Local ne’er-do-wells, miscreants and reprobates celebrated a bumper payday today as a result of the social welfare office water supply becoming contaminated with LSD, street name: Acid. Upon consuming the tainted drink, staff experienced such a level of euphoria that they cancelled all claim reviews whilst also paying out the well-loved Christmas double dole week for the whole month!
I caught up with the main architect of such merriment, Higher Executive Officer/insert bullshit job title here, Assumpta McDeadweight, who still clearly basking in the afterglow of the transcendental experience described her trip to Damascus by way of psychedelia.
“It was just a normal Monday morning for me. which generally consists of a good aul bitch and moan about how tough our entirely redundant,, unqualified, permanently secure jobs are, and how all men are bastards.”
I ask Assumpta, that in an era of quantum computing and the automated facility to open a bank account online in a matter of minutes, why does society still need 50k a year + paid civil servants such as herself to open and decide 200 euro claims?
“Without me, the very fabric of society would collapse, the town would descend into an apocalyptic scene of chaos as nobody would get paid. My position is highly specialized, which involves CC’ing emails in between my six breaks of the day.”
“Anyway, it was after my third of these tea breaks when I began to feel an emotion I hadn’t had since before the menopause all those years ago, that of a mild form of contentment. By the time of my fourth break I was questioning my Catholic faith whilst also coming to the startling conclusion that wage labour is nothing more than a form of modern-day slavery that has been foisted upon us by capitalist elites.
“And that the unemployed I so despised are necessary to a functioning economy as full employment would put too much upward pressure on wages.”
“During these revelations a terrifying, yet liberating, wave of realization crashed over me that my whole working life had been wasted shuffling forms back and forth through a labyrinthine system. That I was merely a pawn in a greater elaborate artifice, created purely to frustrate, humiliate and obstruct my fellow human being from receiving relative pennies to survive.”
“During the subsequent ego death, I became wracked with guilt thinking of the sadistic ecstasy I drew from dragging claimants through endless bureaucratic hoops. The heaving, sweating walls of the 80’s brutalist architecture threatened to consume me as the now deafening clocks roman numerals peeled off on to the floor before dissolving before my very eyes.”
”’That’s it!’ I professed to myself. ‘Time is a distraction devised by a man regulated by the illusion we call reality!’ I quizzically examined my clock-in card before folding it and swallowing it quicker than a Joanne’s chocolate eclair. ‘Time does not exist now in the Department of Social Protection!’ I satisfactorily thought.”
“’Everyone can now go home early!’ I proclaimed, to which a colleague candidly responded, ‘Ah, we were down in the pub most afternoons anyway, just didn’t bother clockin in or out.'”
“Normally, this declaration of brazen insubordination would have demanded the cruellest retribution from me, but by now I was completely at one with the energy of the earth and all its life forms. Instead, I joyously upgraded all social welfare payments to Christmas bonus status, and also adding extra zeros on the payments here and there.”
It is unclear how the water supply became adulterated with the hallucinogen and, crucially, who will pay for the staffs’ drug-induced benevolence. In the interim, Assumpta has been suspended indefinitely pending an internal review. “ Ah sure the worst-case scenario is I’ll be transferred to the H.S.E. for my sins!” she chuckled.
