For those beginning to wonder, I am still here.

Work's been a real grind of late and I've just been bouncing along the bottom, working and sleeping. Received a surprise, but most welcome visit from my bro GeordieKeith this weekend however and that reminded me what life's all about. I guess mammoth sessions of drugs, computer games and boundless conversation are just what I'm all about really.

Work was nothing more than an ugly blur today, the best part of me stayed in bed I think, had more sense. It's funny, in a way, but I'd been having the most mindbending nightmares over the last week or so when the stress was on me and I wasn't smoking.

Though I happily let the details drift away from me upon waking I do recall a recurrent theme. Every so often I have dreams that are so real the only way I can tell the difference is that I know I'm dreaming. When the dream is a bad one it's an unpleasant feeling, trying to wake myself up to escape , but whatever the circumstance it's a weird feeling.

Your senses seem to be telling you utterly convincing things and the only way you know it's not real is vague memory of there being some other world. At work today, sat at my desk in a daze, I found myself struck by the exact same feeling. None of it seemed real, which is probably why it was so easy for me not to give a fuck.

Anyway, thanks to Mary and this little cat sleeping in my lap and one very pissed Geordie, I'm feeling better than I was. The will and ability to think is returning and with it comes a post.:

All three things today come from work but hey, work with what you've got I say. To start of quickly, I've recently come to see a senior manager in my department in a different light. Basically I've realised that while he talks the talk, and fuck me can he do that, when it comes to actual work he knows nothing.

What he is good at is taking credit for the work of those under him and what's now also clear is that not only is that how he's got to be where he is, but that the higher he has climbed the better his tactics have worked. He's a lovely guy but a nightmare to work with and, to use a phrase he's rather fond of, as long as he's a hole in his arse he'll be a bad manager.

He doesn't mean what he says, he's bullshitting, he doesn't even know what he's saying.

Now, moving seamlessly into the second point, unless you count this as a seam, shit, anyway, if you were in my office and asked me for my job title I'd tell you, "why I'm an Admin Support Officer of course." The thing is that would be a lie.

Basically our chief exec left a few months back and the decision has been made to stretch the existing management team to fit. This has meant a whole shed load work has been 'delegated' and I'm sure you can guess where a lot of it's ended up.

I'm currently doing my own job and a lot of what our Property Manager and Information Officer would be doing, if we had them. Now in a few months there's supposed to be an Information Officer post being created in our team, so doing this work now puts in me good stead for that. The fact remains however that I'm doing work way above and beyond my job description.

As a result my line manager has put wheels in motion to change me to an Assistant Information Officer and move me up a pay scale. (That other manager I mentioned tried to pass this off to me as his idea by the way.) The upshot of all this is that I'm getting more money than my peers, but I'm not allowed to tell anyone.

I mean what I say when I tell you I'm an Admin Support Officer, I'm just lying. What I say is not what I know.

Last week I had half a day out of the office at our quarterly staff briefing, (a good way for me to keep track of how much of my life I'm pissing away here.) This time there was only one issue to be discussed: the forthcoming merger of housing ALMOs in Leeds.

Council housing is currently managed by six Arm's Length Management Organisations but this system is to be revised into one, two or three ALMO's. Basically we had half a day and a free lunch to discuss and feedback the pros and cons of each option.

The ALMO boards and council wanted our unique perspective on the issue before putting the decision to our tenants in a ballot. we had a presentation before splitting up into smaller discussions groups, mismatched chairs, A-boards and multicoloured markers, you know the scene.

Now to be honest I wasn't really up for this, a mountain of work and no restful sleep had reduced my usually tolerant nature to the point where I just couldn't be arsed. The only points I thought of were raised by other people so I just sat back.

It wasn't until the chair was wrapping up and asked each person in turn if they had anything to add that anything really worth saying occurred to me. I asked if the tenant's decision would be final and was told is almost certainly would be. Then I asked who would be presenting the potions to the tenants and was told it would be the strategic landlord, (I think this is the body that oversees all the ALMOS).

More or less thinking out loud I followed the line of reasoning I'd opened. The strategic landlord will have a preference as to which option is chosen and so will simply present this as the best for the tenants. As I said, starting to be a bit annoyed by what I was realising, the tenants don't give a monkeys about the structure as long as it delivers service.

The decision has already been made! Nothing we said would have any impact as, despite appearances, the power was entirely in someone else's hands. As the group broke up to return to the closing presentation and lunch there grumbles of agreement spread through the group. The merger will almost certainly mean job cuts, which are much easier to sell if you can pretend that the staff themselves were instrumental in the decision.

They didn't mean what they said when they told us they wanted to listen, they were covering their ass. They didn't say what they hoped we wouldn't know.

So it seems like there's a whole bunch of reasons not believe anything anyone says, ever. But that's not enough is it? If, instead of dismissing what you hear all together, you try and work out where that anyone is coming from maybe you can decode some degree of truth, or at least useful information, from the nonsense being spouted.

We all have our own agenda and it's impossible not to let it skew our view. The fact that some people try AND SUCCEED in pulling off some quite breathtaking bullshit can only be taken as a sign that people are forgetting this. In fact come to think of it, religion, politics and economics pretty much all come down to getting people to believe things that aren't true.

Damn man, we've been getting screwed since forever, it has to stop! We can't go on just taking people's words at face value, we have to start actually thinking about what we're doing. To this end I'd like you all to email me all your credit card numbers, pin numbers, DoBs etc to start a fund to stop this sort of thing...