Keith Waterhouse - Office Life

The flimsy copy of the unreturned pink check-list which he had extracted from the files gave him no clue. The check-lists were addressed to heads of departments only by the coded abbreviation used in all internal correspondence — he begged its pardon, in-house mail. Thus Copeland, he had noticed, was S7 — seven presumably being the floor number and S standing for Stationery Supplies. The head of Traffic Control across the way would be T7, and so on.

All Gryce knew was that his errand was with C10. It could very well mean C for Catering — for he remembered, as he stepped out of the lift on the tenth floor and looked around for a directory sign that was not there, that Pam had said something about believing the offices dealing with supplementary subsistence tickets, or SSTs, to be on either the tenth or twelfth floor. It would turn out, though Gryce had difficulty in crediting it to begin with, that they were on the tenth, eleventh and twelfth.

The tenth floor was unlike the seventh and third, the only ones on which he was qualified to pass comment, in that it was not sub-divided into sections. One department, in other words, occupied the entire length of the building at this level. The fact of there being no partitioned aisles meant there was room for more desks: about a hundred all told, Gryce would have guessed, all three-drawers locking, front-courtesy panel B4A/00621 models from Comform. (One of Comform's salesmen had pulled off a coup all right; rum that Gryce had no recollection of so substantial an invoice.) Behind each desk sat a male clerk — no females in this department, worse luck for those who worked in it — and on the black composition top of each desk, as far as the eye could see, were piles of SSTs which were being stamped, numbered, checked, entered into ledgers or card-indexes, or processed in some way. It was either this extraordinary sight or the uncanny resemblance of the nearest of the clerks to Jack Lemmon which put Gryce in mind of The Apartment, or it might have been another film, where they had made a humorous point about office drudgery in just such a scene.

There was no cubby-hole like Copeland's where the head of department might be found, but the desk where the Jack Lemmon-looking individual sat was placed near the doorway at right angles to the others, so that it could reasonably be taken as an enquiry desk even though Jack Lemmon was doing the same work as everyone else.

Without looking up, and in a weary, hundredth-time-today voice, he sighed, 'Twelfth floor' at Gryce's approach.

'Come again?'

'If you want your SSTs, twelfth floor. Hatch next to the Cockpit.'

'Oh, I'm with you. No, I wanted a word with the head of department, actually.'

'Which department?'

'This department.'

The clerk now gave Gryce his full attention, though without any improvement in his manner. He looked like Jack Lemmon looking foxy.

'Yes, I know this department. But how do you know this is the department you're looking for?'

Overworked, that was his trouble, Gryce thought. So was everyone else on the tenth floor, by the look of things. Not a head had been raised at his entrance, not a pen or rubber stamp laid aside. You would have thought they'd have been glad of the diversion.

'I was looking for C10, in point of fact.'

Gryce produced his pink check-list flimsy. Instead of reaching out for it, as expected, Jack Lemmon made Gryce hold it out for his inspection for all the world as if he were a human lectern.

'You want C12. Twelfth floor. Hatch next to the Cockpit.'

Thank you for nothing, said Gryce to himself, and went out.

Rather than wait for the lift he decided to walk up the stairs to the twelfth floor. Give his legs a bit of exercise. Reaching the eleventh floor foyer, and noticing that like the tenth it had no directory sign to identify the department or departments accommodated at this level, he paused out of curiosity to glance through the glass swing doors, one of which was invitingly propped open.

From the thumping of rubber stamps and the clicking of numbering machines, it was as busy a beehive as the floor he had just left. Gryce took a few diffident steps nearer. An all-male cast again; no one looked up. Hovering inside the doorway, he could now take in the length and breadth of the eleventh floor. It was an exact replica of the tenth, with the same rows of clerks at the same rows of three-drawers locking, front-courtesy panel B4A/ 00621 desks all stamping or otherwise dealing with their stacks of SSTs. Except that the clerk nearest the door didn't look remotely like Jack Lemmon, Gryce might have been the victim of some trick of space that had led him out of the tenth floor, up a flight of stairs and back to his starting-point.

Gryce didn't know what to make of it at all. While he was not quite sure what the numerical strength of Perfidious Albion might be in an actual head-count, it didn't need a degree in mathematics to work out that in an office block of twelve storeys, approximately one sixth of the workforce was occupied in fiddling about with wretched subsidized luncheon tickets. He had heard of firms being hot on staff welfare, they found it paid off in terms of productivity, but this was ridiculous.

Of course, it didn't follow that the tenth and eleventh floor battalions were engaged on such comparatively futile chores for all time. Indeed, the pace at which they were tackling their stamping and numbering and so forth seemed to suggest they had a deadline to meet. That, on reflection, would be it. Pam had explained in detail how the subsidized meal entitlement was in a transition period between orthodox luncheon vouchers and company or in-house SSTs. Gryce would have caught them slap bang in the middle of the change-over process. The clerks on the tenth and eleventh floors, or a substantial number of them, would have been diverted from other duties for this one-off rush job. When the crisis was over they would go back to their routine work, whatever that might be.

Satisfied, for the time being, by this deduction, Gryce proceeded to the twelfth floor, which a sign in the foyer told him was the domain of Catering (Administration). Supplementary to the explanation he had just given himself, Gryce could now see that there was probably a spot of empire-building going on this neck of the woods. He had come across that sort of thing before: he had once worked in a billet where the publicity wallahs had started out as one man and a boy and had finished up occupying a specially built annexe with their own typing pool. You had to hand it to them, in a way.

At any rate, one small mystery was solved. It was C10 for Catering as he'd thought all along, though why they couldn't have called it C12 and saved him all this trouble he was blessed if he could say.

Catering (Administration) occupied only two thirds of the space available, the other third having been walled off, papered with simulated brick and equipped with heavy mahogany doors to form the Cockpit executive restaurant. The doors were open. Gryce had a glimpse of several women, waitresses they would be, who were sitting at the white-clothed tables smoking cigarettes and gossiping. You couldn't blame them: lunch had been over a good two hours and they plainly had nothing to do except idle the rest of the afternoon away. Saving their presence, he didn't see why jobs like theirs couldn't be done by part-time labour, as in all the other billets he'd known.

The Cockpit was on Gryce's left as he entered from the foyer. To his right, beyond the same kind of waist-high partition as separated Stationery Supplies from Traffic Control, was Catering (Administration), or rather the hub of the Catering (Administration) empire if it proved that the tenth and eleventh floors came permanently under the same umbrella. Although the familiar rows of clerks were hunched over the familiar rows of desks they were not, Gryce was relieved to say, engaged in any logrolling with SSTs. Even so, their noses were kept to the grindstone as they busied themselves over files and ledgers. There was a martinet in charge of Catering (Administration) and no mistake.