The World According To Me

My 'workstation'* is a plethora of files, correspondence, Court documents, sadness, hope, grief and many, many post-it notes with undecipherable numbers or words which I can't remember the meaning of but am too frightened to throw away. There are various sized bulldog clips, pre-printed labels for mail I send to oft-used addresses and pens that I only remember don't work when I pick one up and try to notate telephone conversations. I have a bottle of water which I refill many times a day, until it starts to get that weird smell about it and then I discard it and buy a new one. I have a dictaphone machine, police interview tapes of people confessing to horrendous crimes and denying others. 'No comment' interviews are so boring to transcribe, I love it when people are creative and come up with fanciful tales about exactly why they were carrying a baseball bat in the vicinity of someone lying on the ground with a cracked skull. I have a little toy orangutan** who is almost out of view behind my flat screen, given to me by one of my little sisters quite a few birthdays ago, I still love it. I used to have a birthday present from another little sister, a playdough lizard with googly eyes, baked until hard and painted lurid blue and green stripes. One of his feet got knocked off and I stuck it back on with blu-tack and it lasted a few more years until the fateful day it was knocked off my hard-drive and was irreparably destroyed, and I was sad. No amount of blu-tack would have worked. I have a notice-board which took six months of nagging to be tacked to the wall to the left of my desk. On that I have pinned the Magistrates' Court scale of Costs, a ten-pin bowling print-out of when I thrashed Pom 131-75, the timetable of classes at my gym, a post-it note that a client pinned to a document apologising for 'her tardiness' (I KNOW what it means, but I never said my sense of humour was particularly PC or tasteful), various usernames and passwords for programs I rarely use, a photo of Lucy sitting proudly, her doleful chocolaty liquid eyes looking straight through the lens. There's a print-out of how I am to cost family law files, and each time I refer to it I wonder how anyone can justify charging $28.65 for reading each page of a letter. The most recent addition to the board is the tag from a cat toy I purchased from the dinky $2 shop down the street for Agnes last week which has the delightful Engrish declaration "a quality and value products from ****** imports". I love that a lot. I have files stacked around my feet, I have to take a giant step over if I want to get away from my desk. I know where everything is, all of the time, even if some days it takes a few seconds to find my mouse.

I spend so much of my time here, at this space. I spend more time here than in my own bedroom.

I think that is sad.


*I hate the word. It's so mid-90's new-wave management speak. But I wanted to use it to annoy myself.