SHINY FLOORS: AN ODE TO OFFICE LIFE
Sometimes at the weekend, I catch myself scripting my activities into neat soundbites: ‘Yeah, it was great thanks – I caught up with [an old friend/some family/my ex-colleague] on Saturday and we [went to this great ramen place/drank sour lemon cocktails for £12 a pop/saw that film tipped for an Oscar].’
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I imagine delivering the line casually on Monday morning, waiting by the coffee machine in the kitchen, or taking my coat off at my desk, or – worst-case scenario – in the 9.28am lift, bursting with bodies but silent save for my reluctant, echoing voice.
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It’s the fail-safe option really. We all know the drill. Monday, Tuesday and, at a push, Wednesday morning, it’s ‘How was your weekend?’ From noon on Wednesday through to Friday, we transition seamlessly to the future tense: ‘Up to much this weekend?’ It’s the corporate equivalent of a ‘How are things?’ offered to some vague acquaintance you’ve stumbled upon in a tube carriage – it’s filler. Rarely, do people care about the answer.
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With the clients, who require more attention than is standard for small talk, our questions become more specific. We ingratiate ourselves with that subtle but effective ego rub – the scrupulously-remembered detail:
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‘How was your cousin’s wedding?’
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‘Did you make it to that new Thai restaurant in the end?’
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‘Off to New York tomorrow, aren’t you? Lucky thing!’
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For the more tight-lipped client, the smooth metallic-box journey up to Floor 8 could take longer than their answer. That’s our cue to bring up any plausible anomalies in this week’s weather. Listen carefully and ‘Cold for April, isn’t it?’ ricochets across lift shafts nationwide. Or we might compliment their coat or new haircut (this needs to be well-judged, not a beginner’s move). And as soon as the lift arrives at our floor – but never before, definitely weird to do so before – we turn, smile and say, ‘Can I get you a coffee?’
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Like many others, our building’s entire top floor is given over to a looming cafeteria. All the tables are ‘modern’ or in colloquial terms, an impractical oval shape that is too low to eat at. Everything in sight is a shade of ochre. At one end, a huge screen made up of several mini-screens shows rolling footage of political crises and natural disasters. Any attempts to lift the remarkably dystopian feel with fluorescent posters shouting ‘PIZZA FRIDAYS’ and ‘February 19th is National Nutella Day!!’ have backfired. For two hours every day, the queue for a steaming ladle of Chilli or Stroganoff or Pasta Bake snakes around the salad bar, that neglected isle of sweetcorn and icy broccoli florets, where every item tastes of water and fridge.
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This meal is sometimes a gathering – a twenty-minute hiatus where instead of doing our work, we complain about it. More often, it’s lonely lukewarm mouthfuls from a foam shell while we keep typing emails, rubbing grease into the keyboard. This soul-sucking practice is called, astonishingly without irony, ‘Lunch al desko’. Sometimes, as a treat, we go to 'get some air’. Wait for the lift, zoom down, down, down, forget our pass to exit, argue in vein with the security man, back up, card retrieved, down again, 7 mins until your next conference call. Time for some air. (This is only socially acceptable if it is actually a) nicotine and tar, or b) an excursion to Boots to buy tights).
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As the clock ticks wearily on to the mid-afternoon - where there is now both too much and not enough time to do anything - frustration on the office floor grows. But this is frustration of a type pre-approved by committee. Elements may include: an introductory groan, the dramatic flinging of one’s head towards the ceiling, hands crashing down on the keyboard. If we’re feeling daring, maybe an exasperated ‘Are you fucking joking?’ The tone here is always slightly ironic, never threatening. It is said into space, the subject either inanimate (Windows Updates; a Central Line strike) or absent (a client who’s just emailed to change their mind – again; our mother-in-law texting to say she’s ‘in the area and might pop by for dinner later’).
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We are tickled, of course, by the constant stream of low-level misdemeanour: the ‘they slept together at the office party but she’s engaged’ or the ‘he only got promoted because he has something over management’. But we are aware too of being duped by these water cooler tropes, these tales of half-known acquaintances, gloriously tempting only because they are presented in stark relief to the alternative: going back to your desk and doing some work. Outside of this formulaic misconduct, no-one – really no-one – does anything of much interest at all. No-one does a naked worm down the corridor, or smashes their face into the blinding flash of the scanner, or screams until their throat is dry raw.
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No-one clambers onto their desk and looks their alarmed colleagues in the eyes, their face bulging, hands quivering and whispers ‘Why?’, then with voice raising ‘Have you ever asked why? Here we all are–’, they’re shouting now, ‘LITTLE SCAMPERING HAMPSTERS, round – and round – and round’, their arms flailing in windmill motion, ‘and round the wheel we go. Every single… Every. Single. Fucking. Day’. They burst into sobs, and like a toddler exhausted by the challenges of the monkey bars, allow a hastily-summoned security guard to help them down, wiping the back of their hand over their snot-streaked face. We look on in horror. No. No-one does that.
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Instead, we swipe our security passes; we ask the right questions; we sit at our laptops – hot desking, apparently, but of course, no-one moves (how Becketian, you think, but don’t say) – and we tiptap-tiptap-tiptap. Hours of printing and painstakingly scheduling meetings that will be postponed tomorrow and ‘Take out that final slide’ ‘No, put it back in’ Punch & Judy pseudo-politics via Outlook mail app.
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There was the one time that someone found a shit in the bathroom sink and the office was momentarily ablaze with gleeful horror. It was such primal dissent, a fracturing of the glossy, well-oiled pretence that fuels and sustains corporate life. An actual shit, it was revolutionary. In mere hours – via rippling WhatsApp groups and corridor clusters, and mainly because the HR room has a glass door (Open Plan Culture! Aesthetics Over Pragmatism!) – the culprit was uncovered.
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And it was a truly disappointing discovery. Because this was no sticking it to The Man. This was not a stinking protest at a forgone promotion or the brutal workload. This was just a guy who had got blackout drunk at Thursday Drinks and mistaken one porcelain bowl for another. And with the culmination of this mundane tale, we all returned to our desks and our mundane questions.