Spiked: Information leak as a travel souvenir

All right, if you have to go on the road for four weeks at the beginning of the year while all the other normal people are working, it's your own fault. During the summer break, time stops a bit, for everyone. The inbox hardly fills up either, even if you forgo a vacation function. But if you break with common sense and take a vacation in February, there's no slow warm-up, no grace period, no mercy.

The perfidious punishment for four weeks of enjoyment and switching off one hundred percent is the feeling of having forgotten everything, but really everything, on the first day of work. Like a child learning to walk. But at the age of 35. On a stick. Great.

First, I take the elevator to the wrong floor. Well, that can happen. I find my office without any trouble, but who are all those people running around? The boss? On my desk, next to a dirty foreign cup, is a stack of newspapers and I have no idea what's in them. Is there a crisis again? Is Blocher now driving Pastor Sieber's Pfuusbus? Is Schawinski now moderating DRS 1? I have only heard about Grusel-Gaddafi's latest brain burnings. You can't even dive in the rainforest in front of this desolate son.

Fortunately, I have good colleagues who are not above updating the lost employee: The clean man Guttenberg screwed up on his dissertation, you're now allowed to break up via text message, and Gottschalk doesn't want to do "Wetten, dass ...?" anymore. Thanks, guys. But I need the following information even more urgently: What day is it today? What time is it? When will the next issue be published? Do I need to write anything for it, and why am I even here??? How does my computer turn on? Where did I put the key to my desk? And who's going to tell me my password - which I've written down on a slip of paper, but which is in my desk, which is locked, and the key ... But I've already mentioned that.

Fortunately, my letter opener is always on my desk. What's the point of having a key if you can do it by force? But regret follows on its heels: 500 e-mails, oh nooo. But maybe they will bring me back to the here and now. "Dear President & CEO," I read. Have I been promoted and forgotten? In addition, Dr. Axel Lehmann writes to me "from Harlesden, North West London, here in England". Here in England? Am I perhaps at the wrong workplace? That would explain a lot, for example the thing about the people in my office, whom I have never seen before. "The choice of contacting you is of a geographical nature", Mr. Lehmann writes further. That's too high for me, I need a coffee.

But the next disaster already awaits me in the kitchen. What was to be done again when this little light flashes on the coffee machine? "Selamat datang," it shoots through my head. That's Malay and means "welcome". I don't know why I just remembered that now.