A classic curve of buildings. Beautifully set against the park, graceful and imposing at the same time. B had landed his dream temp job, it was an Institute of impeccable reputation and by the looks of it grand offices as well.
Having recently left the dark and tawdry halls of UCL, his relief was hard to contain. His mind had been bombarded on a daily basis by academics, all desperate to pass on the infinitesimal grains of truth they had gathered from ancient corners of libraries. Here, now, in this place, he saw a golden future, of the sweet progressive bliss of the Institute of Chartered Accreditors - the font from which the people the world relied on to qualify them achieve their precious own qualification.
The reputation of this body had already made itself known to B, with little subtlety. He had been aggressively introduced some years ago following a naive conversation B had started with a tutor about the dubious merits of the professional sector. At the time he had been battered by the vehemence of retort, all hinged on the value of the ICA and it’s specialised army of ‘members’.
Years later, the respect in his soul was both ingrained by habit and quite genuine. And so it was that he entered the offices of ICA – the first floor was quite grand as expected with a lovely receptionist to greet him with a cheery hello. ‘Gosh’, B thought, ‘I’ve landed on my feet here.’ He took the lift to the second floor where he found that the doors almost shuddered in protest while the speaker crackled and mumbled ‘3rd floor’. Little did B know that in for several months now the lift denied all knowledge of correct floor announcements preferring to favour the ground and 1st floor. As the doors scraped open they revealed a scene harking back to a beige paradise where Audi Quattro’s and novelty ashtrays were du jour. B eyes squinted in disbelief, pushing his glasses up his nose he turned to double check lift numbers, which ominously glowed red.
With his brow furrowed at the lift’s crafty satire on the futility of bureaucracy, and a glint of reflected red in the back of his eyes, he turned to face ‘The Office’, what would be his home for 8 hours of his days to come. It was quiet; were he prone to cliche, perhaps too quiet. “Oh God”, he thought to himself, “I hope they’re not going to expect me to work in this colour?” He decided that, whatever his reverence of the Institute, he was at heart an aesthete and couldn’t face that. He turned around quickly to get back into the lift before anyone saw him. Suddenly the mendacious announcements of which floor he was on was better than the silence - the all consuming silence - but he then felt a tap on his shoulder.
For a fleeting second he expected some gorilla in a security uniform, but as the shock abated and the blood thumping through his veins graciously dropped to a speed where he could hear again he saw that, clearly, this was a clean shaven man in a sharp suit.
“You must be the temp.” This feral growl pounced forth from him. So distracted by the bead of sweat peering from the edge of the suit’s hair as he was, he almost missed the barked instruction, “Follow me.”
Wondering what such a sharp suit was doing in this beige purgatory, he was turned around and led down the corridor, through a doorway into the office.
The office was open plan long and narrow with a mottled wallpaper resembling the colour and texture of porridge. Electric blue office chairs set off by brown veneered desks and bulk-purchased PCs drained B’s blood and chilled him to the core. What time warp had he fallen into? Was there no design ethic at the heart of this building, itself a heart of professionalism? Scanning furtively around the office he glanced a bastion of creative strength and aesthetic design, the soft glowing pulse of an Apple.
There was a strange glint from the head of the person nestled behind it, but his initial surge of panic was quelled as the dapper primate directed him towards an enclave. He had scant seconds to marvel at a glimpse of underdeveloped middle fingers – ‘no doubt atrophied from never having to use the right mouse button’ he mused – before the hand firmly planted on his shoulder directed him down to what would be his chair.
His body swayed and his neck felt forcibly jerked to follow, snapped from the welcoming silent Apple aura to the electric blue chair, dusty piles of paper, clunky printer hum, and a grey mouse - complete with a right click button. He braced himself and spread a fake smile. The phone started to ring straight away, it even sounded like a PC to him, somehow prone to failure and aware of it’s own impending redundancy. The dapper had vanished with comments flying over his shoulder about a colleague coming to settle him in and in his final flounce out the door barked “Shouldn’t you get that?”
“Is that the pathetic excuse for a company called the ICA?”, spittle flew from the mouthpiece peppering his chin with bile and distaste.
Unprepared and compulsively honest as he was he replied, “I thought it was a not-for-profit membership body, not a company?” a sliver of panic sliding into his fingernails on the last word. The crack of the phone being put down left a ringing in his ears that would remain for the rest of the day.
The rest of the morning had not been kind. His induction apparently over the moment the final stitch of the suit had disappeared through the door frame he was left to introduce himself to the other people in the room himself. This was accomplished with intermittent results as, aside from only one of his new colleagues proving in any way both lucid and communicative, he was subject to the whims of the telephone. His initial reaction to the phone’s squeal for attention was to be one of his most positive for the entire day.
Somehow the phone was aware of him, of this B was sure, as any attempt to move even half the distance to the door was punished with it’s siren. The voices summoned from a more bitter plane to complete the connection were at best aggressive and at worst abstract. Several sheets of A4 paper were now full with names, phone numbers and arcane enquiries full of strange dodeca-syllabic constructs.
He had used these incomprehensible terms as a device to start conversations with his inmates - already the word seemed natural to him in this place - and this was how he had discovered that of the four of them only one would speak. He had only found the fourth, in fact, by accident when he was clearing a printer jam. The printer had taken to rocking most unsettlingly and emitting its own weak bleeping at the time so it wasn’t until it had been calmed and put to sleep anew that B had realised that a short woman was sitting at a desk next to it - she was entirely hidden from view at B’s desk.
This fourth inmate, however, was the bald peon tied to the Apple. He was hunched and flinched at every noise, except the phone. This seemed to have been blotted from his perception through the cruel anaesthetic of repetition. He was the editor of the ICA’s magazine and had reluctantly explained some of the words befuddling B so.
It was whilst he was hurriedly explaining poly-structural socio-fiscal ethnography when he said that this was a specialty of “the boss”.
“The boss? Is that the guy in the suit then?” It was the first spontaneous question he had asked of anyone here and he had an inkling that it was too much for this fragile wretch to take. The peon flinched and mumbled into his coffee. His eyes fixed on the screen and refused to move. B sighed and returned to his desk, half-wondering at the strength of will required to be so meek and feeble.
