Apologies to readers who are waiting on the next chapter of "Anjali's Red Scarf". I'm still working on it but it's coming slowly, so in the meantime here's something rather different that's been sitting in my drafts folder for a while.
*****
"So," I said to Sigrid, "we're cutting our travel budget but increasing training. By the way, have I mentioned how good that coat looks on you?"
Sigrid and I haven't worked together for several years now, but her office is on the same train line as mine, so every other week we share the ride in to the city. If there are two seats together, we'll sit and chat. More often it's standing room only, and we'll share a stanchion and lean in to talk as the commuting masses press around us.
"Why, thank you," she replied. "Some nice person bought it for my birthday. Oh, Tim, I didn't tell you my news. Derek"—that was her current boss—"wants to talk to me about organising a team-building event."
"A team—oh. Oh dear."
We were both thinking about the same day, five years in the past and many miles away.
* * * * *
I was twenty-two. I'd been working with Joint Coordinated Network Inc's software division for a few months, my first real job, and when they first sent me the offer I thought I was incredibly lucky to be working with one of the biggest names in office productivity solutions.
How soon the novelty wears off, eh?
JCN had over a hundred thousand staff worldwide, but somebody in upper management had decided that big offices were inefficient and discouraged innovation. So they'd decentralised, breaking their big divisions into smaller groups, and moved the groups to wherever office space was cheap. This is how I found myself assigned to the Paradigm Reimagination Group, a team of forty-odd people stationed in a small office in a suburban industrial park.
PRG was working on a new project, a web-based office productivity application, and I'd been brought on as a developer. The concept was interesting enough, and even as a wet-behind-the-ears code monkey I could see that it had plenty of commercial potential if we could get it right.
Our rivals certainly thought so. Barron Software, an up-and-coming outfit looking to build market share, had just announced that they were working on a similar product. So we were officially in a high-stakes race, and while there was still some way to go, our chances weren't looking good.
Whose fault was that? Oh, there are so many places I could point the finger.
There was Howard, our senior developer. He'd been with JCN since the 1980s, and he knew everything there was to know about the inner workings of our products. Problem was, he didn't feel like sharing. Often I'd end up playing Freecell for hours on end, not because there was no work to do, but because Howard didn't think I was up to it. "It'd take too long to teach you," he'd say, "faster to do it myself."
There was the anonymous person who'd printed out the wrong version of the project specs for a planning meeting, leading to us spending two months on a build that didn't meet requirements. Most of my work on that one ended up being deleted unused. Demoralising. Nobody quite remembered who had brought the printouts, and nobody was prepared to own up.
There was the ongoing feud between Kathleen (general office admin) and Margaret (the boss's PA). For reasons neither of them would discuss, they'd stopped talking to one another, which had led to a very memorable day when Margaret scheduled a visit and speech from the Regional Head of Operations in the same timeslot that Kathleen had booked a protracted test of the fire-alarm system.
And let's not even talk about the Milk Bandit.
I could go on and on. There were so many other dysfunctions I could name, interpersonal conflicts and grudges that made Middle-Eastern politics look straightforward by comparison. But the biggest one, in my eyes, was the boss himself: Alistair.
Alistair had once been an Olympic rowing coach, and he never let us forget it. Every day as I walked into the office, I was met by a framed photograph of him standing alongside the team as they showed off their silver medals.
That had been thirty years earlier. On the strength of that achievement, and perhaps because he'd been to the same private school as several of the company execs, he'd managed to talk his way into a management position at JCN. Alistair fervently believed that managing a software development project was fundamentally no different to managing a rowing team, a belief that he shared with us at every opportunity.
Every Monday morning at ten a.m. Alistair would call us all together into the break room and deliver a Motivational Speech. Inevitably he would exhort us to Pull Together, Keep A Productive Rhythm, Put Your Backs Into It, Don't Be Afraid To Get Your Feet Wet, and so forth, as seventy-eight eyes stared wistfully at the biscuits that sat so tantalisingly close. But his signature quote, repeated more and more frequently as we circled closer and closer to the drain, was this:
"When our competitors are giving a hundred and ten per cent, we have to give a hundred and twenty!"
Nevertheless, working at JCN had its compensations. For me, the greatest of these was the presence of Sigrid, the newest member of the office's small graphics team. She had joined three months before I did, and as new staff we'd both been volunteered onto the office End-Of-Year Party Planning Committee together. So we spent half an hour together every week—more if I could contrive to synchronise my tea-break with her—and I'd become aware of her many good qualities. In addition to being cute (her button nose, her pixie cut, her blue-grey eyes) she was smart, and she was kind; no matter what you brought to her, she'd do her best to help. We both liked Belle and Sebastian, and we'd both been falsely accused of milk theft.
All in all, I had become rather more than fond of her, and yet I had no idea what to do about it. I was shy and inexperienced, having graduated from university only slightly less virginal than when I'd gone in. I consumed as much internet porn as you'd expect from a lad of my age, and I had no shortage of explicit fantasies about every attractive woman in sight, but that part of me seemed quite detached from the part that gazed wistfully after Sigrid and daydreamed about being one another's one and only.
I wasn't at all sure how one went about asking out a co-worker (
what if she says no?
) so I made no moves. I simply hung around with her as much as I could, and waited for her to notice my signals and take the first step.
In hindsight, it's not a strategy I would recommend. Sigrid seemed to enjoy my company, but seemed oblivious to my romantic interest. Furthermore, there was a fly in the ointment. Sigrid had a friend named Kelly, a tall freckled redhead from Ireland who also worked in the graphics team, and who had taken an instant dislike to me for reasons I couldn't fathom.
If I came by Sigrid's desk, Kelly would be there to intercept me: "Hi Timothy, Sigrid's very busy right now, but I'm sure I can take care of whatever it is you need." If I was in the break room when they arrived for lunch, Kelly would steer Sigrid to some other table; if they got there first, I'd arrive to find Kelly had arranged things in such a way that I couldn't sit next to Sigrid, or she'd hint that it was time for them to finish up their break.
It was all subtly done. Had I ever thought to bite the bullet and just
ask Sigrid out
, I don't know what Kelly would have done about it. But there was no danger of me doing that. I didn't have the nerve.
In any case, we had other things to worry about. Our project had been delayed by a month, and then by another. Head Office was taking an interest in the state of things, and they were not happy. I gather they had communicated to Alistair that coming second might have been impressive in the Olympics but was rather less acceptable in a two-horse race, and that we needed to shape up and start delivering.
The first consequence of this was an increase in the length and frequency of Alistair's speeches, which mysteriously failed to motivate us. He also took to micro-managing, which made things all the worse, since we had to spend much of our time explaining the detail of our work to somebody incapable of grasping it. With PRG on track to miss yet another deadline, Alistair resorted to desperate measures.
