today i went back to work on an early shift, which for you clueless out there means a 7 am start, and a 5 pm finish.

of course i hate it. i hate earlies, i hate nights...come to think of it i think i hate shift work after all! which technically means i'm in the wrong job altogether, but that will be a different post one day i'll manage to write.
i've been on leave for nearly three weeks and no one has noticed. you'd think that the moment you leave the office everyone would go: "where is she?? she can't be on leave!! surely, however will we manage without her??!!". but the fact is that no, you're just a figure, you're a statistics, you're a pin number onto your windows account.
oh they did ask where i'd been, presuming that since i'd not been in for a while i had been one of the following: on leave, made redundant or dead. and since corpses don't talk (except on telly, that is) they automatically excluded the deceased variant. forget the redundancy, where i work it's not contemplated, since idiots never stop harassing us, you need all the people you can get to keep up.
so really the only option available in the end is the annual leave one. but that's not glamorous unless you've been to fiji...and if you're back it means your holiday is finished, so it's already a thing of the past. so next time, i'll pretend i was off dead and then somehow came back to life, to make it interesting.