Six Digit Fix

My best work buddy has gone to Dubai on three-week secondment. I am taking it quite badly. Every night I cry myself to sleep, alone, on a windswept moor. During the day I am listless and desk-bound. Sometimes I drag myself over to his desk but it's quite a long way away and anyway I've started to get some funny looks when I sit in his seat and pretend to be him for hours on end. His colleagues object to my answering his phone in a Scottish accent and then weeping uncontrollably for the rest of the conversation. They always seem to know that it's me.

The days really drag now. Instead of spending hours creating fake meetings and emailing pictures of teeth, or pandas, I have to do my work. I rather resent this, as it's piled up somewhat during the last month or so. To put it off, I talk to other, neglected, workmates and try to come across as mopey and downcast, for the sympathy in it, but they haven't really noticed.

In the evenings I sit at home and drink gin.

forlesan: "be deprived of, lose, abandon," from the Old English forleosan; for- "completely" + leosan "to lose".