I’m even worse at work. My desk is an embarrassment, to be honest. It is littered with coloured pens, enough Post-It notes to create my very own roll of Post-It-themed wallpaper and dozens of scraps of paper covered in illegible notes under the scribbled heading ‘to do’. Organised chaos, I call it. But there really is no excuse. I work for an office supplies company, after all, with unlimited pen pots, filing trays and notepads at my disposal.
I am one of eight account planners at Penand Inc who set up and manage new accounts after unsuspecting office managers have been hypnotised by our sweet-talking salesmen – and women – and their copies of our two-inch-thick glossy catalogue.
I’m really an admin assistant with a fancy title and a salary to match, which is probably why I have stayed for so long. You get used to earning decent money, don’t you? Especially after being a student when you are used to pooling your coppers for a loaf of bread to make cheese on toast after a night in the student union bar.
I work with the biggest bunch of knobs. Dickheads, all of them, except Felicity and Erin, who I share an office with. Between us we look after the big national companies. There were four of us but Hannah, the senior account planner, was sacked last month for stealing a bottle of Tippex. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t the Tippex that got her the sack. If they were that petty then I’d have been out on my ear long ago – I could open up my own branch of WHSmiths with all the pens and Post-It notes that have made their way home in my handbag over the years. The Tippex was merely the straw that broke the camel’s back, shall we say, because Hannah didn’t just nick the odd pen or pencil, or pad of Post-Its, or bottle of Tippex. She nicked an entire office. Well, obviously not an office as such, but everything needed to equip one. Her boyfriend was starting up his own recruitment agency and Hannah thought it would save him a few quid if she got him a few bits from work. Like pens and pencils, and a ream of paper or two, for example. I’m sure she didn’t actually intend to put the flat-pack beech-effect corner desk with matching filing cabinet into the boot of her car. Or the traditional executive leather facing manager’s chair. Or the Canon C1492X printer scanner. Although, if she had stopped there then she may well have got away with it. But when she was spotted leaving the warehouse with a 12-pack of Tippex – there’s only so much Tippex a person can get through, even if your employers are paying for it – suspicions were aroused, and an investigation was launched. In other words, Hannah was summoned to personnel where she ‘fessed up and was promptly handed her P45.
Which has left Fliss, Erin and I holding the fort. And for some ludicrous reason the two of them have nominated me to be in charge of the team until a new senior account planner is appointed. Erin says she isn’t ‘boss material’ and Fliss says she’s past it.
But I’m a terrible leader. I hate telling other people what to do. I’d rather do something myself than have to ask somebody else to do it.
Fliss and Erin are very sweet though. They never take advantage of my complete inability to delegate. If the roles were reversed, I can’t promise I wouldn’t completely take the piss – come in late, take extra long lunch hours, leave early…
Come to think of it – I do all that already…
As if to prove my point, they are both already in as I survey the nuclear disaster that is my desk.
“Cup of tea, Becky love?” Fliss asks, illustrating one of the many reasons I totally adore her.
“That’d be fab, Fliss, thanks,” I reply, shrugging my coat off and draping it over the back of my chair.
Erin and Fliss are the perfect people to share an office with. Fliss makes a fabulous cup of tea, and Erin, despite being on a permanent diet, always has a well-stocked bucket of Maltesers hidden between the hanging files in her desk drawer.
Fliss is amazing. She has worked for Penand Inc her whole life. Well, almost. Thirty-eight years to be exact. Can you imagine that? Working for the same company for nearly forty years? If I’m still at Penand Inc when I’m forty, never mind sixty, someone please put me out of my misery.
Not that I’m knocking Fliss. It’s what you did in her day, isn’t it? You joined a company straight from school and stuck with them, getting your carriage clock after thirty years and a big retirement bash a decade or so later. Incidentally, why a carriage clock? Why not something more useful like an iPod, or a Kindle, or a weekend in Paris? A carriage clock, tick-tocking away on your mantelpiece, is surely just a brutal reminder of all the time you wasted working for a company that deems you worthy of nothing more than a carriage clock?
Fliss has had her carriage clock, but she has another few years to go before the big bash. She’s thinking about early retirement though. She should. She can afford to. Her husband Derek has just sold his veterinary practice. They’re loaded. But she says she’d miss Erin and I too much. She says we keep her young.
Despite that claim, Fliss has been doing her damndest to get rid of me for the last eighteen months. In the nicest possible way, of course.
“Don’t be like me,” she keeps saying. “Still here when you’re sixty.”
No chance.
“You’re wasted here, lovey,” she says.
Fliss knows my real goal is to be a writer. I wrote a short piece about her once – and Erin and Hannah – after I realised how much they all made me laugh.
For weeks I kept a little notepad in my desk drawer and every time one of them did or said something funny I would write it down. Like the time Erin laughed so much at a joke I told she did a huge fart in the middle of the office cafeteria. And the time Hannah told us she’d forgotten to take her contact lenses out before she went to bed and woke up the next morning thinking there had been a miracle. And the time Fliss came out of the ladies with her skirt tucked into her knickers.
When I had completely filled the notepad I wrote a short story about them. It was only meant to be for the girls to read, but they loved it so much they made me submit it for the company magazine.
And ever since then, Fliss has been on at me to “chase my dreams.”
“Malcolm wants us to split the Leeds accounts between Roger Calvin and Dave Anderson,” Fliss tells me, flicking the kettle on and dropping tea bags into three mugs. We’re not supposed to have a kettle in our office – we’re supposed to use the kitchen on the third floor, but we can’t be arsed. We’re rebels. And it gives us a little thrill every time we plug it in, knowing there’s a chance we might get caught.
“Why, for heaven’s sake?” I ask.
Fliss shrugs.
“Does he realise how much time that’s going to take us?”
“Bill is leaving, apparently. He and his wife are moving to France to run a Bed and Breakfast. He says he’s had enough of doing a job he hates.”
“I know how he feels,” I say, immediately regretting it, as I sense Fliss lifting one foot up onto her soapbox. Three, two, one…
“So leave. I keep telling you that you should.”
You don’t want to be like me…
“You don’t want to be like me…”
Still here when you’re sixty…
“Still here when you’re sixty…”
You’re