Kiss me, I'm drunk

Q. How do you tell when I'm on leave?
A. I arrive at work 10 minutes late. Without a tie.

Happy St Patrick's Day to you all!

It was round about 10am I realised I'd actually booked today off work, which they all found very funny. Especially as I was on Duty today. To those of you who don't work in social services, the Duty Officer is responsible for all the random events that occur off the scale of anyone else's caseload. Duty can take you to all sorts of strange places, but fortunately all my crises could be resolved by making the right phone calls.

What couldn't be fully resolved was why I'd left potatoes in Manager's pigeonhole yesterday evening. For the record, it's because I'd headed over to my client's house with a bag full of potatoes, with the full intention of teaching him how to cook a nice healthy snack. Like most things in my job, that's not how it worked out, leaving us with several potatoes left over.

It was round about 3pm when Manager went past my desk.

"Can you call _____ and ask her what time the meeting is on Monday. Anything come up on Duty?" Her eyes flipped down to my hand, as did mine, and she paused.

"And why are you holding a potato?"

"I brought my client a present, and he really wasn't interested. And you were complaining you didn't get any lunch all week."

The perplexed expression dropped for a moment. Then Replacement Secretary chipped in.

"Oh, I thought it was for St Patrick's Day."

Manager inhaled deeply, as she often does when I'm around.

"No no no. Definitely not. It's been in your tray since Tuesday anyway."

She laughed. "I was gonna say... St Patrick's Day, famine?"

She came up to me again a bit later. "So, any plans for your days off then?"

I paused. "I thought I might take a long walk in the sunshine, listen to some birdsong, maybe go to a nice country pub for lunch." Again, she stared at me. "Or drink far too much tonight and take four days to recover." She seemed to approve of this one.

So the plan for tonight is to catch up with Mog and the tail end of the Willesden Green St Patrick's parade. Now I'm on holiday, some bad behaviour is in order. Is it too tacky to keep the green shirt on?

Thinking about it, the green shirt probably did me a favour. The potato thing could have gone horribly wrong.