oh dear

The New Year was ushered in at Phil and Vicki's with shot roulette. This is technically a game, but not one you can win. I gained this much from it – a ready-made New Year's resolution: never drink again. Which lasted until early afternoon of New Year's Day.

Soon enough I was back at work, where things have been most interesting: people going off with stress, erupting in fits of rage, fleeing the office in tears – and that's just me. Seriously though, it's getting to the point where every morning I expect to find something like a barroom brawl in progress - bodies being flung through windows, furniture smashed over people's heads, someone playing a piano excitedly. This would need to be logged on our timesheets as a 'team meeting.'

Because, yes, we now have to fill in timesheets accounting for our activities for every second of every working day. Well alright then, every half-hour - it's a complex spreadsheet, but not that complex.

The idea seems to be that if people outside our directorate doubt that we do anything, we can show them this spreadsheet and they will be mollified. Or at the very least they will be reassured that we have created and filled in a spreadsheet. Or that someone has.

There were the predictable discussions about which categories things fall into. For example – visits to the toilet. 'Downtime'? 'Logistics'? I think I decided to classify use of the urinal as 'downtime' and anything in the cubicle as 'other activity'. But that's just me.

There has still been no final approval of our move to new premises – perhaps they are hoping that we will self-destruct before then. We were going to move to an open-plan office upstairs in the interim - a requisition was raised for dado-trunking. But this has been abandoned. Funding is tight, we are being told, really rather a lot.

On the plus side, we have abandoned Tragic FM. Or I have, switching back to Radio Two on the one day over Christmas when no-one else was in. A provocative move in this atmosphere, but I seem to have got away with it so far.