supposed to be ‘getting serious’ and writing a new blog post, when an unnamed source close to the writer of this blog asked me what it was that I was actually doing.

I decided to come clean with him.

“I’m writing the word ‘arse’ in Comic Sans, ” I replied.

The unnamed source thought I was joking but then I showed him:

You may be wondering why I would do something as bold as write  ’arse’ in the world’s most reviled font.

It was a protest, see. A protest against the indented paragraphs in this new blog template I’ve chosen.

I hate it.

See?

There it is again.

It’s the kind of thing that, instead of inspiring me to write witty prose, drives me to look up the spelling of  ’unitard’, google images of dried fruit that resembles Luke Perry or write things like this:

But can I find another template that will suit my carefully-crafted banner head? No, sir, I cannot. (And yes, by ‘carefully-crafted’, you can safely assume I mean ‘hastily slapped together in Microsoft Paint after two-thirds of a bottle of wine’. I mean, that’s a given.)

So, what do I do? Do I walk away from this blog and reinvent myself YET AGAIN? Or do I just accept my fate as the indent’s bitch?

All advice considered. No, really.

* Edited to add: if this post seems really confusing because you can’t see any evidence of an indent, this is because I took that blog template and I changed that bitch.

After The Fall

Recently, I found myself in the company of two five year olds exhibiting advanced  symptoms of  ’ants pants-ness’ in a public space. Oh, the horror.

My friend M – the mother of one of the five year olds – looked at me and gave me The Nod. Any parent with a child over three knows what that means. Within seconds, we had both done the quick-draw with our iPhones – and within a few more seconds ‘Angry Birds’ and ‘Fruit Ninjas’ were working their iPacifier magic.

M then apologised to her friend –  a new mother with a small baby, who was having a coffee with us –  for our ‘crap parenting’.

“Please don’t judge us too harshly,” she said.

“Oh, no, don’t worry,” said M’s friend and then told told us a story about how she’d recently inherited one of those baby walkers that resembled something Davros, Commander-in-Chief of the Daleks, might sit in. “I swore I’d never use anything like that with my baby and now she practically lives in it.”

“That’s just the beginning,” I remarked. “Next, you’ll be putting the baby in the baby walker in front of ABC Kids on the TV and maybe – just maybe – adding the old ‘rusk on a string’ concept into the mix.”

(For the record, “rusk on a string” is an innovation that sees the rusk, usually tossed to the ground with great disdain by the baby ne’er to be eaten again, is actually saved from entering the 3 second – slash – 3 minute – slash- 30 day rule politics by a string. Think of it as a kind of biscuit bungee jumping. )

“Then, all you need to do,” I continued, “Is to put a straw in the gin bottle nestled into the Baby Bjorn strapped to your chest and you’re free to do the dishes or hang up the washing or answer the door to the Department of Human Services…”

M”s friend looked mildly concerned but her fractious baby soon had her bustling to get home for ‘nap time’.

“Don’t worry,” said M, as her friend prepared for a hasty exit. “We’re not judging you for being a slave to The Routine.”

“Oh, no, not at all,” I joined in. “It’s not like we’re saying ‘Oooh, look at me! I’m [M's friend] and I have to place my half-swaddled baby in her cot in a darkened room NO LATER THAN FIFTEEN MINUTES PAST THE HOUR’ or anything.”

M’s friend glanced warily at us both, uncertain of whether we were joking or not, but then her baby started to cry and she was out of there.

As we watched her leave, M remarked how she’d wished she’d known her friend was going to leave so soon because then she’d have waited another five minutes before she’d pulled out her iPhone and her friend would have been none the wiser about M’s dubious parenting techniques.

“In any case,” M went on to say.”We probably shouldn’t have made jokes about The Routine or bottles of gin. It’s unfair to fuck with new mothers’ minds like that when they’re living so close to the edge as it is.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” I replied. “It’s been so long since I jumped off that edge that it’s hard to remember what it was like before The Fall.”

And then we continued to chat pleasantly with each other as only two mothers whose children are engaged in Zombie Smash warfare can.

God bless the iPhone.

Shark = Jumped

Let us all accept right now that this blog has already jumped the shark. Moreover, let us never mention this fact again.

Hush now.

Don’t spoil this.