Off-cast #1 Offices Are Strange Places No Matter How Hard You Try by Giles Skerry

Brilliant. Someone has brought their kid in. Every time this happens, the women flock to it, often shrieking with delight at the little terd.


Sorry about that. No matter how hard you try, you find yourself inexorably drawn into a world to which you think you don’t belong. This is entirely understandable. As a middle class, well-educated liberal with extreme delusions of artistic grandeur, I cannot help but think that I am basically spending seven hours a day rotting away in a physical, intellectual and moral compost heap.


My physical degradation bothers me the least. Sitting has often been one of my favourite pastimes, so atrophy is nothing new. Sure, I can actually feel the (small) muscles in my body turn into blubber but I have a thrice daily trip to the vending machine. This means I break a sweat throughout the day. That’s not to mention the epic journey outside for some fresh air. It’s not all good though. Constant typing has turned my hands into arthritic wrecks, so that by the end of the day I am barely able to lift the mashed potato I seem to always be eating to my mouth. And I come home with yet another illness. The air in here, by 4 p.m. is brackish and stagnant. Sometimes I eat mouldy food solely on the hope that it contains some penicillin to cure my ever increasing ails. I have also become a massive hypochondriac. I’m pretty certain that I have some sort of cancer, and if so it’s definitely because I work in an office.


As I write, I do so like a member of la resistance. I quickly switch screens (alt-tab folks) whenever anyone important walks by. Not because I fear recrimination and punishment. Rather, it is because in this environment any kind of intellectual discourse is considered heresy. There is no room for Vivaldi, or Kubrick, or Napoleon, or Eco. This is a world of solutionising, of task management, of spreadsheets. So severe is the busin-rot that has set in that there is actually one folder containing the following sub-folders: desk instructions, drafts, goals, metrics, process improvement, RMS PREP, SOX, staff, useful information*. Now, I don’t know what RMS PREP or SOX is but I’m pretty sure that if I read each file contained within I’d probably become so bored that I would collapse and die. This job has made me so brain dead that I am actually struggling to think about what intellectual conversations I’d like to have with my colleagues. I used to like all that shit, but now I just go home and watch the hits.


If you do feel the need to talk to colleagues about something other than ‘actioning the business plan’, then broadly speaking there are but three avenues you can go down. Sport (usually football) and plans for the weekend are deceptive cul-de-sacs. They can normally only be sustained for a few minutes before both parties go back to work feeling wholly unsatisfied and actually a little bit irate. The third avenue, however, often turns out to be a route 66 of conversation that can lead to laughter, friendship, and possibly hopefully sex: gossip. I have actually found myself trying to ingratiate myself with people by listening to their trite complaints about others’ fuckups and agreeing that he or she in question is surplus to requirements. Everyone, including myself, spends most of their time judging someone else.


This is the real problem with my office. I can take the absence of intellectual and physical stimulation because I can find these in my spare time (or not at all because I cant really be bothered). The moral reprehensibility of this job, however, is almost insurmountable. I actually have become a shit. I bitch about people just to pass the time and judge them because they are shit at a shit job. But it gets better. I am also a corporate bastard. My job basically entails making sure that debt collectors get their money from poor people who turned to the wrong people for a cash injection. I am the electronic equivalent of a sledgehammer. I break people with emails. One particular example stands out above all else to illustrate this.


I opened a sizeable envelope containing a list of everyone that one of our clients, CBN if you’re interested (ha!), had made bankrupt that year. I handed the document, which was well over fifty pages thick, to my Italian boss. She looked at it and began laughing. When I asked why, she said it was because they were all Sicilian, and everyone hates Sicilians. On the hope that I could get a pay rise, I started to laugh as well. It worked, though, because for seven fifty an hour I’d pretty much do anything.


*contains nothing useful.


N.B. Since writing this, I have received a letter from one of the debt collectors I work for demanding ninety quid. I’m not going to pay.

Words: Giles Skerry