No sooner had the chance arisen to travel to Scotland with work than it was quickly withdrawn.
The inference was clear: there was no probability of them sending a non-driver all the way up there (we'd have had to book you a first-class flight! laughed my manager.)
One of my colleagues was instead chosen to visit our Scottish office - though, soon after, it turned out that the gun had been very much jumped, because our assistance wasn't required anyway.
For the rest of the afternoon, I sat in relative (to my usual standards) silence, letting it bother me greatly that I had been overlooked.
Later, it occurred to me that I was bothered that I was bothered - the emotional equivalent of dividing one by three, and getting .33333333333333....., generating copies of itself forever.
I'd no particular interest in going to Scotland anyway - the short notice would have left me scrambling around for the limited supply of clean clothing I have remaining, and I'd then have endured an interminable northbound journey, which would have had a lonely hotel room and solitary confinement as the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
I imagine such a hotel room as potentially a final destination: a perfect storm of circumstance for those who are stalked by - or, perhaps more correctly, those who stalk - suicide. December nights in unfamiliar Glasgow, with the whole of the city lagged by layer upon layer of ice; the frozen moon looking on with indifference, and the room's little square proscenium the ideal stage for a man to perform his own death routine.
Yet still, the rejection wounded me - I'd have willingly gone there and been dangerously unhappy in order to do a job. This is familiar.
A couple of years or so ago, my manager's chocolate bar was taken out of the fridge overnight and not only were we expected to react with horror at the great theft which had occurred, but we did precisely that, for the reason that we as a collective felt violated by it.
Similarly, being overlooked for a business-related trip to Glasgow doesn't concern me in the least, because it would have been the worst thing in the world. Yet the false emotions and gestures I am forced to exhibit have a ring of truth to them* - the corporate ghost has been swallowed in its entirety, and it renders us lunatics who believe our own lies.
In the words of Eco: I don't believe it, but it's true.
(*When I'm less tired, I'll attempt to differentiate between obvious falsehoods, and the lies which are true that sustain us - the greatest one of all being Bluefish.)
