Creative Thinking in the Face of an Emergency.

It's that hellish time of year again - Parliamentary Recess, when MPs return to their constituencies, and wander around like lost souls, irritating the hell out of constituency staff and making work for its own sake. The Boss is worse than most. He thinks he's so indispensable that he cannot take even a single day off, and that we need him to open the mail and answer the phones, despite the fact that these things get done every day whilst he's at Westminster - as if by magic.

I wouldn't mind so much if he'd just go and sit in a coffee bar somewhere and take his laptop with him, but he says he likes to be "in the thick of it", and takes over my desk and my computer instead. Then he decides that I need him to dictate incoherent replies to all the letters he has already opened, or at least, those that he hasn't already misplaced.

This means that I am forced to waste time writing down notes that I have absolutely no intention of making any reference to in the replies that I will eventually write, once he's not looking. To make matters even worse, he seems compulsively driven to start swearing whenever I am on the phone to a constituent - which is really embarrassing. I have to keep explaining it away by pretending that he's the boiler repair man, and has no sense of decorum.

The Boss has also adopted his usual Recess practice of sneaking into the office early so that, by the time Greg and I arrive, he's already rifled through our desk drawers, and the fridge. The most outrageous aspect of this - at least as far as Greg's concerned - is that Andrew has helped himself to Greg's entire secret stash of Twixes, and has used up all the milk.

Greg gestures for me to join him in the corridor for an emergency meeting.

"God almighty, haven't you arranged anything for him to do?" he says.

"I tried," I say, "But bloody Carlotta wouldn't play ball. She even cleared space in his diary so he could spend more time in the office with us."

"Bloody woman. Wasn't winning the sodding World Cup enough for her?"

Greg is pacing up and down the corridor like a caged animal, and I am desperate for a cigarette. Already.

"Well, you've got to do something. I can't stand this. I may have to kill him if you don't get rid of him soon." Greg almost looks capable of murder. He has an unhealthy dependency on chocolate.

Far be it from me to boast, but I do have an extraordinary ability to think creatively in an emergency.

"Go and find yesterday's local paper, then search through it for mentions of local organisations that are complaining about something, like lack of funding," I say.

"And?" Greg looks unimpressed.

"Then phone them up, and say The Boss has read about their plight, and is very interested in the valuable work they are doing in his constituency.

"And?"

"Say that he would very much like to come and see it for himself, and could he pop over today?"

"Brilliant!" says Greg, and sneaks off into the Party office to use their phone for his vital secret mission.

Half an hour later, he comes back, gives me the thumbs up, and says,

"Andrew, aren't you supposed to be at your meeting now?"

"What meeting?" Andrew finishes my sandwich in one very over-ambitious mouthful.

"The Phoenix Project in Easemount," says Greg. "Molly, didn't you tell him?"

"God, no. I forgot. Greg has the details, Andrew. Shall I call you a taxi?"

"No, I can drive," he says. "Just put their number into my mobile in case I get lost."

Whether The Boss can drive is a moot point, but the fact that he has the option must mean that he has finally talked Trish into letting him have the car keys back. (She is a very creative individual herself. You probably have to be to survive being married to Andrew.) A few weeks ago, she developed a well-founded fear that Andrew was going to get caught drink-driving and, mindful of the negative Press coverage that would ensue, she decided to take direct action.

While he was engaged in a medicinal drinking session after a particularly hostile GC*, she sneaked into the car park, and drove his car away. She texted me to tell me what she'd done, but I didn't tell him as I wanted to see what would happen when he went to drive home after the meeting. I expected him to come roaring back into the bar, shouting that his car had been stolen. But he didn't.

It turned out that he just looked around the car park for a bit, then gave up and took a taxi home. He obviously assumed that he was just too drunk to recall where he'd left the car, and that he'd remember once he sobered up. The whole story came out the next morning when, staggering downstairs on a quest for coffee and ibuprofen, he spotted the car parked in the driveway of his house. At that moment, he really didn't have a leg to stand on when Trish refused to give him the keys back. God knows how he's persuaded her to reinstate his driving privileges now.

So, due to my low cunning, we are blissfully Andrew-free for the next few hours, which means that I can finally get round to writing proper replies to today's letters, and Greg can spend his time arranging visits to other local organisations. By the end of the afternoon,The Boss is booked up for a good chunk of the rest of this week, and half of the next one too - thank God.

Just before I leave the office, Mrs Cowan phones to apologise that her husband hasn't yet got round to signing his Data Protection form. She says she'll make sure he does it tonight, and that she'll drop it off to me tomorrow morning. Then she bursts into tears, and says that they are now being chased for mortgage arrears, as it appears that their bank hasn't even been honouring those payments.

Honestly, those bankers are such shits.  Not that I'm in any position to criticise - spending all my time fretting about not being able to afford a hotel room for a dirty weekend. I need a slap.

*GC - General Committee meeting, as usual.

Fall-Out, Preventative Measures and Unforeseen Hazards.

Bloody hell, I don't even get a lie-in this morning. Am hoping the office will have to stay closed all day so I can lounge around relaxing - as far as it is possible to relax while waiting to hear if you're going to die - but instead I get a call about 9:30am saying I can re-open the office, oh joy. The results are back from Porton Down, and it turns out the powder wasn't harmful to breathe in - though it was potentially explosive. At least we don't have to keep taking the tablets now.

Then Fiona phones to say she's changed her mind about working here since hearing about what happened yesterday, so that's another intern we've managed to lose within their first week. Can't say I blame her for being nervous as, when I see today's mail sitting on my desk, I don't actually want to open it. I consider sticking it all in one of the big grey plastic HOC* envelopes and sending it to the girls in the Westminster office, so that, by the time they send it back to me, it'll at least have passed through the scanners at the House of Commons. But then I realise that this will slow down our turnaround time, and The Boss won't tolerate that. Not for the first time, I wish death and destruction on both him and TheyWorkForYou.com.

So there is nothing for it but to open the bloody post myself. I hold each envelope out in front of me as if it was a bomb, then poke a letter opener into one corner before turning my back and ripping the blade through the top of each one. This achieves the dubious benefit of making me feel better while I'm doing it, but the results then irritate the hell out of me, because I seem to have cut through the top third of every letter in the process. I have to get Greg to stick all of them back together before we can even start to reply to them.

Greg says that he is so traumatised by having had to expose his body to a "bunch of gym-toned civil servants in a public place" that we are going out tonight to get drunk, in order to obliterate the memory. This seems like a good idea. At the time. When will I ever learn?


*HOC - House of Commons, as usual

Not Exactly A Good Start To The Week

Today I have to strip naked in a multi-storey car park. Then I am hosed down by some guy wearing head to toe plastic. For God's sake, this is all getting too much. It all starts before the new intern has even arrived for her first day on the job.

I am opening an envelope when white powder starts flying everywhere. Greg and I just sit and look at each other for what seems like five minutes, then he yells, "Start panicking!" and runs around pointlessly for a bit, while I try to work out who we should call for help. First a police officer turns up, and then the decontamination unit arrives, along with three fire engines and two ambulances. They evacuate everyone, including all those who work in the neighbouring offices. We're going to be even more popular with them than we already were after the Mr Humphries debacle, thanks to this.

All the officials are wearing full decontamination suits and breathing apparatus, and they set up some sort of bouncy castle-type decontamination thing in the car park. Greg and I (as well as the hapless police officer) are ordered to strip and change into white suits like those in CSI. So not a good look. Then we're scrubbed down with Fairy liquid, which does nothing for my new haircut, before being taken to the hospital for check-ups.

After we've seen the doctors, we're discharged, having been prescribed medication to take in case the powder was anthrax. Even the journey home is embarrassing as God knows when we'll get our clothes back. I'm particularly cross that I was wearing my favourite pair of shoes at the time. I have to go home in a plastic suit and a pair of fireman's trainers, which must be a size nine at least.

Meanwhile the office is to stay closed until the exact nature of the powder is established, and the Police are posting officers there overnight. Bloody marvellous. The usual suspects are going to be leaving so many abusive messages about us not answering their calls that the answer-phone will probably explode.

So now we just have to wait for Porton Down to tell us whether and when we're going to die horrible deaths. Max is furious. He phones The Boss in Westminster, and shouts at him about how he is failing to protect his staff. Andrew goes on about being a "man of the people" and "accessibility" and eventually, Max gets so cross that he has to do my trick of pretending that they've been cut off, as otherwise he says he might have resigned on my behalf, and then where would we be? (Max is not at all himself since his company started talking about redundancies.)

I am too discomfited to do anything for the rest of the day, except sit at home and stew about why The Boss won't let us have all our constituency mail sent to the House of Commons in the first instance, like so many other MPs do. At least then the bloody letters would be put through their scanners before I am expected to open the damned things. The Boss leads such a charmed life - this sort of thing never seems to occur when he's here. If it did, maybe he'd learn his lesson, instead of always claiming that we exaggerate what happens, or blaming us for somehow causing the events.

I'm almost as upset that Andrew has escaped again, as I am by the public humiliation, though that was awful - I didn't even have my new underwear on, as I've been saving it just in case I ever do go on a date with Johnny. Mind you, I wasn't as embarrassed as Greg, who kept muttering, "Bit of weight left over from Christmas. Just joined a gym," for the benefit of the onlookers. I suppose now I'd better check whether my life assurance covers me for acts of terrorism, especially if Max is going to lose his job.