Inpursuitof

I’m pretty sure that the line that won me my job was ‘I’m a list person, I love a list’. I was, of course, lying. I’m not ‘a list person’: I’m neither made of lists nor do I count them as my favourite pets/hobbies/bodyparts. I doubt that there is anyone who genuinely feels passionately about (and hopefully definitely not towards) lists, but they are bloody useful.

Forget race, gender, religion. The human race can be divided only one conclusive way: those who use lists and those who don’t. My first boss battled bravely for a year to convert me to a lister, despite my grave reservations. Fresh out of college, I rallied against this constriction, this idea that everything should be written down lest it be forgotten. It took too much time, I argued. I’ll lose the piece of paper it’s written on and then where will I be, having cleared it fresh out of my mind because all of my trust was wantonly placed in that deceptive piece of processed tree. She gave me a look that was to become all-too-familiar. It said ‘shh’. I shh’d.

I’m constantly on at people to write things down. They don’t want to. I understand it, I do. You think that that’s it, you’re Organised, you’re conservative, you’re Admin. It’s a horrible prospect, but it’s so worth it because Everything is more manageable written down in a list. You can rediscover corners of your brain you thought were lost to enemy hands years ago and HUGELOOMINGTASKSTHATTHREATENTOTAKEOVERYOUREXISTANCEAND KILLYOUINYOURSLEEPWITHASHEEPSKINRUG are robbed of their power once they’re trapped on paper.

3 years of brow-beating from my boss later, I am a convert. So much so that I had ‘washing’ in tan lines on my hand after using the sunbed. Not so clever now…

1) 50p to a homeless charity collector (for a homeless charity, the collector wasn’t homeless)

2) Olivia, after a website meeting.

3) A waiter I snuck up on