Boredom
Friday, June 18th, 2010
I’m sick of football, my head is full of hay-fever and the council are digging up the road outside my office window. But things could be worse. I could work for the insurance company I spent several hours with the other day.
Along with various other organisations, I had been invited by this particular company’s beleaguered HR department to an afternoon aimed at encouraging employees to make the most of all that the city around them has to offer – lunchtime music concerts, talks and walks, gyms and sports clubs, libraries and short courses, massages and spas, volunteering opportunities and in-house social clubs etc. etc. The clichéd work/life balance may have been the message, but there were loads of interesting things to do.
But well, you know what I’m going to say next.
Were the employees interested? No, of course not. They just drifted around looking faintly bored, if not perplexed, by the whole thing. As one man told me ‘We don’t have time for this kind of stuff. I go to work and don’t have time to do anything else other than watch TV’ and another ‘Why would I want to do a course for fun? What’s the point?’. But mostly, they all just looked non-plussed.
Admittedly, some people were interested in life outside work and commuting, and to give them the benefit of the doubt, others may have been put off by the continuous loop of background ‘motivating’ music featuring the likes of ‘Happy Talk’ from South Pacific and C&C Music Factory’s ‘Gonna Make you Sweat’.
Perhaps the world of insurance just attracts boring types, but really?! Life must be tragic for some people.
