by James Birk
Chapter 5
I had developed a number of skives to help me through my working day. The three most successful were the ones I called the ‘Coffee Run’, the ‘File Walk’ and the ‘Stare’. The ‘Coffee Run’ was a simple enough ploy. Essentially I would wait until roughly five minutes after somebody in my team (usually Dawn or Antonia) had come back from the machine with drinks for everyone in the team. I would then pick up the communal drinks tray and in what seemed like a rare moment of generosity on my part, I would offer to get everyone a hot beverage. Obviously most people would decline as they would already have a drink although Tim would usually say yes, being a caffeine addict of similar proportions to me. Nonetheless I rarely found myself in a position where I needed to get more than two drinks but once I had the tray in my hand no-one questioned why I took it with me, and when I got to the machine armed with the tray I had the air of someone who was potentially getting a lot of drinks. Consequently, if anyone arrived after me I would charitably step aside and allow them to use the machine before me, and even the most senior of management figures would gratefully accept this offer, under the illusion that I was a generous team player and not someone who was looking to waste as much time as possible before returning to my desk.
The ‘Stare’ was an even less elaborate scheme, and was really only appropriate to people like me who could represent Great Britain in the ’World Daydreaming Championships’ if such a competition existed. The ‘Stare’ really was exactly what it sounded like, namely me staring at me screen for an extended period of time without actually doing any work at all. Now there were plenty of people who sat at their desks every day and did no work because they were busy chatting or looking on the internet, but the beauty of the stare was that to all intents and purposes it really did look as though I was working. The trick was to start processing an application and once I had got to an appropriately detailed screen, to just stop and stare at the screen for a decent length of time. Make the ‘Stare’ too brief and it was hardly worth doing, make it too long and it became boring, but just the right amount of time, say fifteen minutes, and it was a suitable break. The best time for doing the ‘Stare’ was shortly after someone had been on a coffee run and brought me back a number twelve to enjoy in tranquillity.
My tour de force, however, was the ‘File Walk’. Its genius was its simplicity. Ideally I would wait until the managers were in a meeting, but if I was particularly bored it could work even with the Grant and Kirsty in view. Again the name says it all. Whenever the tedium got too much to bear, I would simply pick a file up off my desk and go for a walk around Kingdom House. I never went to a particular department or even to a particular floor; I would just walk around the building for as long as it took to shake the boredom that had hit me. My record for wandering aimlessly around the office with a file in my hand currently stood at an hour and three minutes and not one person had challenged me, despite the fact that the requirements of my job meant that it was actually hardly ever necessary to leave my desk at all. It was with these and other minor ruses that I passed my days at FFS. Occasionally I did see fit to do the job that I was paid to do, but I could never sustain it for very long.
I was returning to my desk from a fairly unambitious ‘File Walk’, (a mere ten minutes, hardly worth the effort) when I was greeted by a grim faced Kirsty.
‘Grant wants a word with you,’ she said sharply.
I was staggered. A reprimand for skiving was Kirsty’s job. If Grant needed a word it was something far more serious. But what had I done? Yes I was workshy and punctuality was not my strong point but I had always been very careful to be discreet.
Nonetheless a meeting with Grant meant only one thing; I was on the first step of the IDP – the Internal Disciplinary Procedure, the result of which nearly always resulted in dismissal. I didn’t like my job but I could ill afford to lose it.
I made my way to Grant’s desk. He didn’t have an office because FFS operated an open plan working environment in all of its departments so that there were no obvious barriers between management and staff. Of course the psychological barriers remained and the result was that with senior management integrated with everyone else, the whole workforce felt a bit uncomfortable. Although, Tim and I delighted in the fact that Grant had exactly the same sized desk as us, we would have preferred it if he was locked away in a little room at the far end of the fifth floor rather than sitting slap bang in the middle of everything, able to keep his beady little eyes on all of us (actually that is a little harsh – according to Antonia, Grant actually had very nice eyes, it was his personality that let him down)
Today however, Grant was not at his desk.
‘He’s in the meeting room love.’ said Tina, the pleasant but unfortunate woman who had the desk nearest Grant’s. ‘He said to send you over when you got here.’
I nearly burst into tears on the spot. The meeting room! Grant only used the meeting room for the FDM – Final Disciplinary Meeting, where unfortunate FFS employees were asked to leave the building for good. Was I really about to get fired? It didn’t seem plausible, but what else could it be?
I reached the meeting room and gingerly opened the door. There were three people in the room. But that wasn’t surprising, there were always three people involved in the FDM. Grant was there of course, as was Beryl from HR and the third person’s face I couldn’t see because he was facing away from the door but it looked like...no it couldn’t be, that would make no sense at all, but it definitely looked like...
‘Tim!’ I exclaimed a bit too loudly.
He turned around and grinned. ‘Alright mate!’
I relaxed instantly. Tim was my grade; if he was in the meeting then it wasn’t for my FDM. Even if we were both in trouble, I wasn’t about to get fired.
‘Ah, Chris, come in and take a seat,’ said Grant, in what for him was a positively friendly tone, ‘now I don’t know if Kirsty has told you anything.’
‘Nothing,’ I said and Tim nodded in agreement.
‘Well, the thing is,’ began Grant, ‘we’ve lost a few members of the training team for various reasons.’
I nodded, aware that because of a new outsourcing project in India, a number of the training team had been seconded to Mumbai in order to train the new recruits over there. There had been a lot of uproar at the time because naturally FFS workers in the UK had assumed that their jobs were under threat, but the FFS Chief Executive, Brian Potter, had reassured us, via a corporate video that we had been forced to watch in groups in the very meeting room in which I now found myself, that the outsourcing was necessary only because FFS was going through a period of expansion and that no UK jobs would be under threat. So far he had been as good as his word and the morale of the Cardiff office, such as it was, had gone back up to the normal levels of mild discontent and apathy.
‘I’m sure you’re also aware that we’ve had some new recruits in this office recently,’ Grant continued, ‘and unfortunately at the moment we don’t have anyone to train them up, which means that they’re all currently pending. And I’m sure you both remember what that feels like.’
Tim and I looked at each other and grinned. Grant took this as a positive sign that we were on board with his little joke about the boring tasks we had been given when we started at FFS, but in fact we were laughing at his vocabulary.
The word ‘pending’ had probably once been used correctly by FFS staff in years gone by, but now it was a prime example of how words, when not understood properly, can take on an entirely new meaning. The English language is full of words that no longer hold their original meaning, as one of my university lecturers, a pompous but amenable fellow named John Carlton, had delighted in telling my cohort in a lecture that was allegedly about Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, a hefty tome that took me three weeks of dedicated reading to complete, and for which I was rewarded with a forty per cent pass on my subsequent essay. He deviated off on a tangent about the meaning of words when challenged by Richardson’s use of the word ‘f
riend’, which he was actually using to mean ‘family’ in the context of the book. These days of course we draw a distinction between the words and talk about our friends and family, but in Richardson’s day apparently the one word was sufficient to convey the meaning of both. Another evolution of language pointed out by John Carlton as he warmed to his theme, was the origin of the word lager, a word that of course many of us students were familiar with, which had originated from the German word for ‘storeroom’. The English traders apparently mistook the word on the crates that they were importing as being the name of the beer, whereas in fact it was merely a description of where the crates had been stored. My esteemed lecturer allowed himself to digress for a full thirty minutes of what was only supposed to be a sixty minute lecture, and this may explain partially why I did not succeed in that particular module, although it might also have something to do with an excessive consumption of the afore mentioned lager.
At FFS I had seen this evolution of language in practice with the word ‘pending’. The Oxford dictionary definition of ‘Pending’ is the following:
• adjective 1 awaiting decision or settlement. 2 about to happen.
• preposition until.
Before working at FFS, my understanding of the word ‘pending’ would have agreed very strongly with that worthy tome, although in all honesty I never really gave the definitions of any words much thought (another reason why I may have failed to reach the upper echelons of literary analysis during my university days). If pushed on the matter though I would categorically have stated that pending was not an active verb, as in ‘I am pending’, ‘you are pending’, ‘he likes to pend’, ‘she pends everyday’ etc. This perspective was challenged the day I started at FFS and within minutes I given the job of ‘pending’. I was asked to ‘pend’ a large pile of files by a somewhat obtuse girl by the name of Cheryl. Having been given a brief tour of the office, along with my fellow new starters, John, Phil and Angie (of whom I was the only survivor as within six months they had all moved on to bigger and better things) we were directed to a long narrow corridor, near the coffee machine (a resource for which I was eternally grateful over the coming weeks) and instructed to ‘pend’.
We stood looking uncertainly at the files before Phil plucked up the courage to ask Cheryl what exactly she meant by ‘pending’ the files.
‘You don’t know how to pend?’ asked Cheryl with a look of exasperation.
She waited for a few moments for one of us to explain to Phil why he was being such an idiot. Then it dawned on her.
‘What? None of you know how to pend?’
‘Err, no’ I replied, ‘It’s our first day!’
‘Yeah, but you must have pended at other jobs.’
‘Not really,’ I said.
‘I’ve only just finished uni,’ said John apologetically.
Cheryl rolled her eyes as if to say ‘bloody students’.
‘Alright, I’ll show you then,’ she said in an ‘I’ve really got more important things to be doing’ voice.
She picked up a file.
‘You see this number?’ she said pointing to three digits on the left hand side.
‘075?’ I said out loud for the benefit of my colleagues, who I’m sure were also able to read, but after Cheryl’s insinuation that we were all idiots, I wanted to make sure.
‘Yeah, 075,’ said Cheryl, ‘well you take this file and you find the shelf with 075 on it, and you put this file with all the other files on the shelf.’
‘Ok,’ I said, ‘then what?’
‘Well you see this number?’ she pointed to a slightly longer number on the right hand side.
‘45623’ I ventured.
‘Yeah, well you need to make sure that this file goes in between the files 45622 and 45624 on the 075 shelf.’
‘Right, got that,’ I said, ‘what else?’
‘That’s it!’ said Cheryl emphatically, ‘That’s pending!’
‘So, err, ‘pending’ is basically, err filing?’
Cheryl looked confused.
‘What’s ‘filing’?’ she asked in all earnestness.
‘It’s a bit like pending,’ I reassured her, ‘I used to do it in my last job.’
It took me a few months of ‘pending’ to understand the reason that the name had come about. It wasn’t that I was ‘pending’ the files as many of my colleagues now thought, it’s that the files themselves were pending more information. Nonetheless, thanks to FFS ‘pending’ had become a verb and I found that my efforts to reclaim the word as an adjective or at the very least a passive verb, had mostly fallen on deaf ears.
Back to the meeting room though and Grant was explaining to us why the new recruits could no longer carry on ‘pending’.
‘It’s just that we’re running of files for them to pend,’ he said, ‘we need to really get them trained up on inputting.’
It was one of the most bizarre pieces of red tape at FFS that new members of staff were not allowed to begin the process of transferring information from an application form to a database without going through a four week training process. It was bizarre, because essentially a fairly clever monkey could do the job with next to no training at all. Nonetheless, without being ‘signed off’ from the four week training programme, new recruits were often stuck in what was known as ‘Pending Hell’ for months on end.
‘According to Kirsty, you two are the most accomplished processors on the team,’ Grant went on, much to the surprise of both Tim and I, ‘so we’ve decided to requisition you for a few weeks to train the new cohort.’
‘Great,’ I said, genuinely pleased to be doing something a bit different for a few weeks.
‘So does this mean we get more money?’ asked Tim.
‘Well, as it’s only a temporary promotion you won’t be remunerated financially,’ said the Beryl, ‘but of course it will look great on you permanent record.’
Tim scowled, but nodded in agreement, aware as I was that this may not be the career making opportunity that we were supposed to think it was, but that it probably represented a fairly good skive for the coming month or so.
‘When do we start?’ he asked enthusiastically.