Dispatch from the Real World: The Office

Written by Rachel Ogier

From Monday to Friday, from nine until five-thirty, I’m at the office.

I always swore I wouldn’t work in one. I would be a writer, or an artist, or any job which didn’t require a desk. I might condescend to answer emails from a laptop balanced on my lap in bed, but whatever I did, I would never, ever work in an office. Offices were cubicle farms. Workers were packed in and tied to their desks with headsets and keyboards. I thought that I, of all the people in this world, was destined for finer things.

Then one day, I found myself flat broke and with an offer of work from my mother’s-colleague’s-husband. My mother’s colleague had misheard and told her husband I was studying finance instead of fine arts. I got the job.

My new boss didn’t realise I wasn’t anywhere near qualified for about three weeks. He asked casually about my morning classes one day and I replied, just as casually, that I was enjoying the welding lessons we’d been having. He nearly spat out his tea and never asked me to do arithmetic without a calculator again.

My first lesson: the systems in place in office buildings mean that all but the most incompetent juniors can thrive. The systems are the clearly defined routines associated with every little bit of office life.

That first office job consisted of opening the mail, sorting out the payments, stamping them PAID and copying over the details of the payment to the special Details Of Payments Sheet. Then I would have a cup of tea and a biscuit and enter the information from the Payment Sheet into – count ‘em – three different programs on the old PC I’d been allocated. At lunch time my boss would tell me about what he did in a war I’d never heard of and still know nothing about, and I would do the Sudoku in the paper. Then I would file everything, and go home.

From what I’ve been told, it’s the same at McDonalds: put the fries in the basket and press the button. When the timer goes off, serve the fries and repeat until end of shift.

I ended up working at that office, part time, for more than two years. Every day was precisely the same. Every day, I enjoyed it.

I liked showing up at nine and working until my three o’clock lecture. I liked the biscuits and the cups of tea. I liked that the hours were regular and I never, ever had to work Saturday nights. I liked my colleagues, and that my boss wasn’t a psychopath who ran me off my feet and kept my tips.

Now I work in an office full time and am consistently amazed at how few of my friends do the same. One is working for minimum wage in retail, because she thinks office jobs are boring. Another is working in a coffee shop. Still more are working in sales.

In the office, it is tremendously easy to put off doing work. By the time you’ve got coffee, exchanged pleasantries with the nearest co-worker and checked your emails, it can be nearly eleven o’clock. One needs to be disciplined about it. The systems are there so that the work gets done and to allow ten minutes in the day to stand by the water cooler and gossip.

Despite being in Auckland, due to what is surely a glitch in the fabric of space and time, there is not a café within reasonable walking distance of my work. Therefore, we have a coffee machine. Newcomers are shown how to use it before they are shown where the bathroom is, and are not allowed to use the bathroom until they have made a cup of coffee. ‘When you steam the milk, make sure it swirls in a clockwise direction. This makes it creamier.’ They’re always terribly proud of their first cup of coffee, even though it’s generally rubbish. For weeks afterwards, getting a coffee is as easy as standing and saying vaguely, ‘anyone fancy a coffee?’ The new guy will invariably jump up to help.

The characters in the show ‘The Office’ are characters, not caricatures. The police may have better work stories, but I’d bet they’re all from the back room staff. In my office, there’s James in customer service who can fall asleep sitting up at his desk. The office is very casual, but German Steve has extended this to not wearing any shoes on Fridays. No one has said anything yet, but if the gentlemen’s facilities are anything like the ladies (cleaning day is Monday), he will get his comeuppance in the loos.

I am a little nervous around German Steve (there are two Steves. The other Steve is called ‘Other Steve, Not German Steve’). I stole German Steve’s chair when he was on holiday. He hasn’t said anything yet, but I’m afraid he’ll notice one day and demand it back. It’s a cut above the rest of the chairs in the office and a bit easier on my back. When you sit on a chair for eight hours a day, you notice these things.

You also notice, with so much computer time, how tired your eyes are at the end of the day. At three in the afternoon, it’s difficult to focus them on the screen. Someone once told me about working in the eighties, before everyone had computers. They wrote everything down (with pens on bits of paper) and handed it to someone else to type up. Important forms were mailed to Hamilton to be typed up on the company’s computer. I don’t know why the only computer was in Hamilton: maybe they thought Hamilton was an unlikely target in the event of a thermonuclear war.

Another part of my job is marketing. I have a fake Facebook profile that I’ve made look quite fake, because I feel vaguely unethical marketing through social networking. Still, I have over a thousand friends. Twice a day, I update my status to some variation of ‘Look at this cool new product you can buy!!’ Yet my thousands of friends do not unfriend me. I don’t like to speculate that I might mean something to them. For the job’s sake I spend twenty minutes each morning returning their pokes, wishing them happy birthday if it’s applicable and refusing to play Farmville. But they remember it when I ‘like’ their relationship status. I appear on some people’s ‘top friends’ lists. Sometimes they send me little messages. Someone named Maureen posts updates about her mental health and I reply encouragingly. I am afraid someone in India might be in love with me. But of course I don’t unfriend him: I try and sell him things instead.

The office where I work now is attached to a warehouse which houses the products we sell to keep us all employed. This means the office itself is a little bit manky, and is handily located in the precise centre of nowhere. I’ve decided I prefer slightly manky offices to nice ones. In nice offices there’s nothing standing between you and the creeping realisation that you’re trading a fleeting existence for a clean keyboard, the sort without what looks like little bits of your predecessor’s earwax under all the keys. In my dingy office I can say to myself, ‘well, if only my desk had a back to it so I didn’t unplug the computer every time I crossed my legs, life would be perfect’ and absolutely mean it.

I like the office, even though it’s hard to explain to my friends why I’m exhausted in the evenings when the most strenuous thing I’ve done all day is make a cup of coffee. But I like the grey carpet which doesn’t stain when I slosh tea on it. I like the regular hours and the biscuit tin. I like the feeling that I’m working in a grown-up job, doing grown-up things.

Back when I was studying, I never would have guessed that a creative career could be held behind a desk. Granted, I’m not exactly going to be awarded a Pulitzer or Turner prize, but I still get to play with words all day and I couldn’t so that unless someone was willing to pay me for it. The office has its shortcomings, but so does the rest of the real world. I wouldn’t work anywhere else.