Songs: An Office Ballad

notes / gigs / releases

Please don't rewrite my bulletin
Internal Comms
If you rewrite my bulletin
You will make it wrong
You cannot make it sexy
You cannot make it fun
It's simply to inform all staff
The canteen shuts at one

Please don't upgrade my profile page
The intranet guys
The content on my profile page
Was recently revised
But now you have downgraded it to 2005
Mispelt my name and cut the text off
Halfway through a -

Please do not query my expenses
The finance team
Filling in the forms you sent me
Took me half the week
I promise you that this is not
An international scheme
To con the company out of
The sum of 60p

A card to sign and a Christmas Do
A chat while we make a cup of tea
Annual Appraisal
An office life for me

Further to me earlier
Email to HR
In retrospect I realise
I went a bit too far
Slashing all the tyres
On the Change Consultant's car
And setting off the fire alarm
In the seminar

In order to apologise,
In The Usual Place,
You will find that I have baked
A gluten free cakes
Receipts outlining from which budgets
The ingredients came
Are in a brand new bulletin
On my profile page

Published by Wipe Out Music Publishing

I've written elsewhere about my main objection to folk music i.e. that surely the point of The Tradition is to sing Actual Working Songs, rather than do dreary versions of ones from a hundred years ago. I have thus written a LOAD of songs about work, but I don't think I've ever gone all the way and tried to write a Folk Song about it.

UNTIL NOW! This one came about not long after I'd started working in my most recent job, and I was having trouble with people re-writing stuff that I'd written and making it incorrect. The first first popped into the BRANE and then, over a couple of days, so did the rest. The TUNE is extremely basic because, after ages trying to work out something fancy, it turns out that that's just how my songs go.

Entirely coincidentally, I also wrote it not long after seeing Richard Digance. I'm pretty sure no-one would notice.