by James Birk
Chapter 3
There was a queue in Markbys, which threw my schedule out a bit. Well ‘queue’ is perhaps too strong a word but there were at least two other people waiting to be served, which meant that my bacon baguette was going to delay my arrival in the office by ten minutes rather than the anticipated five, which was a problem because I had already been five minutes late for work when I had entered the sandwich shop. Nonetheless I’d always been taught that breakfast was the most important meal of the day and I had no intention of ignoring that particular maxim. Besides Kirsty wouldn’t care, or probably even be aware, that I was late, so unless Grant was on the prowl all would be well.
Eventually it was my turn and the ‘slightly-too-cheerful-for-that-time-in-the-morning’ lady behind the counter produced my baguette in a commendably speedy fashion. I debated whether to eat it on the way into work, but decided that it would be better to hold off and eat it at my desk, so as to reduce my tardiness a bit. I power walked out of the shop and around the corner to the eyesore that was Kingdom House, fifteen floors of seventies architecture at its most abhorrent, which served as the Cardiff base of FFS.
Security at FFS was pretty tight. In order to get into the building you needed to show your ID card to the security guards at the entrance, and they had been known to refuse entry to even senior management if they didn’t have a pass. Once past the security guards you again needed to use the card to open the doors to the offices electronically on all fifteen floors and whether your pass would allow you entrance to a particular office was dependent on your grade within the organisation; I only had access to five out of the fifteen due to being a lowly inputter. In spite of this security it wouldn’t have taken the most ferocious of evil-doers to overpower the somewhat overweight and elderly security guards. Access into the offices was even easier, as you generally only had to follow someone who did have a pass for that particular floor.
I generally adopted this policy upon my arrival to work, not out of any necessity, but more because it was a completely unenforceable rule that one should always swipe one’s pass when entering the office, and it had become a little game of Tim and I to break as many rules as we could without putting our jobs in danger. I was up to thirteen, Tim claimed to be on seventeen but frustratingly he wouldn’t tell me what his extra four were.
I entered the office at nine forty-five which was exactly fifteen minutes later than the latest reasonable time to start work, even with FFS’ partial flexi-time policy which allowed employees to regulate their own start and finish times and lunch breaks outside of core working hours. Technically core working hours started at half past nine but I had an excuse for my lateness should anyone have wished to hear it, which no-one ever did. Except Grant, the irritating pedant who was in charge of my section of New Business – he cared about anything and everything to do with FFS. He was also a bit sharper than Kirsty, my immediate line manager who let me get away with more or less anything, mostly, I suspect, because she didn’t do very much herself.
Fortunately Grant was nowhere to be seen so I deposited my baguette at my workstation and switched on my computer, ignoring jibes from my team about my lack of punctuality. It wasn’t as though the majority of them were working; Antonia to my left was staring in wonder as Dean showed her an image of her own house on Google maps.
‘That’s amazing,’ she cooed, ‘can we look at my nan’s house now?’
‘You can look at anywhere in the whole wide bloody world,’ grumbled Dean who I suspected to have a bit of a crush on Antonia, ‘but I suppose your gran’s house is just as exciting as he Taj Mahal or Machu Picchu!’
‘Is that that new club on St Mary’s Street?’ asked Antonia whose world view was slightly smaller than Dean’s, ‘Anyway we’re not looking at my gran’s house we’re looking at my Nan’s house!’
She paused before excitedly adding ‘but then we could look at my gran’s house!’
Once my computer was halfway into the slightly dramatic and prolonged start-up, which it entered into every morning as though it had been awoken from a hundred-year slumber, I nipped out of my seat and headed down the office towards the ‘break-out’ room, which was a smallish alcove with a couple of tables and a coffee machine. There was no queue so I tapped in the number twelve, which was the code for a white coffee without sugar, and waited while the machine produced my beverage of choice. The quality of the drink was debateable, but I couldn’t even think about getting through the day without several trips to the machine for a number twelve. Sometimes I opted for a sixteen, which was a cappuccino, but as it largely tasted and looked the same as a number twelve I rarely bothered. As the machine beeped to signify my drink was ready I realised that I was feeling a little bit more lethargic than usual that day so I tapped in twelve again, reasoning that a second drink would ensure that I was ready for the day.
I was not oblivious to the reproachful looks of Faye, the maternal middle-aged woman who sat opposite me as I arrived back at my desk with my two coffees. Office protocol was that one should always offer to get drinks for everyone else when one went to the machine, but I was not a great believer in this philosophy, and often tended to go for solo runs unless I was feeling particularly bored and needed an excuse to skive for a bit longer. I was viewed as something of a parasite by the rest of the team because I always accepted the offer of anyone else that was on their way to the alcove. Faye did not reprimand me today because all eyes and ears were on Grant and Kirsty, who had just returned from a meeting to find Dean and Antonia looking at Antonia’s mother’s friend’s cousin’s house on the internet.
‘I have pacifically told you two about this before,’ ranted Kirsty, ‘Company policy pacifically states that use of the internet is for work use only!’
Kirsty seemed flabbergasted but I knew that she didn’t really want to be telling Antonia and Dean off, indeed she was often to be found using the world wide web for non-work related purposes, but with Grant standing over her shoulder she had little choice in the matter.
Grant turned his steely gaze towards me.
‘And why are you late?’ he asked coldly.
I met his stare with a friendly smile,
‘I’m on lates,’ I replied simply.
‘That’s right,’ nodded Kirsty, ‘he is on lates’
It was company policy that the office should stay open until five thirty but as flexi-time allowed people to leave as early as four o’clock, it had been necessary to adopt a rota to ensure that at least one person in every team stayed until the office closed. Naturally the person who did this would start later as well. Being a late riser, and only living around the corner from work, I had won the eternal gratitude of the rest of my team by agreeing to do the ‘lates’ every single day of the week. The only day it was a bit inconvenient was on ‘pay day’ Friday when everyone else finished early in order to get to the pub in time for ‘happy hour’. For a never-ending supply of lie-ins I had reasoned it was completely worth missing out on ninety minutes of moderately priced drinking once a month. However I soon discovered that the later I was allowed to get up, the more I wanted to stay in bed in the mornings, and so I had subsequently been getting later for work by a few minutes each day. Nonetheless I still had one trump card left to play.
‘I am aware that you are on lates,’ sneered Grant, ‘but why, at five to ten, are you only just sitting down to work?’
‘I’m only having thirty minutes for lunch,’ I retorted, milking a controversial point yet to be rectified by Human Resources.
Technically, someone finishing at half past five could start as late as ten o’clock and still work their proper quota of hours provided they only had a half-hour lunch break. The managers didn’t like this because it meant that some staff could start after the half past nine deadline, but until HR came up with a satisfactory response with which the unions agreed, I was completely safe.
‘Just make sure that you do only have thirty minutes for lunch,’ warned Grant before he headed
off to make somebody else’s day just that little bit less bearable.
He was right to be concerned. I was fully intending to have an hour for lunch as normal. Half an hour just didn’t give me enough time to really enjoy my daytime TV viewing.
Kirsty shot Dean and Antonia a look of anger before heading back to her desk to do some online shopping.
As if to break the tension Faye grabbed the specially designed tray with little cup holders and announced that she was going to the machine to get drinks.
‘Could I have a number twelve?’ I asked as I bit into my baguette, fully aware that I still had two full cups of coffee on my desk, but concerned that if Faye was going now, it might be a while before anyone else went.
After my run-in with Grant I decided that it would be prudent to actually do some work for a change, so I set about sifting through my daily allocation of applications to enter onto the system, making sure to put any awkward forms that might require me to do some thinking, or worse still, interacting with customers, to the bottom of the pile.
I had just finished entering my first form when I was smacked on the back of the head by a paper file. I looked up to see Tim grinning menacingly over me. In the excitement of my altercation with Grant I hadn’t even noticed that his desk had been unoccupied.
‘Where’ve you been all morning?’ I asked as nonchalantly as I could manage, and trying to disguise the fact that his file had actually hurt me a little bit.
‘I’ve been debating with a medic,’ he said gleefully.
Whenever there were any medical conditions disclosed on a life assurance application, no matter how innocuous, we were not allowed to process it in ‘New Business’, but rather we were to transfer it up to a team of ‘specially trained’ medical underwriters who would make a decision on whether or not we could accept the potential risks of that condition and, if so, what the revised premium would be. The file would then be passed back to us so that we could inform the clients that they would have to pay a much larger premium than they had initially been quoted. They would naturally argue and then we would have to take their complaint to the medical underwriter, who would explain in entirely opaque terms, exactly why the premium needed to go up. We would then attempt to explain this to the customer, who would not understand, and would ask us another question that we were not qualified to answer. Consequently, we would again refer the case to the medical underwriter and so on and so forth.
It would probably have been far more straightforward if the medical underwriter spoke to the clients directly, but no one in their right mind would ever suggest that course of action to a medical underwriter (or ‘medic’ as was their misnomer of a nickname in FFS). Nobody would dare have the audacity to even think it - except Tim.
‘Hold on, so you’re telling me that you actually convinced a medic to speak to a customer?’ I asked incredulously.
‘You should have seen his little face,’ laughed Tim.
‘But...I mean...how?’
I was astonished; medics were the worst kind of jobsworths imaginable. They never did anything unless they really had to, and even then they moaned about it and checked the wording of their contracts several times first.
‘By the power of reason,’ affirmed Tim, ‘In the end he couldn’t argue with my logic.’
‘You mean after listening to you droning on for an hour, he conceded that it might be easier to talk directly to the customer, rather than to carry on talking to you.’
‘Well that’s a fairly vulgar way of putting it,’ huffed Tim taking his seat next to Faye and pinching one of the drinks from the tray she had just returned with, while she was looking the other way.
The door of the office opened. Dean glanced up from the monitor at which he had been sullenly staring since his reprimand, and the cloud lifted from his countenance.
‘Hey boys,’ he whispered, ‘it’s the newbie tour!’
Tim and I both looked round in delight as a stream of new starters entered the room on what was a traditional and slightly humiliating tour of the office that every novice processor had to go through on their first day. They were predominantly young, no doubt many of them recent graduates, still with their dreams intact and possibly one or two with the belief that FFS was the beginning of a fabulous new career, rather than the graveyard of ambition that it actually was. They were led by Caroline, an evil but nonetheless very fanciable HR operative who had plagued me incessantly over my missing reference during my first few months with the company. I shuddered as I heard her cynically sweet overtures, putting a positive spin on even the most banal of office features, such as the somewhat unimpressive view from the windows – a vista of the local prison.
Antonia huffed with impatience at the attention Tim, Dean and I were paying to the fresh-faced crowd of new admin assistants. She knew there was only one reason that we were paying them any heed. We were on a shameless lookout for young, attractive and ideally available young ladies.
‘The brunette is mine,’ leered Tim.
‘Short one, or tall one?’ asked Dean.
‘Tall one,’ he stated definitively, before conceding ‘The short one is pretty, but I’ve got to think of the practicalities.’
‘See anyone you like Chris?’ asked Dean.
I glanced surreptitiously at the new intake. I wasn’t exactly Casanova, and there were plenty of girls that were appealing enough, but I wasn’t really very comfortable with verbalised sexism so I just said ‘You know me Dean, I’m not fussy.’
Tim put a condescending arm around me and laughed.
‘What he means is that he’s so desperate he’d shag any of them’
Antonia shot us all a look which was a mixture of contempt and pity.
‘You guys are so sad,’ she complained, picking up the tray, ‘I’m off to the machine, anyone want a drink?’
‘I’ll have a number twelve if you’re going,’ I said.
As the new cohort made their way down the office, I did notice a cute little redhead bringing up the rear. She looked a bit nervous and lost, but then one of the other girls made a comment to her and she smiled and her smile lit up her whole face. She turned and followed the rest of the group out of the room but her smile remained, engraved on my mind. I felt a strange feeling that I had never experienced before. It was as though my heart had melted a little bit.