Week 1 - Tuesday
Finding plausible ways to kill off my colleagues has made today fly by. It
has given me a new interest in life, and even the dullest workmate becomes
fascinating when considering ways to arrange little accidents for them or
trying to think of ruses to inveigle them into the dark end of the basement
with me. Disposal of the bodies would be the main problem, but not, I am
confident, an insurmountable one. I suppose if I did succeed in killing them
all head office would simply send replacements, but in that case I would
then be the longest-serving member of staff and would have dibs on the
working staple-gun and the best swivel-chair.
'Cherchez le motive, mon cher Hastings. What can have driven someone to
systematically butcher the entire staff of this building? A man may kill for
many things - money, passion, safety, revenge...'
Me, spinning round: 'Wheeeeeee!'
'...or a desirable swivelchair.'
I shouldn't go on with this though. Knowing my luck someone will fall down
the basement steps and break their skull and someone will find this and
arrest me.
Besides I really do like working there. Well, not like, but as jobs
go it's bearable. Most of the staff are women and the boss is a woman and
there is no macho nonsense. And half of them are fit and the rest are nice
and motherly and sometimes bring me tea and cakes and stuff. And quite a few
are fit and motherly so I can daydream about going back to their
place for sex and tea and cakes and stuff. I suppose it's unlikely to
happen. But I might have to pretend it does to impress you.
The best thing is the workplace itself though. It's a big old building,
rambling and decrepit and largely untouched by the dead hand of modernity,
and I have most of it to myself. Most of the staff are in one big room on
the ground floor, and there are a few other offices and interview rooms for
clients and conference rooms scattered around the second, and the third and
fourth floors are pretty much mine. There are all kinds of nooks and
crannies and dusty unused store-rooms and little winding corridors leading
God knows where - it's the next best thing to having a castle full of secret
passages.
The last time I was there I accomplished the mammoth filing reorganisation I
was hired to do in the first two weeks - startling the boss and particularly
surprising myself by my capacity for hard manual labour, although it was
probably just due to being overcaffeinated from the unusually early rising -
and then spent the next three largely skulking off and exploring. I found a
balcony on the third floor where I could sneak a fag and look at the cherry
blossoms in the park and watch the people strolling by, and a big abandoned
office in the fourth where I once spent an hour throwing furniture at the
wall in my rage at the indignity of being a filing clerk. And an echoey
store-room it was ace to sing in, and a happy little room where I would go
to write or perfect my aim flicking elastic bands at the lightbulb. Or I'd
make up client files for fictional characters like Raskolnikov and Ignatius
J. Reilly - a letter from Raskolnikov asking for more time to pay, I
remember, pleading poverty but saying he expected to receive some money from
an old woman soon, and pompously abusive letters from Reilly excoriating the
members of staff I didn't like. Oh and I did a particularly elaborate one
for an F. Kafka, full of forms referring him from one department to another
in an endless circle and his plaintive letters for help. Amused me at the
time. I must see if they're all still in the system and have attracted any
new paperwork. If as threatened it finally all gets transcribed onto
computer they will assume a ghostly life of their own here.
Anyway I would definitely work more often if all workplaces were as archaic
as this. One of the staff has a working coal fireplace in their office,
although I've never seen it lit.
Oh, oh, check this. This is from a book called 'My Turn To Make The Tea' by
Monica Dickens, an amiable account of life at a small provincial newspaper
in the 50s or earlier:
'Someone had drunk my tea, and the office cat had got my biscuits on the
floor... worried a lot about whether the milk would go sour if we lit a
fire, and whether we could get any more coal...
'[The Editor's sanctum] was a little odd-shaped room stuck in a top corner
of the ramshackle old Post building. There was only just room in it for a
claw-foot coat-stand with one foot missing, a kitchen chair for visitors,
the editor's swivel chair that swivelled on a slant, and his scarred old
roll-top desk... The electric light, with a shade like a dirty white china
plate, hung in the wrong place and was hoisted to shine over the desk by a
piece of string tied round the curtain rail.
'...Since the paper started in 1890, nothing had ever been moved or thrown
away. The shelves and cupboards had long ago reached saturation point... Our
reporters' room was half silted up with rolls of old galley proofs which had
been collecting dust there since the Relief of Mafeking. No-one had yet
discovered that I was systematically using them to light the fire...'
Ohhh, I would kill to work in an office like that. Doesn't Dawlish in the
early Len Deighton books have a coal fire too? I can't find it right now.
Here's a bit from Billion Dollar Brain though:
'The Charlotte Street building was an ancient creaking slum. The wallpaper
had great boils full of loose plaster and there were small metal patches in
the floor where the boards were too rotten to repair. On the first-floor
landing was a painted sign that said 'Acme Films. Cutting Rooms'.... The
next landing was painted with fresh green paint... Behind me I heard Alice
puffing up the stairs with a catering-size tin of Nescafe. Someone in the
dispatch department put a brass-band record on the gramophone...'
Yes, yes, yes! Sheer pornography. I've got to do a literary anthology, the
Big Erotic Book Of Knackered Old Offices. Down with cubicles and well-lit
open-plan abominations...
Back in the fifties my Dad worked in a building that had brass speaking
tubes in it and those pneumatic message tubes where you put a metal
cylinder containing papers or something in it and it gets whooshed to the
other end of the building and pops out on someone's desk. (Like on
Brazil). I am stricken with envy. To hell with e-mail. You would
pay for the joy of working in a building where you got to use
pneumatic-shooting-cylinder message tubes.
Anyway, not much to tell about today. Walked the aisles and filed the files.
(This is how we talk after-hours in filing clerks' bars, where all the
drinks are arranged in alphabetical order, and at the top of a step-ladder -
the first time you get a paper cut on each of your fingers, you're in the
inner circle and have to drink all the vowel drinks to celebrate - and all
the chairs are those little wheeled stools you step on to reach the higher
shelves - and we list our favourite birds and arrange them according to
height - and when you vomit you call out Dewey.)
That's it, really, and more of the same tomorrow. Oh, I almost forgot though
- Margaret from the second floor invited me back to her place for sex
and tea and cakes and stuff. We had sex on the table while she made
the cakes and rolled in the flour and stuff, and then we baked the cakes and
got into bed and I ate the cakes off her nude body. And then she made me a
cup of tea and licked the spoon really erotically after stirring, and then I
drank a cup of tea while having more sex. That was ace. But this is a pretty
average day for me, you know.