21st Century Schizoid Man

I haven't seen Breaking Bad but I have seen Aaron Paul's X-Box ad, and now I no longer feel a pressing need to see Breaking Bad. That ship has sailed, I feel. In any case, can anything that everybody likes really be any good?

In the ad Paul is seen lounging on his sofa (or in any case, a sofa), playing computer games and chilling out after playing 'the role of a lifetime' as he describes it. Oh what, is your career over then? Apparently not, since he is at pains to assure us that he is 'busy' – and indeed he seems to have a script in his hand (presumably not the one for this ad) and at the end he answers his phone. We only hear one word of the resulting conversation ('Yo!') but I think we are meant to assume that this is not the pizza delivery boy double-checking the address.

Yet there is something weird about showing a man slobbing around playing on his X-box and then insisting on how 'busy' he is. It's schizophrenic in the popular sense of the word - an impression only enhanced by the fact that the X-Box allows Paul to play games and watch his 'favourite shows' at the same time ('This is insane!', he crows). Can this be the key to Breaking Bad's universally good reputation - nobody was really watching it?

Adding to the insanity is the fact that Paul talks to his X-Box, and not just his – everybody else's. Apparently his command 'X-Box, on!' has caused machines all over the country to wake from their slumber and – for all I know - start taking over the world.

Still, I rather like it that all his orders are prefaced with the word 'X-Box', since it guards against the melancholy possibility that some other household appliance might think it is being addressed, and suffer an identity crisis ('But Aaron, I'm the vacuum cleaner, I can't record Emmerdale!')

Of course this isn't really insanity (inanity, perhaps), just the way of the world. One must adapt or die. At work we had a big meeting about the new structure we are moving into – not the actual bricks-and-mortar building we are going to occupy (this physical move is currently scheduled for next May) but the new department structure – which is going to be a 'matrix structure'. Uh-oh. I've seen that film. The paperless office is one thing but now I'm starting to think the new office won't have walls, floors or ceiling either. Maybe we'll just stay in bed and experience the working day from there. Mind you, that doesn't sound too bad, come to think of it.

A further spell of unreality is cast over the whole thing by the fact that we are moving into what is continually described as the 'SHU', or Stock Holding Unit. That everyone pronounces this 'shoe' lends it all a fairy tale air ('When we all go to work in the shoe...')

Finally, maybe we will all end up working from home. If I have a home. I came back from this meeting to discover an e-mail from Mat, headed: 'Is your house on fire?' Was this a new marketing technique by his design company? If so, it was effective, since I rang him right away, in a panic. It turned out that the houses on fire were further down the road and had been dealt with. My reality stabilised again. Or seemed to.