Screw The Changes, We'll Fake It

Ah, Jesus, the things you start doing to keep your marbles.

Y'know, if you work with any more than about ten people, there's probably at least one of them that is totally batshit-crazy and a further four or five that are pretty fairly unhinged, and assuming you're not one of the afflicted you'll probably just try to keep your dealings with the unhinged and the batshit-crazy to a minimum as much as possible.

This is the big Axis of Mental in here; there is nowhere to go, no way to avoid, and perhaps worst of all, no-one sane to talk to so I tend to spend a lot of my week having batshit-crazy conversations. Not all of it, you understand. A bit more than I tell you about and a bit less than you might think. I mean, it's a 45-hour week. Many hours of it are either silent or comparitively sane. But a fair amount of it, let's say 20%, is pretty much batshit-crazy, and a good amount of the rest is certainly letting air in.

I mean, for three and a half years, like.

Anyway, I try to deal with this in various ways; I've tried acting completely stupid - like -

The Boss : "Do you need customs for Egypt?"
Here's me : "Don't know."

The Boss : "Oh, yeah, you do."

Here's me : "Wouldn't know."

But there's only so long you can keep that up for. I went through a phase for a few weeks there of just making up answers at random, and actually it worked quite seamlessly for a couple of days -

The Boss : "Where is Lemon Refresher?"

Here's me : "Lemon Refresher isn't a place, per se, it's an autonomous city-state. It's in Tanzania."

The Boss : "What's the nearest port?"

Here's me : "Antwerp, although Liverpool is closer by 8 miles but technically Antwerp. Did you know that in Lemon Refresher, musicians don't have to pay income tax?"

But it started to get old quite quickly when it had no effect at all.

I've even, and this is fucking desperate, tried to mentally fill in the blanks in the conversation, think them through quickly and try my best to give correct and helpful answers - sick, yes, I know - but even that has a habit of backfiring completely.

The Boss : "How much.. Immingham or Liverpool?"

Here's me, thinking quickly : "Of the two, Liverpool is closest to us."

The Boss, breaking my heart again : "No, from Rotterdam?"

Honestly, I've tried all sorts of approaches. I'd speak exclusively in Bulgarian for an entire week if I only knew how, it wouldn't make a difference. There is nothing that makes any difference. The Boss is in some bizarre way utterly formidable. She cannot be stopped. She cannot be reasoned with. She is Juggernaut.

I even hid her bloody bin today, and she didn't even notice, just ripped up the paper and threw it round where the bin used to be.

We're onto A4 envelopes now, with the ripping.