AFFORGANISATION

I had been working on an extremely cumbersome and complex document for an awfully long time, in the stygian gloom of that office, cut off from an air supply and natural light. I might just as well have been working in a bathysphere, if that is not a bathyscape, or scope. It was getting on for four in the afternoon, and my eyelids were starting to droop. Beads of sweat were breaking out on my fevered brow. I stared listlessly at the text on the computer screen. There was something else I still had to do; another task that I had set myself on this humid, sweltering day, that I had not yet accomplished. I referred to my notebook. Since my short-term memory disappeared with age and I found myself forgetting what I had agreed to do five minutes after the agreement was reached, I tend to write everything down. After the same five minutes, I cannot understand what it is that I have written, but that's another matter. I read my note. I needed to rationalise the wording in my document. I had to change every mention of the 'noun' 'firm', i.e. a business rather than something that doesn't yield to the touch, to the noun 'organisation', because 'firm' didn't cover every aspect of meaning, whereas 'organisation' probably did. I was working in an antiquated version of Microsoft Word, because my client has not upgraded the MS Office suite since about 1880. This Word has a tendency to fall over fifty times a day when any file reaches the magic size of 1 megabyte, and mine was twice that. I had to keep saving it every forty seconds. However, this version does have 'a find and replace' function, whereby one can select a word and replace it with another word more suitable to the narrative. As the word 'firm' appeared no fewer than thirty-nine times in the document (did I mention that this wasn't a particularly riveting read?), I decided to replace it using this tool. I forgot, however, to match the whole word and the whole case, so the tool hunted out every occurrence where the letters f-i-r-m appeared in sequence and replaced them with 'organisation.' I realised this as soon as I had pressed the 'enter' key and I sat back in horror as everything from 'affirm' to 'firmware' was swept away on a tide of afforganisations and organisationware. Laboriously, I sought out each of these solecisms and amended them, one by one, all sixty-five of them, or so I thought. I emailed the file out to a colleague for his comments and packed in for the night. I came back to the office the next morning to an irate Voicemail message from him: "Is that you trying to be clever again, Hardwick, with your poncey long words that nobody's ever heard of? The Team and I have spent twenty minutes trying to work out what this means. What the Hell is 'conorganisation' anyway?'