Office politics a mere trifle alongside office anarchy

Memo from on high in the workplace this afternoon:

“I have just witnessed the most appalling sight in the disabled toilets, so much so, that this will now be locked and only used by disabled staff.  This is the second time poor ***** has had to clean this up and it’s simply not fair to her to have to do this!  The toilet is now out of order, due to the flush handle having been broken as well.“

Not for the first time, I gaze around our open-plan office and inwardly shudder at what dark forces froth away beneath the flimsy veneer of civilisation.

Friendship and the pursuit of a proper job

While I haven’t seen him for years, I remember him as a lovely bloke. Good company and seemingly a decent person.

So part of me hopes we never meet again. Rather that than being reunited and having to wait with glum resignation for the conversation to turn to the subject of what we’re doing with ourselves these days.

Will I be able to hold it back, I wonder? That curl of my lip or arching of the eyebrow as he confirms what I already know from his website; that his career has ventured into one of those innumerable, vague niches of corporate life that executives have the happy knack of carving out for themselves whenever they feel the need to justify their existence.

The layman knows such niches by the grandiose job titles that tend to accompany them and the question they invariably stir up in his mind. “Do we really need those?”

There’s a woman currently extolling her former tarted-up polytechnic university in a series of radio ads in my area, for example. Without that noble seat of learning, she insists, she could never have dreamed of becoming a brand communication executive.

Do we really need brand communication executives? Didn’t we somehow survive without them for centuries?

Second-guessing strangers like this is one thing but to have to do it to a friend is a deeply uncomfortable prospect.

So much so, that I think if it hasn’t already been written, a self-help/confessional feature in one of our consumer magazines is long overdue.

Working title: I think the world of my mate but he’s just become a performance optimisation consultant.

Movember – hairy lips and home truths

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Two colleagues are discussing their involvement in the Movember appeal, while admiring their hirsute upper lips in the mirror above the sink.

“Very nice,” one of them observes, with perhaps a hint of irony.

“Yes, and so much less hassle than all that stuff women have to do for breast cancer,” says the other. “They run marathons; we grow moustaches…”

He leaves the rest unspoken but has said enough to leave me thinking the unthinkable.

That old boast, beloved of male blowhards everywhere – “If it was men who had kids, we’d have come up with a better way of doing it years ago.”

What if it’s true?

Juvenile dementia

He takes a fair old beating, our office dreamer.

‘Dream-a-day Bill’, ‘head in the clouds’, ‘making one of his rare visits to our planet’: those are some of the nicer things uttered behind his back.

So it was good to hear this essentially nice bloke come back with a self-deprecating belter of a response today.

“I’ve a unique genetic makeup,” he explained sheepishly. “I get less senile as I get older…”

If sexist firemen ran the world, would you be doomed?

Image via Wikipedia

Umpteenth career fire drill yesterday. Same old desultory stroll into the windiest open space on the premises, followed by the same old struggle to kill time with conversations that would otherwise never see the light of day.

A is the office uber-cynic. Like me, just once in his working life, he’d like all this to mean something. No-one hurt, just the whiff of burning and a hint of genuine urgency in everyone’s step before firefighters show up to save the day. Just once; to make a lifetime of these poxy drills worthwhile.

It won’t be today, however, and A’s resentment gives voice to a truly preposterous notion .

“Well, I won’t be going back to rescue anyone if it’s a real fire,” he snorts. “Not unless she’s got big tits…”

Time hanging heavy on our hands, I actually afford this proposition a few moments’ contemplation, briefly visualising  a world where the discretion of those in the rescue services actually comes down to breast size.

A world where the biggest smile in town belongs to a cosmetic surgeon and the last words the owner of a 32B cup hears as the smoke closes in are, “Sorry love. This is the last stretcher and I’m afraid ‘pert’ doesn’t cut it…”

I like A a lot but I do hope he’s never entrusted with real power.