Office life
Call waiting
Holly Budd
Aman with a holdall walked into my office this morning and said he'd come to install the new telephone.
`I haven't asked for one' `You're on my list.'
If you're on somebody's list in this place, you're for it. You can't get off and often you can't find out how you got on. In every large organisation there are swathes of people who get their job satisfaction not from doing what the organisation is for but from hindering. This man was clearly one of the saboteurs. 'See — it says you.'
Debbie, my secretary, sits in the outer office in order to fend off predators but she's not at her best in the mornings. She followed him in, pathetically mouthing `sorry', took one look at my face and fled.
The man described the new telephone. It could remember, broadcast, hold confer- ences, ring people for me, record who'd rung in my absence, follow me round the building, all that sort of thing. Like com- puters, they do ever more of what you don't need and complicate what you do. I am an unreconstructed Luddite: I don't want to hold conferences and I believe that people who spend a lot of time on the tele- phone do less work. The only luxury I want is to be able to switch it through to Debbie, who can answer most queries anyway. The old system does this with the press of a sin- gle button. The new one demands three presses and a code and even then won't desist from leaving messages on its little screen.
The man found my needs offensively simple. 'But you can camp on other peo- ple's phones,' he expostulated.
Debbie, who is excited by new things, had crept back in. 'That means they can't avoid speaking to you eventually,' she offered.
It next transpired that this toy demanded alterations to the trunking. The floor would have to be opened up and my desk moved to a ridiculous part of the room. I tele- phoned — very simply — the manager who claimed what he called 'ownership' of the project and was told it was essential to keep abreast of every new technological generation. That confirmed it as a job justi- fication scheme. I left for an aggressively long lunch.
When I returned the old phone was restored and my desk was in its proper place. Debbie, who unlike me improves as the day goes on, smiled winningly. 'It's all right. We can stay as we are.'
`How?'
`I chatted him up and he agreed to put us at the bottom of the list which means we'll never get it because before he works down to us there will be a new generation to suc- ceed this one which is already obsolescent and he'll have to start at the top again.'
Who said every new start is a different kind of failure?
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