you don't have to be mad to work here

On my desk at work is an ancient post-it note, rescued from an old job bag during the archiving process. It says, in bold black letters: 'Ready to print, laminate, and send to Wales.' This oddly inspiring phrase has become a kind of positive mantra to me. Its complete irrelevance to anything in the present day somehow only heightens the effect. 'Yes!', say I to myself on the morning of every working day, 'I'm ready to print, laminate and send to Wales!' Then I fill in another spreadsheet.

The other day, however, an opportunity to make a lasting contribution fell into my lap. Into everybody in the department's laps, actually, via e-mail. They were asking for a new organ donation campaign idea to replace the existing one, for an interim period. However, my suggested slogan – 'Give us your bloody organs' – has not been used, even though it immediately suggests some striking visuals and is, moreover, that precious thing - a joint message: blood and organ donation. Oh well. There's no doubt that most of the important stuff is decided at meetings, and I don't get to go to many of those.

Not that I don't necessarily benefit from meetings. The other day everybody in the next office went to a meeting about branding and returned with teacakes salvaged from the feast. Admittedly, they were a little bit squashed in transit, and consequently looked like they had been made by Salvador Dali rather than Marks and Spencer. When you peeled off the foil you discovered that the marshmallow foam had exploded out of the shattered chocolate: you couldn't remove the teacake from the foil, you had to put your mouth to it. It was the nearest I was likely to get to eating a teacake slaughtered in the wild, and much more satisfying than a pristine one would have been. This meeting had a good outcome as far as I was concerned.

But in terms of influencing contemporary thought, my best hope would be ringing in to the Jeremy Vine Show on Radio 2, and other people tend to get there before me. There was controversy recently over a 'mental patient' Halloween costume sold in a major supermarket. Alistair Campbell was called in to express his outrage. Well, he should know about mental illness, having doubtless helped to cause quite a lot of it in his time. A self-described former mental patient rang in to say that the costume didn't bother him, and that he routinely wore a T-shirt saying 'Psycho'. 'What do you think of that?', asked Jeremy of a female caller who had been offended by the costume. I'd have given my frontal lobe to hear her say: 'Well Jeremy, he's mental isn't he? I mean, he said so himself.' But she was tactful.

They should have asked disgraced UKIP MP Godfrey Bloom what he thought. He did turn up later to defend his position on calling female UKIP members 'sluts'. This was clearly a joke, but the fact remains: the man's a tool. Make him – I dunno – Mayor Of London or something. Or he can take over from Jeremy Kyle when something happens to him. Anything except politics. Numerous people rang in to say that he was 'a breath of fresh air'. Breath of stale air, more like. He can use that as his mayoral campaign slogan - Godfrey Bloom, A Breath Of Stale Air. I won't even charge.