Twunts - people at work who hurt you

Riding the twunt.

I always knew the point would come, when every minor lapse and
distraction I had succumbed to in the last year would be thrown back in
my face. Of course, such is the way with face-back-throw-ins, I had no
answer. I simply sat there, in the office of the person sacking me, and
let the list of black marks hit me like the public stoning that it
was.

To the reporting of all the times I hadn't jumped quick enough, I
stared down. To the terse reiterations of the "reality" of my
situation, no response. Even when my own sorry circumstances were
wielded against me with (surely) carcinogenic spite, I could not muster
anything beyond a soppy liberal sigh. I was fucked.

I concede that there were days which I filled with strictly personal
occupations, the trawl of the internet, the image manipulations which
were merely high-res doodles, the cigarette-laden daydreams. These
occurred during the times that the office was solely mine, times when I
had no immediate responsibility to fire me up.

Not that the job itself was not inspiring, I had wanted to work in this
field for ages and ages. Pursuing interesting and aesthetic ideas and
turning them into huge showbizzy projects was something that everyone
wanted as work. But the reality of a job is that it will only ever be a
dream if it remains unobtainable, unrequited.

The early days were characterised by me delivering results, and
regularly. It was a pastiche of those television shows where the
dynamic reporter/police detective/consumer rights person is at their
desk, avidly poring over thick files, two attentive colleagues awaiting
their vital response, people rushing up with more files to receive
instantaneous approval or rejection. Servile receptionists holding
their impossibly manicured hands over the phone with a pleading look in
their eyes " Please take this call, they've been trying to reach you
all week! ". This was my honeymoon. I was doing it right and doing it
all over the place.

Initially there was a lot of praise, perhaps not full-on gushing, but
definitely a constant babbling brook of bright approval. In meetings I
was introduced with a smile as " the one who has recently turned our
world upside-down ". The difficulty with this, of course, is that I was
receiving a lot of disturbing attention within the hermetically sealed
world of an office. The teachings of Confucius and Zen came into their
own in this situation. I deflected the jealousy of others, by the
careful use of worried frowns and nervous asides. To the other denizens
of this tiny world I was not some posturing golem of efficiency, I was
the village idiot on a roll.

There was still the matter of the twunt, however. The twunt is that
person in the office who knows almost everything about you within an
hour of you arriving. They manage this by having the ear, and mouth, of
those who are in control. This privileged position has been attained by
the twunt via a special and obscure alchemy. Twunt-dom arises from the
alchemy of the following self-extracted formula.

" The person you would like least to possess knowledge and influence,
always has it in superabundance. The quantity of advantage they enjoy
is always inverse to their lack of productivity. "

This means, in layman's terms, that the twunt's ability to become an
agonising sore on your working day is because they have nothing better
to do. With no demands being made on a twunt to deliver work, they can
literally devote themselves to undermining every last gobbet of
self-belief and psychological sanctity that you possess.

The twunt is always the first to remind you of the tiny, infinitesimal
boundaries that are invisible to the naked eye. That desk cannot be sat
on, because it has a weak leg. If any coffee cups find their way into
that room, you can be sure of fireworks from that particular creative
genius. Cream cakes are only brought in when either a board member is
visiting, or if somebody has been fired for sleeping with a client. The
twunt cannot resist laying out demarcations and signifying the cliques,
factions and improvised hierarchies in a range of situations. Their
intended dominion is your ragged soul, and the pens of twunts are never
chewed.

A rabellaisian character, on meeting one of these insufferable pedants,
might respond with a slap of the thigh, a hoary guffaw, perhaps even
leaping off something. This can be effective. If the twunt is
psychologically robust however, this approach may be deflected with
little more than a raised twunt eyebrow. Favoured by the New York
offices, there is the model in which the initial approach of the twunt
is greeted with a massively-overpowering instantaneous bonhomie and
mock-fascination, this approach does not work with London twunts, who
are impervious to the theories of anybody from Los Angeles.

Technically, the twunt has no power. But in your presence they will
connive and barter until they have your work within their sphere of
lardy influence. This will begin the process known as "twunt-riding",
in which lovely normal people, like you and I, find our fates pinioned
to the whims of the twunt, a situation arising from a manoeuvre more
complex than a one-armed man making an origami centipede. The full
twunt-riding experience is delivered when you begin to attend meetings
at which the twunt chairs. A meeting like this is akin to having wires
inserted through your ears, passed down through your eye sockets to be
hooked through your kneecaps, and then being forced to Cossack dance on
a cobbled street during an earthquake. Your pain will become obvious.
It will be noted. There will be discussions about your attitude. This
is riding the twunt.

When the twunt finally delivers the killer blow, which in my case was
the activity report which flatlined for a month, be prepared to witness
the so-called "twunt hole ". This is like a black hole, except this
twunt phenomenon is an emotional state from which no sincerity could
ever escape, as the entire smugness of their vapid life is condensed
into a dot no bigger than the delivery end of a Rotring .003 pen.
The twunt will sit opposite you, as your blood turns to warm vinegar,
and imperceptibly form a "twunt hole", and the person dismissing you
never notices.Immediately following your sacking, all your work reverts
to the twunt's portfolio of successes through a weird office succubus
arrangement. And so the twunt is exonerated and waits for the next new
lamb to take up a workstation within their grey vista.

So, back to the situation. I sat there and watched my present
occupation become my previous occupation, the twunt had been called in
to take notes. The deed was done, the office day ended there for me. I
was, at least, able to get to the bookies for the 3.30 at Kempton,
where there was a horse running called " Two go Hunting". It was a
sign. I lost my last twenty quid. In writing this thing, during a spell
check, the computer wanted to subsitute the word " twunt " with the
word "taunt". I wonder...what kind of genius built this
dictionary.....and whether they received the credit for it.