Keith Waterhouse - Office Life

At the conclusion of, to Gryce's mind, this farcical business, Copeland returned to his desk with the toffee wrapper concealed in his hand, insinuating it on top of the one that was already lying there in the clear hope of Gryce not noticing that there were now two wrappers on the desk instead of one. He then went on to smooth out the top wrapper as he had done the one beneath it. It seemed quite important to him to prove to his own satisfaction that the two toffee-papers, when smoothed out, were exactly the same size, and when next he spoke, to ask Gryce if he was finding his feet, it was in an abstracted sort of voice.

The question had already been asked of Gryce by several of his colleagues and he gave the same answer: that it was a little like finding one's way around an ocean liner. He had never been on an ocean liner but the simile seemed appropriate, bearing in mind the slightly nautical flavour of the phrase about finding his feet that everyone used. Copeland confessed that there were parts of the building he was himself still unfamiliar with, giving the piles suppository in haystack tree as an instance. Gryce thought he must mean the Files Depository in basement three. He said that he would have to find Gryce something to do, and Gryce said that he looked forward to it. And then, reverting to the subject of telephones as abruptly as he had departed from it, Copeland repeated:

'Yes, dialect wine.'

If, as Gryce now guessed, he was saying 'direct lines', it didn't go very far towards explaining the mystery. Gryce supposed if his wife had used a bit of initiative, she could have got him on the phone by unearthing his letter of appointment and ringing the direct line number quoted on it — except, come to think of it, that it would have been the direct line to Lucas of Personnel, so it wouldn't have helped her much. But that didn't explain why a big commercial concern like Perfidious Albion should choose to be ex-directory, and it didn't explain why the telephones on the seventh floor, direct line or not, never seemed to ring.

He was not going to raise these questions with a busy head of department, but Copeland, who was now engaged in folding down the four corners of his toffee-papers to form an octogram, evidently sensed his puzzlement. Carefully serrating one of the folds with a thumb-nail, Copeland explained:

'It saves clogging up the twitchboard with outside calls, so our masters the business efficiency wallahs assure us. Each department has its own dialect wine. So if your wife does want to reach you in an immersion, see, she can always get you at this number here.'

Copeland gestured, more of a flaccid gesture this time, in the direction of his own telephone. He had only slightly stressed 'immersion, see', but enough for Gryce to gather that he was saying 'emergency' and that outside calls were not encouraged. Sound policy. It would stop his wife, especially if she were never given Copeland's direct line number, from ringing up to ask if he was working late again.

'Of course,' added Copeland, 'there's nothing to prevent you from making your own cause outboard.' Calls outward, that would be. 'Just dial nine on your internal extension and that gives you an outside wine, provided you don't wish to ring Australia. But you can't get incoming calls.'

'Except presumably from other departments?' ventured Gryce, anxious to seem alert.

'Not encouraged,' said Copeland firmly. 'Verbal enquiries play the merry dickens with the cistern, such as it is. Our cistern is to get everything in writing. Memo in, memo out, that's the idea. Then we all know where we are.'

Sounds more like the civil service every day, thought Gryce. But that was how these big firms tended to conduct themselves these days. The business efficiency wallahs were the masters now, as Copeland had rightly said. Gryce wouldn't have been surprised to hear that they'd had one of those American teams of whizz-kids in.

Since Copeland had the quizzical look of one expecting further questions, Gryce was emboldened to ask: 'But isn't it unusual for a firm this size to go ex-directory?'

'Furiously enough, it's more common than you'd think. It does make cents, when you look at it from the business standpoint. Nine out of ten calls are from established clients who know what dialect wine to ring and whom they want to speak to. Your unsolicited calls — salesmen, dissatisfied customers and other pains in the nether regions — are eliminated completely. It cuts down on use of executive time enormously.'

Oh, yes, they'd had the American whizz-kids in all right, revamping the organization from top to bottom.

Gryce, who had been encouraged by the tone of the interview to lean familarly against Copeland's desk, straightened up. Thinking that Copeland might want to go back to the theme of how difficult it was to find one's way around a new billet, and perhaps express the hope that he had at least managed to find out where to draw his pay cheque, he did not immediately leave.

He was surprised when all Copeland said was, 'Does that add to your pension?' Gryce, with an inane grinning nod, withdrew. Not until he was back at his desk did he work out that Copeland had asked, 'Does that answer your question?', just as Seeds had done when asked what British Albion was in aid of.

As to work: perhaps because he had drawn attention to himself by going into Copeland and pestering him about one thing after another, he was that very afternoon assigned his duties. Gryce felt hard done by: he had been banking on a week's grace at least.

He had also begun to hope that when the axe did fall, he would be asked to take over Mrs Rashman's job. Given that his arrival in Stationery Supplies overlapped Mrs Rashman's departure to get married only by a few days, it followed that he must be her replacement. From the evidence of Gryce's own eyes, Mrs Rashman was employed solely to snap rubber bands around batches of documents before they went down to the Files Depository in basement three. It would have suited him admirably, and he would be intrigued to know who was going to take over Mrs Rashman's little sinecure. Perhaps young Thelma was due for promotion.

For himself, he was given more exacting work, which was flattering in a way. Under the tutelage of the Penney twins, he was instructed in a process known as 'calling-in'. This meant he would be responsible for encouraging the various departments of British Albion to return their stocks of obsolete office stationery, for example the weekly sick-leave record sheets which had now been simplified, and to apply for replacements. Issuing the replacements would not be Gryce's pigeon. As he understood it, an operation that had hitherto been handled solely by the Penney brothers was now being divided, amoeba-like: where they had once called-in old stocks and subsequently issued new supplies, they would now be responsible only for the second stage of the procedure after the first stage had been cleared by Gryce. It was probably a lead-up to the reorganization programme that Copeland had talked about, doubtless resulting from the visit of that American whizz-kid team.

'It does give us one advantage—' began Hugh Penney.

'— a chance of catching-up,' finished Charles Penney. Gryce had noticed already that they distributed their sentences between themselves, so that each brother had an equal share of whatever had to be said. It was only rarely that either of them made a complete statement.

What he had not noticed, until they brought their chairs across and sat one on either side of him, was that the brothers suffered from joint halitosis.

The co-ordination they achieved in matters of dress, posture and so on did not extend to their diaphragms, so that while one brother was breathing in the other was breathing out. Gryce, as he put it to himself with unaccustomed crudeness, copped it both ways. He had had it in mind to spin out his indoctrination to last several days, but as wave after wave of fetid air assaulted his nostrils he determined to get the mysteries of 'calling-in' unravelled as quickly as possible. He did wish that Seeds, who had been inconvenienced slightly by having to move his chair in order to accommodate Hugh Penney on Gryce's left, would stop prolonging the proceedings with jocular interruptions such as: 'I see. Three heads are better than one, eh?'