Within a week of finishing my last A-Level exam, I was in a London skyscraper, frantically noting down my new employee logins to various pieces of software I’d never heard of before.
After meeting the other apprentices and being introduced to the head of my department, I was now being taken through each and every ‘basic’ I had to remember. The ‘basics’ in this particular office were pretty much anything and everything my manager could think of at the time.
Between trying to remember my ID password and meeting yet another faceless, fully suited, no-tied (in that new-wave modern kind of way) office executive, I looked out the window, 23 stories up, and saw St. Paul’s Cathedral. And no, I’m not about to get religious, don’t worry.
I took a minute to breathe it all in.
Just a week before, I’d been trying to kill time in the sixth form common room by flipping coasters up with the back of my hand and catching them. But now.
Now I was in the middle of the genuine ‘London’ experience – commuting 4 hours a day and trying to figure out when it was safe to cross the road. I had not yet entered the hive mind of the commuter-conglomerate so I assumed it took a while before these things became second-nature.
Despite the hellish shock of waking up at 5am, I was excited. I knew I’d never get tired of that view, nor the feeling of emerging from a tube station onto a packed street, full of modern offices and 300-year-old churches.
I’d made it. And it was great.
Until it wasn’t.
The novelty wore off. It wasn’t the commute that killed it though. Nor the waking up early. It wasn’t even the £6 I had to fork out for ONE sandwich when I forgot lunch.
Nope.
It was the people.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m sure (well not SURE sure) that in their private lives, they were all simply delightful individuals.
But.
When it came to their attitudes at work, I didn’t know what was happening. Was it something in the water? The dysfunctional air conditioning? The lack of openable windows? I couldn’t tell.
They weren’t all bad of course. But for the most part, I simply couldn’t believe how self-absorbed they were, and in what utter contempt they held others. It was as if they believed their role as ‘drone 1483’ was somehow singlehandedly keeping the entire organisation afloat.
Pricks exist. I get that. School was full of them. But to be honest with you, that’s where I thought it ended.
I was surprised to see the amount of backstabbing, whining, whinging, bitching, and outright throw-under-the-bussing in play at this office.
Everyone seemed to have it in for everyone else. The office politics was draining. Allegiances would shift, contractors would reply to emails ‘too snappily’, IT veterans would criticise anyone who dared question why we still used local folders to save group projects in.
Personal matters were the talk of the room, followed by a rushed silence when the subject of the discussion walked in. It was like a cool kids’ group chat with admins who would add and remove users at random.
As a public sector organisation (naming no names – but it’s the most useless one, let’s put it like that), I thought the degree of professionalism would be a little higher. I never expected MI6-level stuff but come on, at least a sense of team effort.
I was close to being fed up.
But after a few weeks of witnessing these playground problems, something clicked.
I realised something.
90% of the staff in my department had been there for 15+ years.
This was their life.
They bitched because the little things mattered to them. They acted so high-and-mightily important because they genuinely believed they were. Why wouldn’t they?
They’d been exposed to nothing but the same floor of the same building for a fifth of a century – one-upping Laura from accounts or exposing a missed memo to the Chief Officer really was a big deal for them.
Scraping any credit they could or edging a little further up the chain of respect was what their life revolved around now. And I came to realise that it was okay.
Not only was it okay, it was necessary.
I’d come into THEIR world, not the other way around. The only difference was, I hadn’t been indoctrinated yet.
I’d come from a place where I had the freedom to care about whatever I wanted to. My time constraints were minimal. I studied multiple subjects, played games, volunteered, read dozens of books, news stories, and articles. I looked at as much of the world as I could.
So, when I joined this absurdly large room, far too high above the ground, and the people there would spend half-an-hour discussing in what order the words of a job-title should go (true story), my many youthful ambitions and interests were punctured all at once. I was bitter.
Despite how young and inexperienced I was, it all felt so small and banal to me. I felt more important than everyone there, exactly because I didn’t act like I was more important than everyone there. I had it in my mind that all this schoolboy-squabbling was pointless.
It stumped be for a fair month or two.
And then I slowly began to understand.
That’s life.
Yes – I still believe that some of the people there were slightly more pathetic than in your average office, BUT people caring so much about the little, trivial, bitchy things at work is what keeps them going.
That’s how the modern workplace functions. It’s what gives us such high outputs – it’s what keeps ‘experts’ in their roles.
I stand by part of my initial analysis: so much time, money, and effort is wasted (usually in the public sector) due to shirking of responsibility, finger-pointing, and general laziness. But hey. That’s just human. It’s what we do.
So, when some fresh-faced, incompetent arse from an independent sixth form comes along and starts to internally criticise it, all they need is some time to figure out the importance of it for themselves.
I did tell a little lie earlier on. I didn’t really leave because of the people. I’d figured out and come to terms with the environment after 4 months. I learnt to accept it for what it was, all the while submitting before its cruel necessity.
I even started to take joy in the small workplace spats. I’d write down predictions for how certain people would react to situations, and craft little stories in my head during meetings.
And by doing that, I came to learn the greatest trick I have ever known for gaining respect from anyone. That’s a story for another post though.
When it came down to it, I simply left because the work wasn’t what I wanted to do. The early-to-bed, early-to-rise situation didn’t help much either, mind you.
I knew if I had to play my part in this social tragedy we call work, then I was going to do it on the backdrop of an industry that actually mattered to me. Hence, I get to write about it now. How meta.
The moral to take away from this tale, other than the fact I enjoy writing about the boring and obvious, is this:
No matter how trivial something at work may seem, whether involving you or not, remember that it’s simply one minute necessity that makes up the puzzle of an efficient world of work. Without partaking, the novelty of office-work would wear off – and then we’d all be screwed.
So, the next time Peter makes some futile remark about Jo working from home too much and slacking with her work – call him a wanker and contribute to the gossip-mill.
You’ll be doing your bit for a healthy working environment.
Talk to you later,
Alex
