The coffee thing has been kind of a mixed success, stress levels in the office are down about as far as they can go, but so is productivity as well. People think they’re giving better care, but no-one can quite cope with their workloads. Management are considering starting a hiring round, which would be the first time we’ve increased the size of the office in a while and there’s talk of where all the new people will go. Human resources reckon we’ve got enough room, facilities have decided we’ll need a stack of new offices and everyone’s been ordered to tidy up and cut down on the amount of space they’re using.

I’m finding all of this quite weird. Because I distinctly remember that the last time we did this I came to work one day and the inside of the office had simply doubled in size compared to the outside. But we’re being weaned off divine intervention apparently, so it’s proper “earth like” management techniques for us. They’re even talking of relocating the office to earth itself, because that would cut down quite dramatically on travelling expenses (at the cost of heavily increased commuting costs, but as money for that comes out of a separate pot no-one seems to mind).

Still the I’ve finally started coping with the workload so I may have more chances to keep this up to date now. We shall have to see what the future holds. I can’t believe it’s been over a year since I updated this diary.

I’ve started a twitter feed which I’m finding much easier to keep up to date – so you can keep tabs on my daily activities on a much more intimate level. You lucky lucky things…

So today, when they told us they were going to start stocking the machines with decaf there was nearly a full-scale revolt. Apparently, the higher-ups are a tad concerned about the office caffeine dependency; and despite the literal magic that generates the coffee, they’re concerned about the fact that when supply drops, morality across the world is in jeopardy.

Naturally, people are grumbling, and some of my colleagues are talking about going on strike. No one believes them though; you don’t become a guardian angel by putting yourself first.

Ah well, I’m sure we’ll all get used to the decaf thing, the same way we all got used to having our appraisals case-by-case instead of annually, and the cubicles.

We get these little upsets every now and then. Despite their omniscience, those in charge do seem to change their minds often. All part of the plan I suppose. Still, if you wait around for a couple of centuries things usually change back again.

This is simply because not a lot of moral education happens at Breakfast time. This is because most people haven’t actually engaged with the world at all, so any effort to educate anyone would be completely wasted. This is also because people don’t really do much that you could use as a lesson.

Take for example a young couple waking up early on a Monday. They’re having even more difficulty than usual getting out of bed because it’s Monday, and somehow Sunday night’s sleep isn’t as restful as all the other nights of the week. Through a series of grunts, they manage to agree that they want toast, rather than porridge. Through more grunts, they decide that he wants a cup of tea, but she wants orange juice. Curiously, they decide that she’s going to make the tea, while he’s going to get the juice from the fridge. They sit down, by unspoken consent they listen to the radio rather than talking to each other.

They are barely engaged with themselves at this point in the day, let alone each other. The opportunity for either of them to even make the beginning of a mistake is minimal. All of which means I can sit back and relax, enjoy my coffee and crumpet and read the newspapers.

My job is moral education, plain and simple. I come across religions very occasionally and it amuses me that while they all differ in the details, they all get the main message right.

Regardless, despite all agreeing in the main, it seems a human obsession with creating new versions of all the major religions; from all the various orthodoxies and cults, to novel creations like pastafarianism, the lolcat bible, and this surreal creation epic. This doesn’t just apply to religion though; humans seem generally prone to creating new artificial distinctions in whatever it is they’re into. Just look at the fractious geeks and their coding religions, the plethora of different (yet indistinguishable) genres of music and all the pointless arguments between various sports fans.

I’ve often meant to ask someone in RRD about this, and I got the chance the other day. His response was some complicated drivel about the human animal being a pack animal and being unable to cope with empathy at the scale of the entire human race. His friend summed it up for me: “to a human, people look like ants from a long way away”.

He just has to ask. And so he does, he asks his doctor if he remembers him.

The doctor, of course, does; how could he forget? He could hardly forget that it was with this man that his wife finally became sloppy. It turns out she’d been having affairs left, right and centre for years. Discovering this final affair had actually meant that he’d been able to divorce her. As he’d married her for the money and she’d foolishly not asked for a pre-nuptial agreement, and he’d been quite badly wronged by her, he ended the marriage on a bit of a financial high.

The Asshole screwing him out of the money had simply meant that the divorce courts had looked on him more favourably. His rather good lawyer had made it appear that his wife was deliberately wasting money to slight him.

After the divorce, he’d gone on holiday, met a devastatingly intelligent and interesting fellow divorcee and had quite the most romantic affair of his life.

He’d come back from his holiday with his mortgage paid off, his self-esteem riding high, and the wife who had been annoying him for the past six years gone. He’d met a beautiful woman, fallen in love, and got married again. He was living happily with his new wife and child in a comfortable home, and because he had no mortgage to pay, he could afford to work only when it suited him, which was four days a week.

It turns out; having an affair with his wife was the best thing that our Asshole could have done for him.

Keep Notes: It’s important to know not only where you’ve gone in the story, that’s easy enough because you’ve written it, it’s important to know where you thought the story was going at all points. This is something I’ve discovered, especially in telling the asshole story, because I realised I’d completely forgotten what the piece of paper was all about, until I went back to my case notes.

That’s it really, I did say tips, but I couldn’t think of any others.

I’m clearly not doing very well today.

Ah well, never mind. You can all look forward to seeing just how well that tip has served me on Wednesday.

And I really didn’t want to give too much away.

But yesterday a colleague and I received a disciplinary roasting the likes of which would have given every demon I’ve ever clashed swords with reason to throw a party. Afterwards I found myself wanting to write about it, but couldn’t – not without giving myself away.

Now I find myself feeling so guilty that I think I probably should.

You see, I was dragged over the hot coals, not because I failed to fill out form 23B properly (which I did, fail to), not because I was caught outside wearing non-departmental issue clothing, (again, guilty) but because I needlessly endangered the life of a client.

You see, we couldn’t find a member of the gang with morals, and the inclination to break into a house looking for drugs. Instead, we did it ourselves. Which meant it was me who almost killed Cass with my complete incompetence. It would have been only the second time we directly caused the death of a client in a several thousand-year history. All this explains the astonishing thoroughness with which my boss tore me a new one yesterday.

Not least, because it was me the last time as well.

Obviously, I’ve failed in that regard, so I shall simply promise to do better.

As for the mugging, it may or may not surprise you to know that we occasionally visit our cases in person. Any visit has to be specially sanctioned by the authorities, we have to adopt a character that no one will interact with or care about (we normally choose tramps or health and safety inspectors), there has to be very little risk and we have to make damn sure we don’t end up on TV. (Seriously, I ended up in a newspaper back in 1305 and I never heard the end of it.) So I was dressed as a tramp, which leads me to wonder just how desperate people are.

Which is why I’ve been agitating for a similar feature in our FLFBs (full life flashbacks).

You know how people say they can see their lives flashing before their eyes when they have near-death experiences? Well, we were so fed up with the cliché that we got the boys in R & D to develop something that would give people the sensation of their lives flashing before them.

It worked so well in the limited release trial that we’re rolling it out existence-wide. I’m pushing the development team to put commentary into version 2. I’m envisioning a (probably slightly tweaked) internal monologue, akin to the devil / angel conscience that we definitely haven’t ever used. Seriously, where did that cliché come from? That would never be effective at all… People learn from the consequences of their actions, having some weird sanctimonious sod sitting on your shoulder all the time telling you to be nice is far too much work for us. People would get dependant on guidance one way or the other, and then – bang! – freewill has evaporated.

No, this idea is much more subtle, making someone them re-live past mistakes is a great teaching tool. But having them say to themselves “Well, that was a fuck-up” while they’re doing it; well, let’s just say it should help re-enforce the point. I was all for including alternative endings too, but that was rejected by the early review team as being “liable to cause proof of religion” which is a cardinal sin.

The only problem so far with development is that it would requires us to fool someone into thinking that they’re genuinely thinking the thoughts on the commentary; and I suck at impersonations.

Now, if you’re worrying about all my cases being neglected while I was on holiday, fear not. There’s a horrifically clever system here at work, which means that no one is left without a caseworker while their worker is on holiday.

It’s called Time Travel, and quite simply I spent last week on holiday, went back in time; and then spent the same week again on holiday. This doesn’t really answer why there were no diary posts; it’s just that last week was really quite busy. I didn’t post from the holiday version of last week, because Magic Angel Internet doesn’t extend to the cottage I was spending the holiday in. That’s not so much due to the remoteness, but due to the fact that I was on holiday. MagicAngel^TM services get told when you’re on holiday and cancel your connection for the period.

It’s supposed to help us relax or something, but it drives me up the wall. But I suppose when you only get a couple of weeks holiday a year it’s important to relax.

You may be asking what kind of time-travelling holiday scheme only allows you two weeks holiday a year; you may be asking what kind of magically time-travelling system can only provide two weeks holiday.

I know I do.

I mean, come on! We’re omnipotent here! What’s with the two-week limit? The officially stated reasons range from quantum psuedobabble to management doublespeak. The best translations we’ve come up with in the office are: “we can time travel, but it’s tiring” and “because you don’t deserve more than two weeks.”

You can take your pick as to which.