Hey kids, looks like your dad’s been snorting Prozac

Anything interesting happen at work today dad?

In a bid to give our children a positive outlook on working life, at the tea-table every day I am obliged to regale our two boys with tales of my day at work.

Given our boys are aged nine and six, it means I have to put the stories that appear in the paper though an internal horror filter.

I am under strict instructions from my wife to keep my stories upbeat and interesting.

The tales of doom, gloom, murder and mayhem are ditched in favour of the more offbeat and wacky that adorn the pages of this illustrious publication.

I get her point though. The sight of a bedraggled world-weary figure stumbling through the doors every day railing against the world before scrabbling for the wine bottle was not a good advert for the great world of work – and that’s just the paper boy.

So it has come to pass that, no matter how poor a day I’ve had at work, I must bounce through the doors with a big smile and a cry of “hey kids, you’ll never guess what amazing story we covered in the paper today.”

I’m beginning to feel like Graham Norton on Prozac.

Fortunately, there’s plenty of offbeat stories to be harvested from the Echo and repeated to our kids. Such wacky tales as: The man trying to break the world record for wearing underpants; protesters picketing chip shops selling frogs legs; and our April Fools Day joke about Sunderland Royal Hospital buying reinforced beds and chairs for super-fat mothers (that was a joke, right?).

To the casual observer I now appear like a man with a drug problem working for an adult version of the Beano.

I’m not sure if it projects a positive image of the world of work, but the boys seem to love it.

Advertisement