At Work and in the Office

Story · all 20 words

A Thursday

Nothing went wrong at work last Thursday and nothing went right either, and I have been thinking about it ever since as a fairly accurate description of office life.

It began with a meeting at nine that had been arranged in March, postponed twice, and finally survived. Twelve people were invited. Four attended. Two of those had no idea why they were there, and one of them said so out loud in the first minute, which I respected enormously.

The subject was a project that has now been running for fourteen months. Somewhere in the second half hour it emerged that nobody in the room was actually in charge of it. Three people believed somebody else was. The deadline, which is in November, was described by one colleague as “comfortable”, and everybody wrote that word down.

Afterwards I went back to my desk to write a report that has been on my list of tasks since the beginning of the month. I wrote four hundred words, sent it to my manager, and then realised I had attached the wrong document. The one I sent was a shopping list. She replied with a single full stop, which I have chosen to read as kindness.

At eleven the printer stopped working again. It has been dying slowly since March, and the whole department now treats it the way you treat an elderly relative: gently, and with low expectations. Somebody said that we should really sort out the printer. Everybody agreed. Nobody has.

At lunch I actually took a proper break – twenty-five minutes, outside, no phone – because our new head of training spent a whole afternoon last month explaining why eating at your desk is not a break. It was the single most useful thing anybody has taught me in two years, and I still forget it four days out of five.

The afternoon was better. I had to deal with an angry email from a customer who was entirely right, and once I stopped defending us and simply agreed with him, it took nine minutes. Then I did two hours of overtime, which I did not mind, because the office is quiet after six and I get more done between six and eight than between nine and one.

At about seven my colleague Huda put her head round the door and told me she had finally asked for a pay rise, after four months of deciding to. They said yes immediately, which she found insulting, and she is probably right.

The staff here are good people. Somebody always cancels something, the printer is always broken, and the project will still be running in November. But at half past seven on a Thursday, Huda and I sat on a desk eating somebody else’s biscuits and laughing about the shopping list, and that is most of what a job actually is.