"Did ye get your hole last night?"

When you have a tough job ‘job humour’ is the only way to get through it. You don’t really have it in academia, as the main downtime job of academics seems to be to constantly bitch about everyone, not that that doesn’t happen in every job, but the camaraderie of shit jobs invoke a bizarre humour that is more or less just repeating mundane phrases until they’re funny, you know..kinda like The Fast Show. In my current job* it’s just throwing something from long distances into the sink and saying with an ironic measure of pride in an assured tone… “skills”. That’s it, simple effective workplace humour that, like a meme, you can’t help repeating once you’ve heard it. Hey, it may be mundane but it’s better that the work humour at a bakery I worked nights on summer holidays (12 hours a night, 6 nights a week…for tuppence a month…you were lucky etc) which simply involved going up to a coworker and asking ‘did you get your hole last night’** or referring to a bread-crumb maker which vibrated ever so slightly as 'the wanking machine'. I make up my own humour, humming the 'The Imperial March' to myself when handed big grey Ikea bowls that look supisciously like Imperial gunner helmets, and remembering Will Ferrell's Gus Chiggins sketch from Saturday Night Live when I get handed mussel bowls that look like prospector's clanky pots.

Oh, on a related bizarre old TV note, the ones at work also know who ‘Pob’ is and do occasional impressions of him, which is the kind of thing that I respect in a person over say, having a car, playing sports or being religious. I like shows that never get repeated, it’s the media version of fossils found at certain levels of the ground, if you remember Pob you are a certain age, tying to explain a wooden-headed Welsh puppet that lives inside your TV and then spits on the screen and writes his name in it to anyone not of the ‘age of Pob’ and you will look like a lunatic. Kinda like that bit in Spaced, ‘it’s too orangey for crows!…’

*main duties: getting covered in crap, wearing an apron, getting treated like a trained monkey.
**My response was: "how in sweet fuck can I 'get my hole' if I'm fucking here every night, and I'm staying at my folks place, and I'm in rural Ireland and am social outcast because I like comics rather than playing GAA football or walloping people?"