Four weeks. Twenty days. Around fifty cups of herbal tea. Forty trips on the cross river ferry. Approximately 500 various responses to the questions “How was your trip?” and “Is your book published yet?”. Five pairs of laddered stockings. Ten calls to the IT Help Desk to recover forgotten passwords.
That’s how long I’ve been back in my corporate girl shoes for. And yes, it’s been a massive shock to my creative girl way of life (especially the herbal tea bit – I’m not drinking coffee at the moment and it’s nearly killing me). Such a shock that it took about two weeks for my brain to even really start functioning again. On my first day my boss Lorraine asked me to start thinking about developing a dashboard to measure KPI’s for Bid and BD costs, and I nearly had to ask her what a KPI was. Key Plot Item? Keep Pimms Iced? I remember just nodding and writing it down, trying to look serious and knowledgeable, all the while wondering how long it was until home time.
Unsurprisingly, not much in Corporate Girl world has changed in six months. Lots of new faces to avoid making eye contact with in the lift and a new job, but pretty much everything else is the same. The biggest surprise was only having 1800 emails in my inbox on day one, most of which were junk. Although there were a few in there from around March/April from people asking me to please run a workshop for them. Which was four to five months after I left – meaning that they hadn’t even noticed I was gone all that time. A good reminder that I’m not nearly as indispensible as I would possibly like to think I am.
As for my new role? So far, so good. Mostly because I still don’t know exactly what my role is so I’m able to bring some creativity into my corporate girl life when answering the question ‘So, what are you doing now?’ I’ve taken to just murmuring something about ‘global projects’ and ‘client development’ and I find that it tends to make people’s eyes glaze over, stops any further questioning in its tracks and lets me get back to surfing the net and stalking people on Facebook (just joking Lorraine. I swear. I would never stalk anyone on Facebook).
I will admit that the fulltime-work/writing juggling act is not nearly as easy as I thought it was going to be. I distinctly remember writing a blog entry several months ago (around the time I was in Spain and had 24 hours a day to devote to nothing more taxing that writing, eating and sleeping) where I stated that I thought it would be bloody easy to fit it in when I went back to work. Just an hour or two a day, that’s all I need.
Hmmm…..
You see, it turns out that spending my day talking about the impacts of the carbon tax on our clients is strangely draining on my creative juices. And the fact that I’m addicted to Masterchef hasn’t really helped either. The only writing I seem to be doing at the moment are emails to my accountant to organise my tax return and filling out forms to get my drivers license replaced. Even my beloved blog is slowly going to seed.
I clearly need a new plan of action.
So. I’m going to start up a new blog. Exactly what it will be about is still a work in progress – but it will be something that lets me continue to blog about my book, bachelors or bus station toilets. Stay tuned. I'll tell you all about it next week....just as soon as bloody Masterchef is over.
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