by James Birk
Chapter 17
Even as I stepped out of the lift and onto the fifth floor of Kingdom House, I knew there was something afoot. There was an unsettling silence in the corridor, which although it was never a particularly bustling part of the office, served as an ominous portent of what was to come.
The fact that I actually had to use my own ID card to open the doors rather than following someone else through with theirs only furthered my apprehension.
There was none of the usual hustle and bustle of office life in the open plan room. Everyone was sitting quietly as his or her desk, and there was a low murmur of discontent running through the room. Here and there, I noticed the odd person crying, but the general air seemed to be more of anticipation of grief rather than of grief itself.
‘What’s going on,’ I enquired as I took my seat, noting that Antonia was in floods of tears, and being gently soothed by Dean, who bore a look of shock himself.
‘Redundancies,’ muttered Dean gravely, ‘They’re laying people off.’
‘No way!’ I exclaimed, ‘That’s come out of the blue hasn’t it?’
‘Apparently not,’ said Ian, ‘The company has been in trouble for a few months now.’
‘But we’ve got loads of work,’ I said, ‘We’ve just taken on new staff for goodness sake. We have to outsource to India. We can’t be losing money surely?’
‘That’s just it, outsourcing to India is saving FFS a fortune,’ said Dean, ‘They can’t justify the costs of running this office too.’
‘But what about all the new staff we’ve taken on here?’ I argued, ‘Surely me and Tim wouldn’t have trained all those people if we didn’t need them.’
‘My point exactly,’ agreed Dean, ‘But then, when have the decisions made by anyone in this company actually made any sense whatsoever.’
He punched his desk in frustration.
‘But, I mean, what’s been said?’ I asked, ‘Have they made an announcement?’
‘No-one’s said anything,’ muttered Dean, ‘but the rumour mill has been on overdrive since this morning. All the managers have been in a meeting since nine o’clock.’
But they’re always in bloody meetings,’ I argued, ‘they have meetings about bloody meetings. That doesn’t prove anything.’
‘Yeah but they looked all serious when they went in. And they were all dressed smart.’ Dean looked at me meaningfully, ‘I mean properly smart.’ He paused for dramatic effect, ‘Suits!’
It was true; managers wearing suits usually meant something big. FFS, like many offices I had worked in, had a ‘smart casual’ policy when it came to office attire. For men this consisted of trousers, shoes and shirt but no tie or jacket were necessary. For women the dress code was ‘suitable office attire’ which was open to wide interpretation but essentially only denim and obscenely revealing clothing would generally be cause for reprimand.
Even the most senior management rarely wore suits. If a jacket and tie was on display it generally meant that someone from head office was in the building, and that rarely meant anything good. The last time head office had paid us a visit in Cardiff, we had been informed shortly after that our annual leave was going to be reduced from thirty days to twenty-five for anyone who had joined the organisation in the last eighteen months. The time before that we found out that the previously very popular ‘Staff Share’ scheme was being scrapped.
Visits from head office rarely brought good news, but they were few and far between. And there had never been anything as catastrophic as redundancies, indeed, as my mind wandered back to my belated induction into the company, one of the key advantages of working for FFS as highlighted by the ‘ice sculptor extraordinaire’ Roberto, was that FFS had never had cause to make any redundancies throughout its one hundred and sixty year history.
‘OK, I admit that the suits are a bad omen,’ I acknowledged, ‘but how do we know that they aren’t just going to take our coffee breaks off us or something?’
‘There are rumours, Chris,’ said Dean, ‘when you have rumours and suits on the same day, it’s never good.’
‘But where are these rumours coming from?’ I pondered, ‘I mean, who started them.’
‘Well I heard from Sharon in Red team,’ said Antonia through her tears, ‘and she heard from Clive, in Yellow.’
‘Yeah, I heard from Brian on the sixth floor’ said Dean, ‘and he heard from Keith on the ninth.’
‘I heard from Craig in accounts,’ said Tim, ‘but I don’t know where he heard it from.’
‘And I heard from Tim,’ said Ian, ‘and I heard it from Dean and Antonia.’
‘Well, I mean, I suppose you all heard from different people,’ I mused, ‘but none of those people are any more ‘in the know’ than us are they? So we don’t definitely know anything yet do we?’
With the matter briefly settled, and feeling like the only rational and sane person in the office, I picked up the drinks tray in a rare moment of philanthropy and volunteered to get everyone a drink from the machine.
Two things happened in quick succession to render me as uneasy as everyone else. Firstly I noticed some suit-wearing people in the coffee room. One of them looked decidedly familiar, but I couldn’t quite place him as I hurriedly filled my order. It was only when I was on my way back to my seat that I realised it was my old school friend Matthew Goodwin, looking every inch the corporate executive in his bespoke pinstriped suit.
My first thought was one of panic that he might have seen me and realised how insignificant a cog I really was in the corporate machinery of FFS, and then I remembered what he had said to me the last time we had met.
‘My company’s just been doing some work for FFS...no wonder you’re thinking of getting out mate. Bit of a sinking ship that one...’
The truth was beginning to register as I placed the tray down in the pod and distributed the beverages. It was only as I sat back down at my desk that the second thought struck me like a cartoon anvil being dropped from a great height.
‘I didn’t know you knew anyone in ‘Accounts’,’ I turned to look at Tim, ‘I didn’t even know there was an ‘Accounts’ department in Cardiff.’
‘Oh there isn’t,’ replied Tim casually, ‘I met him while I was on the seventh floor, chatting up your ex, Cheryl. He was in the next pod having a less than discreet conversation with her line manager about the impending redundancies. He’s down for the week from head office, to help facilitate.’
‘Oh,’ I said, somewhat deflated, ‘so you started the rumours then?’
‘Well Cheryl did her bit too, she was outraged,’ he turned to me and smiled, ‘but the good news is that she’s agreed to go on a date with me!’
Sometimes I wondered if Tim really was my friend at all.