Office life
Piles of bin ends
Holly Budd
The week our wastepaper baskets were needlessly replaced the computers began to
`Yes I suppose the cat is quite big. Why do you ask.' go down. The connection was not obvious to everyone.
They were proper baskets, homely, old- fashioned things, taken for granted until too late. Like Communist officials of old, they disappeared in the night. Unlike Com- munist officials — so far as I know — they were replaced by shiny new black ones, made of plastic. This was a minor spasm of corporate wantonness, the sort of thing to which companies are prone when they think they ought to be modernising. It would have been no more than cud for office philosophers to chew on, were not the three bins — one each for Debbie, Nigel and me — stuck firmly inside each other. They were left between Nigel's desk and mine, within orange peel range but useless for Debbie in the outer office. First I tried to separate them, then Debbie after her reviving cup of coffee, then Nigel when he got back from the dentist. I never thought he would be very strong, though he might be, and I felt so sorry when he went red in the face with effort and his trouser- legs shook.
During the next few days the bins were moved about as we each tried to be unselfish and tidy. The computers func- tioned intermittently. There was no remotely satisfactory position for our trim- tarian bin and its rapid filling convincingly demolished the myth of the paper-less office. Not only paper, orange peel, apple cores, KitKat wrappers, remains of sand- wiches and Nigel's Exchange & Mart (1 must find out about that).
The limit, so far as I was concerned, was reached when we'd had some other people in for lunch-time drinks and I found myself emptying broken crisps into one of Deb- bie's shoes.
It was then that both computer systems went down simultaneously, which we had been assured was impossible. I must con- fess to a secret pleasure when things go wrong, unless they are connected with WY home or my travel. It probably derives from childhood when the order imposed by our parents was occasionally shattered and we children could be gleefully irresponsible. I proclaimed this confirmation that if things can go wrong, they will. In a universe said to be running down, this is surely a basic physical principle. I am afraid I gloat- ed in the presence of the telephone man with the hold-all, who is also concerned with computers and looked very unhappy' I added that it was inevitable that important things would go wrong when trivial things like wastepaper baskets were pointlessly and ineffectually replaced. Another basic physical principle. The gods are offended. When the computers were restored, the telephone man reappeared and silently took our wastepaper bins into the gents. We were nonplussed. He reappeared with three sepa- rate bins. 'Hot water,' he said. 'Heated air expands. Basic physical principle.' Clearly, there were more connections than I had realised.
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