Workplace Archives • My Dog Errol

336 • From our own correspondent

1st December 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Still holed up, in Azerbaijan,
With two dancing girls, in a barn:
The damn paparazzi
Are all over Patsy
But Patsy is all over Sîan.

War … what is it good for? Macho glory, seedy glamour, the licentious liberation that often accompanies mortal fear? The present bulletin is unhelpful. Quite how the particular situation arose we are not informed, despite the media presence. All we are offered is some needlessly intrusive detail about a putative relationship between the two dancing girls … something which is, in all probability, being faked in order to deflect the prurient and/or predatory attentions of Our Own Correspondent.

164 • Meet the team (18)

12th June 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

And lastly, your mentor, Bob Cratchit,
Whose cloak is encrusted with bat-shit.
A pipistrelle lurks
Near the desk where he works:
How he longs for the leisure to catch it!

How useful, to be finally introduced to one’s office mentor on the very day one hands in one’s notice. The repulsive colleague one has taken such pains to avoid turns out to be the very person who has supposedly been looking after one’s interests all along. Relieved of my care, perhaps he will now have free time to catch the Corvid-carrier that haunts him like a familiar.

160 • Meet the team (16)

8th June 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

Look out for our caretaker, Ken,
And his heavily-hybridised hen:
With its modified beak
It can actually speak
Though not in the language of men.

In any business the janitor – or similar dogsbody – may prove the most interesting and innovative of thinkers. Unfettered by ambition, untainted by rivalry, he or she is free – like a Shakespearean Fool – to defy norms, and provide a foil to institutional formality through the creative quirks of an idiosyncratic mind.

157 • Meet the team (15)

5th June 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

You may glimpse our Owner, Sir Harold,
In tweedy tuxedo apparelled:
His wife is a Dame,
With a stupid long name,
And his heirs are all quadruple-barrelled.

Ownership, surely the root of all evil. And Sir Harold, so blinded by his own wealth, or that of his privileged partner, that all notions of good taste in tailoring have flown out of the window.

155 • Meet the team (14)

3rd June 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Don’t squeal, when you first come across
The corpse in the cupboard (our boss –
His wife’s an embalmer).
He died of bad karma,
A sad, but not serious, loss.

The progress of many an institution is hampered by the veneration employees persist in according to the charismatic figureheads of a former imperium. Here, characteristically, a dead boss has not been replaced: his ‘loss’ is judged non-serious, provided his mortal remnant is retained at the premises.

153 • Meet the team (13)

1st June 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

This tart is your underling, Suki:
She helps us look after the loo-key.
It lives in her drawer
Under spiders galore,
And the cubicle’s also quite spooky.

No young colleague – even if she imposes a Goth’s visual stylings on her work-station, and other purlieux within her ambit – should have to endure the denigration here implied in the choice of the word ‘underling’, nor the childish linguistic register used in describing her meagre responsibilities.

150 • Meet the team (12)

29th May 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Be kind to our stock-keeper, Howard.
He’s desk-bound, but scarcely a coward.
He put down his pen
And toiled like ten men
The night the Great Cake was devoured.

This distasteful snapshot of office life reveals how body-shaming – more typically reserved for female colleagues – is in special cases applied also to men. In this huge chap’s case, jealousy of his evident arithmetical prowess apparently legitimises jibes about his outlandish bodily bulk.

148 • Meet the team (11)

27th May 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Our spin-doctor gushes hot air
As he swivels all day on his chair
Sometimes dazed, sometimes dizzy.
But since he looks busy
The managers seem not to care.

In a world that stands or falls by surface meanings, the appearance of industry – however compulsive and futile – evidently guarantees continued employment.

147 • Crinoline Paradox

26th May 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

I owe my continued existence
To this garb, worn at Granny’s insistence.
Yes, work colleagues mock
My huge crinoline frock
But they strongly maintain Social Distance.

Fashions come and fashions go. The widest crinoline in its day was some 2 metres across: hence its re-emergence in the Covid Era as an agent of Social Distancing. Paradoxically, however, the present-day Politics of Cool forbid us to shy away from any man who chooses to flaunt his Granny’s cast-offs in public. So what can a poor boy do?

146 • Meet the team (10)

25th May 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

That nurse with the knife is Nanette
Whose brief is our burgeoning debt.
She can cut it by half
If she slashes the staff
But you mustn’t take that as a threat.

The presence of trained medical personnel in the workplace would, in an ideal world, be reassuring. But, trained for what? The idea that my new colleagues and I might be culled, in the name of economies, is somewhat less so.

143 • Meet the team (9)

22nd May 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

On that bench lies our governor, Maud,
Who formerly sat on The Board.
In the financial crash
She lost most of our cash:
Disgrace was her only reward.

With characteristic chauvinism it’s a woman the company blames, and shames, for market losses which (as they implicitly acknowledge) afflicted the great majority of businesses in the sector. One is surprised they haven’t feminised her job-description to ‘Governess’.

141 • Meet the team (8)

20th May 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Your trainer’s Monsignor Arturo,
The curse of the Currency Bureau.
His fraudulent dealing
Has gone through the ceiling
And trebled the price of the Euro.

Reformed drug-users make the best addiction counsellors, just as burglars, having served time in jail, often prosper as security consultants. We might surmise from his title that Arturo, above, is a former inmate of the Vatican, and perhaps feel heartened that his skills – if such they be – have latterly found favour in a commercial milieu.

140 • Progress log

19th May 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

At our meeting to Forge the New Way
I was baffled by Paragraph A.
When we fell into bed
Stumped by Paragraph Z
I had understood nothing all day.

A day’s work at the office, or, equally, an entry from the ‘Progress Log’ that the marriage guidance counsellor insists that I keep. But enough about that. Note the classy use of the British ‘Z’ here.

139 • Meet the team (7)

18th May 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Down there is our treasurer, Rafe,
Who begs on the street, like a waif.
It’s a strategy meant
To throw thieves off the scent
Of the keys to the company safe.

In the office environment, confidential ‘insights’ of this sort are often tests of the listener’s gullibility, or else veiled threats: ‘You could end up on the street too, if you don’t do a decent job’ (ie, play the corporate game. It’s just a question of figuring out some of the rules).

136 • Meet the team (6)

15th May 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Your audio typist is Juno:
She hums only music by Gounod.
You’ll implore her to cease
But the din won’t decrease:
She doesn’t know any words you know.

Irrepressibly tuneful and sentimental, the Frenchman’s compositions are the last thing one wants to be reminded of at any time, least of all in a lockdown-defying office. Every memo I dictate for typing begins ‘For fuck’s sake Juno, change the bloody record, can’t you?’ … but the poor girl just hasn’t the linguistic sophistication to oblige.

134 • Meet the team (5)

13th May 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Our company lawyer, Corinna,
Works out of a bedsit in Pinner.
Best not to ask why.
You’ll find out by and by.
Just don’t let her take you to dinner.

The workplace is pregnant with erotic foreboding and intimations of past scandal. ‘Dinner’ is identifiable as a euphemism … but for what, exactly? Some ropes are better left unshown.

132 • Meet the team (4)

11th May 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

In Human Resources we’ve Irma
Who commutes every Monday from Burma.
Frankly, sightings are rare
As her head’s in the air
And her body abhors terra-firma.

‘Human Resources’ … the phrase speaks volumes, volumes of ill-defined flabbiness. Surely Irma – whom I’m sure I’ll never meet – could find a less embarrassing and more rewarding job by remaining in Burma?

129 • Meet the team (3)

8th May 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

And this is your manager, Amy.
Her statements are all pretty samey:
Things like ‘Cover my back,’
And ‘I’m all right, Jack,’
And ‘Die if you ever betray me.’

The predictability of these proclamations is reassuring, even if the office culture they suggest runs counter to civilised expectation.

127 • Meet the Team (2)

6th May 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Your opposite number here, Jake,
Has never once made a mistake.
Just you copy him
And the chances are slim
That he’ll ever work out you’re a fake.

The quest for personal authenticity never did run smooth. To avoid being called out as a fake, behave like a fake. Furthermore, however you choose to play it, someone will be judging you.

125 • Meet the team

4th May 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

First, please greet your co-worker, Eric,
Who hails from the city of Berwick.
His friends call him ‘Anne’,
His enemies ‘Stan’,
But he answers to nothing but ‘Derek’.

First day of a new assignment, being shown the ropes via Internet link-up. Of course it’s ungracious to be pedantic, but Berwick is not, and never has been, a ‘city’ – and this blunder shakes my confidence in the other particulars imparted by my morning’s informant.