Is your office unbearably quiet? Is tumbleweed drifting between the desks, the canteen suddenly deserted and the phones strangely silent? Once again this year I have asked myself why I choose to work in August when everyone else is out playing. I feel like a naughty school child kept in while the rest of the class gets ice-cream and a trip to the zoo.
As a self-employed freelancer I take the view that when everyone else is out of town, I shouldn't be. So I'm here, poised, waiting to fill all those lovely gaps caused by selfish staffers who want holidays when their kids are off. But it's tough going. Nearly everyone you need to reach is ... on holiday. August is a whole month of Friday afternoons when part of your brain refuses to engage and scolds you for swimming against the tide instead of in a pool or the sea like everyone else.
It's not just my brain that's signed an annual leave form - I swear my computer keys are half asleep and every application I need to use takes twice as long. It seems that the hamsters running the internet are working to a skeleton staff in August, just like everyone else.
So what's the solution? Join everyone else in a massive traffic jam or overcrowded airport? How about hitting the trains? I bet they're nice and packed too. Or you could pay three times as much for a break as you would at any other time of year, just for the privilege of not being stuck behind your desk while we're having such a lovely summer.
There really is nothing quite so difficult for humans to bear as the feeling of missing out. Sure, you can look forward to your cheap late-season break when everyone else is back at work, maybe even allowing yourself a secret sense of smugness for still having your holiday to come while they can only look back on theirs.
But I still dream of one day taking August off - it keeps me going while beach-boasting postcards drop through the letterbox.
If you're stuck at work, how do you cope with the tumbleweed, treacle brain, motivational problems and deafening silence? Or is it just a case of grin and bear it?
