Except so far I’ve just seen some weird hippy nonsense about “finding your personal angel”. But I guess that’s what you get for writing about being a guardian angel anyway.

As for a quick note, it’s all busy busy busy, the office is relocating and I finally got appraised. So more on that when I get around to it.

That’s all for now, if you’re still reading.

But for the lazy or retarded amongst you I shall sum up:

• Her brother got involved in a gang.
• They decided to stash drugs in her room.
• We burgled their house (and caught massive flack for that)
• She almost got killed.
• He got the crap beaten out of him by the gang.

Fortunately we were able to pull sufficient strings (or apply enough guilt to enough consciences) to make sure they didn’t kill him.

Since then, he’s very clearly seen the error of his ways, and she’s continued to be an unalloyed delight, her parents have finally re-married (other people, natch) and everything’s ticking along nicely. In fact, such is the success of our little fracas with the burglary that the case has been taken off my hands. Although there’s an excellent chance that that’s more to ensure I don’t kill her prematurely.

All of which means I’m out of her life, and on to some other troublesome case. Yay me!

I’ll probably have some other cases to talk about soon. But for now I thought it best to tidy up the loose ends first. Next week staff performance rating systems! You lucky lucky things.

No?

Marvellous, take your time and retrace the entire silly tale should you feel like it. If you don’t feel like it I’m not going to recap it here. That may sound lazy, but frankly it wouldn’t take you that long to read the damn thing. I’ll be buggered if I’m going to quite a lot of effort to pander to you. It’s why these blog things have categories after all.

Anyway, it turns out the photo he’d had left on him by a gang of assailants wasn’t anyone he’d ever known. It was, however, a girl who’d been beaten and raped a few years before. He only discovered this because they found the gang who’d done it, and it had made the local news. So he was left wondering whether it was a case of mistaken identity (as they’d found the gang after he got out of hospital). But it also turns out there’s a vigilante gang going around kicking the crap out of everyone they decide is up to no good, and they’ve adopted the poor girl as some kind of symbol.

Glad I don’t have them on my books.

Regardless, our Asshole’s reaction to this “was this karma, or just co-incidence” situation has been of the decidedly FuckIt ^TM school of reasoning and he’s actually made a serious effort to build himself a new life. He’s moved house, because the commute to the only company who would employ (i.e. hadn’t heard of) him was murderous. So it’s all new life and re-invention, with just a small dose of moral sense this time. He’s even going out with a girl, just one; seriously he’s a slightly changed man.

He’s still an Asshole though.

The coffee thing has been kind of a mixed success, stress levels in the office are down about as far as they can go, but so is productivity as well. People think they’re giving better care, but no-one can quite cope with their workloads. Management are considering starting a hiring round, which would be the first time we’ve increased the size of the office in a while and there’s talk of where all the new people will go. Human resources reckon we’ve got enough room, facilities have decided we’ll need a stack of new offices and everyone’s been ordered to tidy up and cut down on the amount of space they’re using.

I’m finding all of this quite weird. Because I distinctly remember that the last time we did this I came to work one day and the inside of the office had simply doubled in size compared to the outside. But we’re being weaned off divine intervention apparently, so it’s proper “earth like” management techniques for us. They’re even talking of relocating the office to earth itself, because that would cut down quite dramatically on travelling expenses (at the cost of heavily increased commuting costs, but as money for that comes out of a separate pot no-one seems to mind).

Still the I’ve finally started coping with the workload so I may have more chances to keep this up to date now. We shall have to see what the future holds. I can’t believe it’s been over a year since I updated this diary.

I’ve started a twitter feed which I’m finding much easier to keep up to date – so you can keep tabs on my daily activities on a much more intimate level. You lucky lucky things…

So today, when they told us they were going to start stocking the machines with decaf there was nearly a full-scale revolt. Apparently, the higher-ups are a tad concerned about the office caffeine dependency; and despite the literal magic that generates the coffee, they’re concerned about the fact that when supply drops, morality across the world is in jeopardy.

Naturally, people are grumbling, and some of my colleagues are talking about going on strike. No one believes them though; you don’t become a guardian angel by putting yourself first.

Ah well, I’m sure we’ll all get used to the decaf thing, the same way we all got used to having our appraisals case-by-case instead of annually, and the cubicles.

We get these little upsets every now and then. Despite their omniscience, those in charge do seem to change their minds often. All part of the plan I suppose. Still, if you wait around for a couple of centuries things usually change back again.

This is simply because not a lot of moral education happens at Breakfast time. This is because most people haven’t actually engaged with the world at all, so any effort to educate anyone would be completely wasted. This is also because people don’t really do much that you could use as a lesson.

Take for example a young couple waking up early on a Monday. They’re having even more difficulty than usual getting out of bed because it’s Monday, and somehow Sunday night’s sleep isn’t as restful as all the other nights of the week. Through a series of grunts, they manage to agree that they want toast, rather than porridge. Through more grunts, they decide that he wants a cup of tea, but she wants orange juice. Curiously, they decide that she’s going to make the tea, while he’s going to get the juice from the fridge. They sit down, by unspoken consent they listen to the radio rather than talking to each other.

They are barely engaged with themselves at this point in the day, let alone each other. The opportunity for either of them to even make the beginning of a mistake is minimal. All of which means I can sit back and relax, enjoy my coffee and crumpet and read the newspapers.

His business has evaporated, as both employees and clients have left him at the earliest opportunity. His savings have been wiped out, so he’s had to take a job as a labourer for a large building firm. He had to find someone he’d not had any dealings with, because he’s realised too late that the people you meet as you build a life may come in handy when you need to rebuild one.

Meanwhile he’s had plenty of time to think about why he lied to the police about the beating. Normally he’d be happily set the long arm of the law on anyone he could, but this time he held back, and he’d not sure why.

He’s also been trying to figure out the picture that was left on him when he woke up in hospital. It’s a picture of a girl he doesn’t recognise, which makes it all the more curious. He’s sure it’s a message; he’d assumed that it was a picture of someone he’d screwed over, screwed up, or perhaps simply screwed. He’s stared at the face for hours, and drawn a complete blank. He simply doesn’t recognise her.

It is fortunate then, that the news is on, and something has happened today that he may just be interested in.

My job is moral education, plain and simple. I come across religions very occasionally and it amuses me that while they all differ in the details, they all get the main message right.

Regardless, despite all agreeing in the main, it seems a human obsession with creating new versions of all the major religions; from all the various orthodoxies and cults, to novel creations like pastafarianism, the lolcat bible, and this surreal creation epic. This doesn’t just apply to religion though; humans seem generally prone to creating new artificial distinctions in whatever it is they’re into. Just look at the fractious geeks and their coding religions, the plethora of different (yet indistinguishable) genres of music and all the pointless arguments between various sports fans.

I’ve often meant to ask someone in RRD about this, and I got the chance the other day. His response was some complicated drivel about the human animal being a pack animal and being unable to cope with empathy at the scale of the entire human race. His friend summed it up for me: “to a human, people look like ants from a long way away”.

He just has to ask. And so he does, he asks his doctor if he remembers him.

The doctor, of course, does; how could he forget? He could hardly forget that it was with this man that his wife finally became sloppy. It turns out she’d been having affairs left, right and centre for years. Discovering this final affair had actually meant that he’d been able to divorce her. As he’d married her for the money and she’d foolishly not asked for a pre-nuptial agreement, and he’d been quite badly wronged by her, he ended the marriage on a bit of a financial high.

The Asshole screwing him out of the money had simply meant that the divorce courts had looked on him more favourably. His rather good lawyer had made it appear that his wife was deliberately wasting money to slight him.

After the divorce, he’d gone on holiday, met a devastatingly intelligent and interesting fellow divorcee and had quite the most romantic affair of his life.

He’d come back from his holiday with his mortgage paid off, his self-esteem riding high, and the wife who had been annoying him for the past six years gone. He’d met a beautiful woman, fallen in love, and got married again. He was living happily with his new wife and child in a comfortable home, and because he had no mortgage to pay, he could afford to work only when it suited him, which was four days a week.

It turns out; having an affair with his wife was the best thing that our Asshole could have done for him.

Keep Notes: It’s important to know not only where you’ve gone in the story, that’s easy enough because you’ve written it, it’s important to know where you thought the story was going at all points. This is something I’ve discovered, especially in telling the asshole story, because I realised I’d completely forgotten what the piece of paper was all about, until I went back to my case notes.

That’s it really, I did say tips, but I couldn’t think of any others.

I’m clearly not doing very well today.

Ah well, never mind. You can all look forward to seeing just how well that tip has served me on Wednesday.