Right Dabbsy my old son, you can cram this job right up your BLEEEARRGH

Something for the Weekend, Sir? Slinking away early from yet another works leaving party this week, I was reminded with some regret that I will never get one of my own. All those nice words spoken, all those pats on the back, all those clinking glasses of pub house wine. How lovely it must be to be surrounded by so many faithful colleagues celebrating the fact that you are pissing off at last.

The reason I can’t have a leaving do of my own is because I am not employed. Rather, I get paid for each story I write, each specific project that I complete or for each hour worked on shift. Even when contracting, I never stay anywhere long enough in a single continuous diary entry to even consider myself as “leaving” when the project’s over.

And even if I did, I’d keep quiet about it, in case I really was shown the door. Much of my repeat business derives from curating overlapping projects within the same building, such that none of my hirers know exactly who is paying for me at any one time, and the purchase order system is way too much of a ball-ache for any of them to find out for themselves.

Strictly speaking, I am employed: I am self-employed. A lot of people fantasise about quitting their jobs to work for themselves, so I suppose I am already living the dream. But the only way for me to have my own leaving party would be to do the opposite: quit freelancing and take on full-time wage-slavery employment.

I could then hire an upstairs room in a pub near my home, invite all my freelance colleagues, and after getting wildly drunk, abuse my employer. Being self-employed, this means I would have tell myself to go fuck myself and that I should stick my job up my own arse.

Three months later, I’d have to come back crawling to myself because my new employer had changed his mind at the end of the probationary period and decided to give the same job with a different job title to his nephew instead. I could then tell myself, with great satisfaction, that I had a nerve coming back after everything I had said about myself, not least after having thrown up on myself at my leaving party, and I would only consider taking myself on if I accepted a lower salary.

I’m not one for confrontations. Better stay as I am.

What fascinated me at this week’s big leaving do wasn’t the sheer number of people this person had worked with but that she remembered all their names. Add to this those colleagues and customers she had dealt with but who could not attend, we’re talking about hundreds of people, and I bet she could name them all.

Apologies if I have mentioned it before in this column, but I find names challenging, especially first names. So difficult do I find it that I have considered branching into a career in which the inability to make sense of a person’s name is considered not so much a disadvantage as a positive boon – as a Starbucks barista, for instance.

Ah, remember this?

During a six-month stint editing a computer magazine at the turn of the century (ooh, all those lovely articles about the Y2K bug, it was brilliant), I had a skeleton staff of five. Right up to the last day, I kept their names written on a Post-it note along with a diagram of who sat at which desk.