Ah, skiving
About fifteen years back I got into a shitload of trouble at uni and was told that I'd have to get a responsible job in the media for a few months if I wanted back in. So I got a summer job at a popular Belfast morning newspaper (hint: not the proddy one).

I'd been in there before, on the newsdesk, and had a great time (and this was back in the days of typewriters and carbon paper, none of your computers here). Sadly, second time around I ended up in the marketing department, which was staffed entirely by subhuman cunts who took out their frustrations at their hideous pointless lives on the most junior person about, i.e. me, by treating me like a moron when I was quite clearly nothing of the sort.

So I decided that if they were going to treat me like a moron, I was going to have to act like one. For various reasons, I was three floors down from the marketing offices, in a cupboard out by the printing presses. This didn't have a typewriter in it, so whenever I was asked to type something, I had to walk through the newsroom, head upstairs and borrow my boss's secretary's typewriter. Inevitably, she would ring down to my office ten minutes later to say she needed it back. "No problem," I would tell her, and carry it back up the stairs. "However, could you please be sure to let me know when you're finished with it? I'm in the middle of typing something and I need it back."

It would ususally take them three or four days to notice that the page of typing they'd asked me to do on Monday morning still hadn't been typed up - days which would be spent doing crosswords, reading, smoking spliffs and indulging in absolutely epic lunches.

Shortly after this, they started sending me out on the road to measure distances between almost every newsagent in Northern Ireland. I knew fuck all about anywhere outside Belfast, so I'd hit the road first thing in the morning then cruise around all day essentially at random, doing very much as I did around the offices. (And if I had to drive around for five or six miles to find a shop that was actually arond the corner from the previous entry on the list, down it went in the book as "5-6 miles".)
(Wong Fei-Hung - now with added flickr.com (see profile), Wed 27 Apr 2005, 18:00, Reply)