No lunch break?

Here's a funny thing that happened around this time of the year, 3 years ago.

I used to work for a large pharmacy company. The British call them mutiples (for reasons beyond my ken) while the Americans refer to them as chains. Whatever the name, they're all immensely inefficient and full of assholes.

On the subject of assholes, my line manager at the time visited me while I was working. Every time she visited, it was say how great an employee I was. My sarcasm knows no bounds. In actual fact, it was to remind me who was boss and to spew forth something intensely patronising and condescending from that orifice in her head.

Trish likes to remind me that she is old enough to be my mother and that if I was hiding anything from her, she would know right away. One pharmacist talking to another, folks. This pharmacy chain really molds its managers into the sort you can hate. That, and menopause. 

This time, Trish decided to tell me unofficially that I was not to take a lunch break. Actually, the words near verbatim were "With the coming festive season, none of us will likely get lunch breaks at our work."

This was near Christmas. Some of you may have pieced together what was happening. She was using her senior position to intimidate me into working through my breaks.

What a bitch.

At that point I realised that orifice in her head was different from a human being. The one we have is for talking, breathing, making out and eating. Hers was designed for other things. To be the Mouth of Sauron.