Plato? Aristotle? Socrates? Morons!

I’m not in the habit of inhaling the miasma of public toilets, but I can’t help noticing the ladies’ loos on my floor at work smell uncannily like toffee. I don’t know whether the unsavoury proximity to the kitchenette or some freakish accident of rodent decomposition is responsible, but it’s a smell I find somewhat unsettling. (Side note: my sister was changing my infant niece’s nappy when an unfortunate bout of projectile poohing struck. Arcing gracefully through the air like a ballerina executing a grand jeté, the erstwhile breast milk landed with a sizzle on the wood-fired heater. The aroma of cooking excrement, so my sister said, was a disturbingly pleasant caramel.)

It was for somewhat more than this trivial reason, however, that I applied for a new job some months ago. Feeling that circumstances were such that only a change of department would do, I limbered up my fingers for some fancy typework and bashed out an application to the Department of Hippies. Now, my diehard followers (cue the chirping of crickets in my abandoned corner of cyberspace) will know that I somehow fooled all the flowerchildren and passed unchecked through the Gates of Recruitment with the correct arcane buzzwords on my lips and suitably convincing referrals in my hands. My new job was a mere length of red tape away.

And so I was left to dither in an agony of indecision; I felt tied to the Department of Meat Products by a fear of change and the pleas of a harried boss who’d already lost too many experienced staff, but impelled towards the Department of Hippies by a new supervisor I rather suspect may be a high-functioning sociopath. For months, while the bureaucratic wheel – square, of course, and oft diverted for no explicable reason – made its slow revolution, I demanded career advice from family and friends, with varying and often unsatisfactory results. My resolve swung like a metronome counting out the beats of a funeral march, for either a significant personal era or my chance of escape would soon be dead and gone. But at last, I made a decision I was happy with: I would join the chanting, daisy-crowned ranks and kick my unpleasant supervisor goodbye.

And then the wheel turned with a final jolt to crush my foolish hopes. The faithless hippies had led me on with sweet-talk and smiles, only to reveal they liked someone else better.

So for now, as much as I dread work each day, nothing remains for me but to suck it up and handle my disappointment philosophically. After all, toffee-scented shit happens.