and the next line is.......

 A short one today and probably tedious but I'm less ranty today and feeling upbeat. So you can share in my sunnier mood. FYI the flower is one we sell and it is today's favourite. 
This week at work it's been alright. I earn sod all. There is no earthly way I could continue living in my house and earn what I'm on now for very long.
However, as people keep reminding me, I am healthy and I'm considerably healthier than I was in Autumn and Winter and I'm certainly not blaming the seasons.
Up in the call centre this week I was a little taken aback when I was on a call and had a giant tub of Cadbury's Creme eggs waved under my nose to help myself to. This was followed by tubs of chilled drinks and yesterday, ice lollies.
Today I was approached by my team leader, and in my usual way, I expected I'd cocked up. No, I was being invited to take a break from the phones to come and play a quiz game with some fellow employees. It was a finish the next song line game. We did alright. (I got 11 right and came 2nd to Joe who got 13.) "We" as in the people who work the same contract as me, are playing against "them" the other major contract our firm deals with. Yes I really did just say 'our firm'. I'm starting to feel part of the furniture. All the major players in the office know my name - not sure if that's good or bad but I've not yet been kicked up the arse for anything. I have my group of buddies I sit with every day and it's ok. I'm SO much happier than I was in Mordor. I have my sanity.
There was a point just before Christmas back in Mordor where I really did think I'd lost the plot. I know I haven't now.

I've just got off the phone with my mum. I am panicking about the future and whether this supply work will start when I need it to but we both said that everything really does happen for a reason and maybe at the time you just can't see it. We think I might have had this time to get better from the three years of stress that have been accumulating. I certainly felt more stress free than I did at all since last August coming out of work today. The sun was shining, I had a purse full of vouchers for Tesco with which to eek out a week's shop but I didn't feel like my mind had gone.

There is much to be said for my friend's words of wisdom.
Health is wealth.

Misspent Youth

I've never taken class A drugs. I have never been arrested or even close. I have never drunk so much I have needed my stomach pumped or woken up with someone and thought- "Who the bloody hell is this?"
The closest I came to that was waking up with a revolting love bite on my neck and some vague recollections of passing out in front of the night club and all my friends giving up on my whereabouts. In NO WAY did I kick a man out at 7am....OK I did, but REALLY nothing happened - he wrote to me a bit afterwards while I was at university but from the letters I still have, evidently I didn't write back.

I smoked cannabis a couple of times. Once in my teenage years and all I recall is a VERY difficult conversation with my boyfriend's father and some dreams where weapons were being hurled in my general direction. At university and throughout my formative years, whilst others partook in the green stuff, I stood well clear.

I made a second attempt at the stuff in my mid twenties. It was a mistake. My ex-husband had baked some 'special cookies' for my dreadful back pain. I ate one. He claimed he had barely put any into the mix. I went to bed and in the minutes and hours that followed, I lost use of my tongue and speech and became paralysed temporarily from the neck down. I actually thought I was dying. The next day I still felt terrible and the floor felt like it was sponge when I waked.
Yes a 'special cannabis cookie' did that to me. Thank CHRIST I never decided to try anything else.

I can count my sexual partners on less than 10 fingers. I have had ONE one-night stand and I knew it would be such. Though to be truthful it was a 'one afternoon stand'.
It was a little out of character but he was several years my junior with the body of a god. Fortunately he will never read this - it WOULD go to his head.
I have never 'experimented' with anyone of the same sex or even questioned whether I could bat for both teams. I tend to like to actually really care for someone or at least be insanely attracted to them as in last fling. It took me two years to get over one of my relationships. I was TOTALLY devastated by the end of it.

I did have a period in my early twenties, shortly after finishing university and before I began full time employment, of going out several nights a week and getting absolutely TRASHED on Southern Comfort. My best friend and I would pride ourselves on drinking a double, neat and then whatever revolting shot we could get our hands on. To this day she cannot LOOK at a bottle of Aftershock.I think we had a few messy nights and spent one evening - the pair of us in my looong time on-off-on-off boyfriend's bed with him. It wasn't what you think.

One of the posts I put on here was 25 things about me. When I first wrote it- for one of those silly Facebook things, I concluded I was pretty dull.
I do NOT like late nights, I don't have my music really loud, I have never done an extreme sport or activity. I HATE the idea of motorbikes. I told my old boss that I'd never be into gardening as she predicted. This year I have paid my brother to tidy up my tiny garden. I have planted a bed of heather, a buddleia and am waiting on some bluebells and dwarf lavender munstead. Yes that's right, I said dwarf lavender munstead. It is a variety and I know what it is.
This birthday I'll be 34. There are no wild times to look back on. And it's not even because I've settled into family life young. I told my brother-in-law the other day he was sensible. He immediately decided I meant dull. I didn't. Perhaps I'm sensible too?

Bear with me...

So I wasn't sure what I was going to blog about today and there is little idea of structure in my head so 'bear with me'. I was going to blog about 'Men' and then decided it would be either;

• full of stereotypes
• repetitive 
• insanely boring
• too personal and a little too revealing about my barren love life and latest traumas

So I decided not to. Instead you can read about the joys of my minimum wage job.

I am REALLY tired of hearing above phrase. 'Bear with me'. I am determined NOT to use it as it rings in my ears all day from the office I work in. I am currently fortunate enough to work in a call centre, taking orders and customer service calls. Unless you have worked in a similar scenario, it would be hard for you to imagine the type of moron you have to deal with on a daily basis. A lot of the people I have to talk to are bloody lucky I am bearing with them for less than £6 an hour. I'm not allowed to say - "it's not the end of the fucking world- you were expecting 'pink' and you have 'peachy-pink', YOU ARE NOT IN LIBYA, YOU ARE NOT REBUILDING YOUR LIFE IN JAPAN. You have an item which is not 100% as bloody perfect as you hoped. Well shit. You paid £9.99. You didn't lose an eye."
They record your calls so I have to bite my tongue.

Yesterday a customer rang in barely understandable tones about some goods he had received in 2009 that he wanted to get credit for in order to get new things this year. He had not bothered to ring in in 2009 and I as the phone operator was apparently meant to take his word that the goods from 2009 were a bit shit and give him lots of free stuff.
Even if I believed him, which I don't as his story was very sketchy, I would not be thanked by the powers that be for sending out free goods/vouchers etc on the say-so of slightly confused elderly man re goods received in 2009.

Today a nasty snappy woman rang in wanting me to resend goods whilst her order is still being dispatched. Apparently I am to 'get on to the courier and have a word'. The courier is Royal Mail. My office is based about 300 miles from where the goods are dispatched. When I say 'my office' I mean my bit of desk with a decrepit computer and a headset that is so precious to me now, I get in 15 minutes before my shift will start in order to have THIS chair and THIS computer and headset which I clean daily with germ killing wipes as a man in the office has recently been off with impetigo.
I know that if I get in later, I will have to sit opposite miserable 'J' or next to very loud 'G' or cannot do anything for herself  'D' barely holding onto her job, under a flickering fluorescent tube with a phone with a non-working transfer button. Customers don't like when you cut them off instead of transferring them.

I'm aware I am bemoaning a job and I ought to be grateful I even HAVE a job under the Tory Reich but it is hard when you have studied for 4 years, trained and built a good reputation for yourself, to be doing this. Hard isn't the word. There are days I have total meltdowns and think I should run away and join the circus. I won't. I would have to have an act that incorporated my dog and cat. My dog is stubborn as a mule and my cat is half wild.

So for now, you and my family will have to 'bear with me' while I feel my brain soften or as in the words of Bernard Black- 'fall away like wet cake' and clock watch, knowing that in the last 15 minutes I will have earned enough to buy a sandwich at lunch. I had a five minute conversation with some old bat today about a picture in the catalogue. It was 6.04pm and I was there 4 minutes past the clocking out time. Precious, non-paid minutes wasting my life.

Minutes are not just precious to me, but for the company I work for. If I am at lunch- I have to enter a code onto my phone- the same for a break. I even have a number for loo breaks, an; "I am going to the toilet" code. I am a machine. Mary Portas would have a field day here. There are NO incentives to work harder- and if you do not take enough calls, your name goes on a name and shame list in red. Nice.

I am learning to find small things interesting to keep me from drowning in a pool of my own drool whilst I rock slowly and bang my head on the desk. Today I found the street name 'Electric Avenue' highly amusing. And when a customer has an incorrect code - I like to say - 'computer says no' but this is wasted on pensioners.

God help me I need a new teaching post.