dylan

The other day I missed my bus by the most irritatingly miniscule fraction of a milli-zillisecond and decided to catch the train to work. In the cash point at the station was a shiny bundle of 140 quid in those wonderfully disco crisp new 20 pound notes. Now, I am eternally skint. I've been working a part time job for ages, and as much as I liked it, and as much as it suited my laid-back-to-the-point-of-narcoleptic lifestyle, it wasn't exactly paying the bills.

However I'm also benevolent to the bone (and as some have suggested, some kind of goddamn hippy) so I handed it straight in to the Ticket Office. This process made me miss my train, and I was late for work.
Arriving at late work means you have to explain yourself to a roomful of people who look up accusingly and expectantly as you shuffle shamefully in. My tale of money and morals was met with a chorus of incredulous enquiries over how I could possibly be so stupid as to hand in money that I could have so easily kept. You could say that it didn't exactly help my case when I had to borrow money to afford the 37p it cost me to buy a coffee in my break.

On an aside, and pretty much this whole stupid story is an aside, my workplace has water coolers with two options. One option has light blue droplets drawn next to it, the other has dark. As both taps yield a trickle of distinctly colourless water, I'm at a loss to explain why the choice.

Anyway. To be honest, I felt like a bit of a mug. Not a satisfyingly large and chunky one in a pretty pattern either, more like one of those discoloured glass ones that all the teachers had in primary school that were always half full of an unidentifiable grey-brown beverage with a thick layer of something equally unidentifiable and scummy floating on the surface. I spent the entire day being told I was an idiot (and a stupid hippy) and having so many theories on finders keepers rights to personal property and the like thrust on me that by the end of my shift I was pretty certain that the Ticket Office people were going to nick the money and my good deed for the day would be much in vain. However I was also certain that given the opportunity again I'd still hand in the money, so I suppose some people just never learn.

Also, if any of you have a vague belief in karma, how do you reconcile yourself with the feeling that although you've just done something good, maybe you just passed up karma's attempt at repaying you for the last good thing you did?

And as another aside, the main source of the teasing came from a man who is the carbon copy of Jeff from Peep Show and who is rather depressingly bring out my more Mark-like tendencies. I constantly want to whirl round and snap something at him about how men are not simply put on earth to 'kill and knob' but I know it'd come out in Mark's nasally sarcastic and stuttering tones.

Either way, I was so convinced that I'd been a bit of a fool in the eyes of the general public that it was a huge surprise when the next day I got a phone call from a lovely woman called Debs who was extremely grateful to have been able to claim her money. According to her, if there were more people like me the world would be a better place, so shove that up your toga you big beardy killjoy! She also delivered me the biggest bunch of flowers I have ever seen. If only I owned a vase.

P.S. I was actually going to write an update on everything I've been up to recently, but I think I've blathered on quite enough already!