Uncommon Escape: The Alternative Timeline of England

My name is Naomi and I work for the British Government. There is a lot of paperwork involved. If you noticed, the title of this column used to be "A Week in the Life of a Government Worker" but it was changed because nobody reads this column any more. Now it's just "The life of a government worker", which is depressing because we don't have lives, we have jobs.

My job is to fill out forms that are already filled out. My job is to check boxes that have been checked. My job is to file papers that have already been filed. The worst part about my job is that while I am doing these things, I imagine what it would be like to escape from my office building with my best friends, Julian and Charlotte, who work in other departments on different floors of the same office building and pretend that we're leaving for good.

But we're not leaving for good, obviously. We can't leave for good because we are government workers and we all make too much money to ever leave our jobs. I suspect that's why we call our little mental escape  "leaving for good". It lets us feel free to play around with each other in a safe space where none of us can get hurt or fired.  If anyone caught us actually trying to leave their offices, they'd read us our rights or something and then probably call security on us. But no one will ever catch us because we're smart enough not to try to leave for good because if we did, it would hurt our feelings if no one came with us. No one would go with us because everybody in the government knows how terrible it is outside the government buildings and they never want to leave unless they absolutely have to (like when their family gets sick).  It's basically like being in prison except instead of "jail" people call it "the outside world". Not me though! Because I'm a government worker trapped inside a government building because of my high paying government job!  I love my job!  I hate every moment of every day but I love every moment!  Because I know that if I left even just for an hour or two, someone else would take over my position and discover all the forms that were already filled out, check all the boxes that were already checked, and file all the papers that were already filed. And if they didn't do those things then all those things would be lost forever! Because of course there's no digital system for filing anything so everything has to be kept on paper by hand! So someone's gotta do it! And since nobody else wants to do it then somebody has got to stay behind! Me and Julian and Charlotte! And as long as we keep doing this work nobody will ever notice if we accidentally disappear for a few hours every Friday night!