Trouble is a lonesome town

I think I have sleeping sickness (in the sense that all I want to do lately is sleep, I'm pretty sure I haven't managed to contract a parasitic disease endemic to certain regions in Sub-Saharan Africa) (well... I hope I haven't). This sort of thing has happened before so I'm extremely wary of it. It normally precedes one of my branded descents into woe-is-me style self-loathing and misery (known as 'hitting it emo style'). I know exactly why this is. It's because work have stopped us doing anything non-work related whilst we are sat at our desks. That seems fair enough you moaning emo-bitch, I hear you cry. Well, yes, I concur. However, if you're job consists solely of answering calls and NOTHING ELSE and you're taking, on average 30 calls in a day, each of which last less than 2 minutes a piece (I constructed a table to track this on Friday. Ben who sits next to me then made a graph out of the data. That was pretty awesome I admit)... well then you're left with a lot of downtime. How 'the temps' have been choosing to fill this downtime is by reading, doing puzzles, perhaps occasionally constructing towers out of plastic cups (you know, the usual). All fairly non-obtrusive things to keep our minds occupied. This, it would seem, is quite offensive to the regular staff. I get that it seems unfair that we can sit there and doss all day AND get paid for it. If I were them I'd hate us too, but there is literally, literally literally, N-O-T-H-I-N-G else for us to do. We take calls. We don't follow up on calls, we don't try and sell stuff to people, we don't have to fill in any paperwork or do any admin. We. Take. Calls. We then might take a message for someone qualified to call them back, we may transfer the call to a different department or a branch so they can speak to someone with an ounce of knowledge, we may even be able to answer someone's queries ourselves (it happens. Sometimes). That's it. That's the extent of our working day. It's futile and pointless but more fool Lloyds (or the temp agency I guess) for paying for us to complete that service. If our training extends to all of ten minutes sat round a whiteboard then that's all we really can do. But now, now we're expected to just sit and stare at the walls of our cubicle for the 362 minutes of the day where once we were quietly indulging our natural geek tendencies. They seem to assume we're Jonny 5-esque robots ('Hmm they appear to have human emotions but can they really be sentient beings? Preposterous!') (of course, the absence of Ally Sheedy and a blacked-up Fisher Stevens running about the place should have tipped them that they are way off on this score). Anyway, yes this makes for a boring day, yes everyone has been moaning about it, no I'm not the only one affected. But I am the only one (as far as I know) that needs to be doing something with my brain for more of the day than I'm not doing something with my brain as, if I don't, I tend to start unraveling a bit. It starts slow, the hunger for alcohol and weed grows stronger where there was no hunger before. I start daydreaming about driving off into the sunset and running away to start a new life (to the point where I sometimes convince myself that this new life is one I actually want to lead rather than just being an elaborate fantasy sequence), I find it harder to look at myself in the mirror as what is reflected disgusts me more than it did before, eventually as my wine and weed intake increases exponentially I'll find it harder and harder to wake up in the mornings and to go to sleep at night. Thus I'll have to drink and smoke to ease myself into a slumber, making it more difficult to pull myself out of bed the next day. And so it goes. It will all culminate in me growing ever sicker with my self-centeredness and I'll hibernate for a while until I feel better again. Except this time I don't want to reach any of those low points. It's a fun ride and all but on the hundred-and-fifty-seventh go round it loses some of the sparkle that the previous hundred-and-fifty-six goes had. Of course, I'm supposed to be starting a job I don't really want at some point in the near future but I still havent heard back from the council guys. They said they needed to check on my references and once that was done would get back to me with a start date. However, the fact that I've heard nothing all week is just fuelling my paranoia that they've stumbled across this blog and have read all the libelous comments I've been making. Still, if I did get sued then that would be really good publicity for my blog and, when all is said and done, isn't that the most important thing? (yes)