DISTRACTED BY DUCKS

I was day dreaming in a team leaders' meeting the other day. The ducklings outside were shaking themselves into fluffy balls and the rain was circling into the lake. Under the fluorescent lamp and the gaze of the others inside, in here, in the zoo, the world was a little less interesting.

"I spent two hours going over it last night at home," growled one of the lions, referring to a dull piece of paper he didn't really care about. None of the others raised an eyebrow. This is normal. This is... expected.

I don't think my life is compatible with the lives of managers. They don't have extracurricular activities; they just have work, and work is their master. This wasn't the first time I'd heard this. A few weeks ago, I asked them how they actually had time to do anything practical given that the managers stack most of the days with meetings.

"That's what evenings are for," said one, with a sigh.

Sure, some of these people have kids, but from the look of it they barely interact with them, or look up from the flickering laptop screen on the sofa.

I thought that we were supposed to work to live, not live to work. What nonsense kind of future is this - where work spills over from its sloppy container and seeps into the rest of your life? Are most of us living in a prison of our own design? I felt like spinning round in my chair like Admiral Ackbar and shouting, "It's a trap!"

I mean seriously, who cares about this stuff to the point where it pollutes the best bits of your life? Is any of it really that important? What's it actually for?

I didn't say any of that out loud. But I am more resolved than ever, never to take work home with me. It's not happening. It can't happen anyway - I've got too much going on in the rest of my life.

I turned back to the ducks. They don't have any worries do they? Even in the pouring rain, they seemed to be loving life out there on the lake. There's a simple freedom to being a duck.

That might go down as the weirdest sentence I've written in any of these 749 blog posts.

You know what I mean though.