Right, now I’ve cleared things up on the whole booze front, let’s pick a different flavour for the fourth essay and ramble of the year. Something a little lighter in treatment, but no less ubiquitous in its impact.
Work. Something in which I have been engaged in one capacity or another for just over 31 years. Something which, at the moment, is an object of fascination for me, because I largely undertake it about 12 feet from my toilet, and about 18 feet from where I sleep at night. I first ‘worked from home’ about 15 years ago, when I was in the employ of the University of East Anglia, and had to commute about 550 miles a week in an occasionally unreliable Rover 400, to and fro along the A47, in the company of quite a lot of farm machinery, across the upper central belt of Norfolk. This (the commute) was something I did for about three years, and I did not care for it. It ate up days and then weeks and in the end I suppose months of my life. It stressed me out. It made me fat, and by the end of it, I was smoking six cigarettes a day whilst driving. Not really the way ahead.
The facility to work from home existed perfectly well, and we had a small office space in the little spare bedroom of the cottage Sarah the First and I lived in. It was cosy, stuff worked nicely, and I found it relaxing and productive, when I was permitted to work that way. However, my boss, back then, was an untrusting and miserable lady – she didn’t like me, and I can’t say I was wild on her. Having a sense of humour is, of course, not compulsory, but I’m always a bit taken aback when I meet people with the inability to crack a smile at anything. I daresay that some of the people that have worked with me across the years would describe me as the opposite – I find the joke in everything, and am doubtless not serious enough by their standards. Okay, fine, but I suspect that I stand a better chance of cultivating positive professional relationships with my slightly cock-eyed approach, than one who enters the office under a perpetual cloud, works unnecessarily long hours and takes pretty much zero pleasure from any of it. We will, I’m afraid, all be dead soon enough. When that final day applies to me, I suspect I will not lie there, pondering the Great Beyond, wincing at the memory of how I should probably have been a bit more serious. I’d rather face my annihilation with, if perhaps not a cheesy grin (‘cause, you know, dying and all that), then at least the contemplation that I had managed to have a bit of a giggle, and had done some fun stuff. I have, and I am going to tell you about some of it.
I remember very clearly being called to the Boss’s office for one of our joyless ‘catch-ups’, where she said (and this is verbatim), “I want to row back somewhat from working from home arrangements”.
‘Row back’. Yep.
I nodded deferentially – I don’t really care to argue with a brick wall – it just tires you out. Inside my head, I thought “I need to live nearer to where I work, and I need to both live and work a long, long way away from you”. A few months into the year that followed, I did. But not before commuting by car posed its last real threat to my life, when on a sunny Spring morning, as I enjoyed one of the rare bits of dual carriageway on my route into work, a crow fell out of tree, and rolled drunkenly through the sky in the direction of my windscreen. If it wasn’t already dead (we shall never know), it was by the time it impacted upon my wing mirror at 70mph and tore it clean off. Quite the brush with death, eh?
It wasn’t the kamikaze birdlife that drove me to desire home-working; it was the cost and the time involved in commuting. It’s always seemed to me, as one who’s only occasionally been paid very well, that so often the first act of the working day was to hand over money to get there – and that was only really ever the cause of misery. Much worse when driving, of course, and so after the incident with the crow had passed into memory, there began what’s been 13 years of travelling to work by public transport. Trams got me to work in Sheffield and Nottingham, and these days it’s the train into Leicester – memorably, for that year in Qatar, it was a legendary minibus. I suppose it’s a little bit odd that, right now (early Autumn 2021), the few occasions on which I have to go to go onto campus are characterised by a desire to drive there, because of the pandemic and masks situation we have arrived at. I suppose that will likely melt away again, in time. We’ll see, eh?
Of course, I can always find a frustration, and over that decade and more, it’s been the marriage between my impatience and the reliability of public transport. My ethical code says that I should always seek to get on a bus, a tram, a train, etc. Alright, in the UK it can be a bit of a rip-off, unless you are canny about when you travel and what ticket you buy, but, of course, someone else does the driving and you can park yourself with a book, some music, etc. etc. Broadly speaking I have benefitted from this, although some of the days when it all went wrong, and one arrived home or, worse, at work, drenched, late, and full of murderous thoughts do tend to live long in the memory. There’s something very British about swallowing down one’s rage whilst pressed into the armpit of another random punter on a rail replacement bus service. Truth be told, if my last dozen working years mostly start by getting up, making coffee, walking a dog or two and then cracking off with my work with a view of the garden and slippers on my feet – then I shall not complain a bit. Well, not very much, anyway. It’s entirely regrettable that the Covid hideousness has brought about this state of affairs – of course it is. And I guess my personal circumstances and ability to work alone in my home make me luckier than many people, so I do count my blessings.
Needless to say, the working from home thing does bring its obvious disadvantages. There is an inevitable blurring of the boundaries of home and work, but I can live with that when it’s lined-up against the costs to me in time and money when it comes to tootling into work. Additionally, I’d argue that when I am at home, my employer gets more out of me. Even though we Iive only 12 miles or so from the University, it still eats up a good 80-90 minutes of the day to attend the workplace, and often whilst I am there I am only on the same Teams calls I would have been on had I been sat in my study at home, where I am typing this. Given that time back, after walking the dogs at the start of the day, I am able to start earlier and, when I choose to, it’s no real stress to carry on working and finishing things up whilst dinner is cooking. It didn’t take long for me to make the conscious decision not to plug the laptop in and carry on working after a commute home. That feels both pragmatic and fair, right? It means some of my work gets delayed, but if my employer wants me to present myself at work, then they lose some of my time. Gains on the swings are lost on the roundabouts (literally, in this case).
Lots of other things go in my favour, though. All those parcels? I’m here to greet their arrival, if SWK isn’t. Dog minders? Dog walkers? Not required, as the hounds can park themselves at my feet and sigh and fart discontentedly all day long, if they choose. I can take a more liberal approach to my wardrobe. The coffee’s better. If, as he will do next week, the chimney sweep is coming to visit (quite excited about that), then I can greet him, point cluelessly to the chimney, then go back to work in under ten seconds. It’ll start to sound like I don’t do anything all day – not the case – I have worked harder, in totality, in the last 18 months that at any other time in my 26 years since I left University. I have worked until late evening more times than I can count, but I sort of don’t mind, because I am secretly quite proud about everything I have managed to achieve. The fact that I have done it with one eye on the Test Match, or whilst supervising plumbers and builders is pretty cool. Without home working, the bungalow would be far less developed, after a year and a half, than it is.
Some of the negatives that others have experienced, I am conscious I don’t have to, and haven’t had to. I have no children to educate. I live in a place that is quiet, and I have a dedicated room to work in that I like, rather than a kitchen table that others have to perch at, alongside me. Being stuck in a place where you just can’t be productive must be grim – I’m in doubt about that. Some of those people will be at it forever more, because there is no longer an office to go to. That, in turn, means there is no opportunity to socialise in the healthy way that the workplace sometimes provides. At least on the days when I do have to schlep down the A6, there are some people there to share a coffee, a giggle and a gossip with. I don’t mind being self-reliant for the majority of the time, but the face to face stuff is still nice when it adds to the experience of working life.
All told, I’d say I have had a pretty good result. I think I have most of what I imagined I could have when I first craved the comfort of home during the working day, a decade and a half ago.
But it was not always this way, of course. I used to go to work every day. Sometimes in a car, sometimes on a train or a tram.. now and again, on an aeroplane. And, although it’s been a life mostly spent in and around education, it has not been without variety. It’s had its ups and its downs.
For instance? On my first day at Cambridge, in my first proper job in my own proper office, two significant things happened. The first? The folks charged with wiring-in a phone line managed to get mixed up at the exchange on the end of the street. Consequently, for much of my first week, I found I was getting calls for the ladies’ hairdressers at the end of the street. Fair to say a chap doesn’t learn an awful lot about Quality Assurance and the process of auditing when fending off Mrs Jones’s questions about her cut and colour. The second? During my first morning I attended a meeting with my new boss. I had, by then, had three cups of coffee and no breakfast, having been too nervous to engage with solids. As a consequence, my stomach was starting to gripe rather uncontrollably. At a particularly quiet moment in what were pretty serious proceedings, it voiced its complaints even more loudly than before, and everyone within about 15 feet would have sworn blind that the new bloke had had the temerity to release a loud and sonorous fart. “That’s not how we do things around here, old boy” their expressions told me. I was younger then, of course, and didn’t have a quip available to lighten the mood. I just reddened, and wondered how long I was going to last in the job.
Meetings at that place were generally great, though. One came to enjoy them more and more as the weeks became months and years, and one had a stronger sense of the ground beneath one’s feet. During Wednesday afternoons, my colleagues and I all attended meetings of the General Board’s Education Committee, where we had the duty of minuting the discussions, and on some occasions contributing to them. They were often something of a test of the survival of the fittest. By the time we got to June and July, after lunch, the meetings would often go on for as much as three or four hours, because no one had any classes to go and teach, and because academics like to talk. And talk. And talk. The steady murmur of opinions as the Sun moved ‘round an already warm room meant that more senior members often simply nodded off. Some were heard to snore. Conversely, in the Winter months, the room was generally freezing. Coats remained on, coffee was nursed, and people suddenly developed the ability to summarise their views rather more efficiently. When the heating packed up altogether, you could actually see the hot air being issued.
The humour was also splendid. I recall a long discussion one day about the relative numbers of students going on from undergraduate to postgraduate study in particular subjects. In lots of the Faculties and Departments, the success rate was pretty high. In others, the kids seemed to do their three years, and then leave. In Philosophy, for instance, very few students indeed ‘stayed on’. I was sat next to Prof. Parker that day. Stubbly, shambly and always in a cardigan that was more holes than stitches, he was generally one for a smart remark – he was very much a counter-culture type, and hailed from the School of Music. On hearing the distressingly low statistics from Philosophy, he leaned into my ear and said, “It comes as no surprise to me – fucking Wittgenstein couldn’t get a 2:1 from this place”. I squeaked with laughter and had to spend quite some time mopping up coffee from my notes, having delivered it there through my nose.
Delivering humour through the written word has often proved a more risky affair. Never mind the fact that stuff you write down doesn’t have the benefit of the nuance of your facial expression being available, to demonstrate how serious you were actually being – although that’s a perennial problem – I have pissed off hundreds of people when I thought I was being ‘chirpy and collegiate’. No, I was thinking more about our old chum ‘Reply to All’. It’s been done to death, as an online meme, and we all have our war stories on this subject. Nothing gladdens the heart of the office worker more than the arrival of the ‘recall request’ e-mail on Outlook, that signals someone, somewhere, has dropped a bollock. I always read the content, I’m afraid. Life’s too short not to indulge in some schadenfreude.
My own heart-stopper came on Monday 9th December 2013. A date which has rather stuck in the memory – you’ll shortly understand why.
I was working on quite a lot of international stuff at the time. Mostly European Higher Education partnerships. We had a potential new partner about to join the fold, with a guaranteed income of about £400,000 proposed for the coming three years, for my paymasters. It was an independent Italian College – pretty well-to-do – History of European Art, Fine Art, international students from wealthy families in California – you get the picture, right?
They had been somewhat bullish, during the negotiations. Impatient, in fact – as other colleagues seemed to have given them a few rather informal promises that we now had to be a bit more clear and direct about, so as to remain within the boundaries of the law. This did not go down well. Repeated counter-statements arrived about how we had to authorise them, right now, to advertise their students would get our degree for their efforts. Their business was being affected, bureaucracy of this sort was unacceptable, did we know who they were? Blah, blah and blah.
By and large, I was able to deflect all this stuff, and propose a series of ‘fudges’ whilst the big stuff was concluded, but I arrived that Monday morning to find a particularly up itself and aggressive communication had arrived on Saturday morning. Unthinkingly, I sent a reply out to my colleagues which, amongst a range of sentiments, also expressed my view that.. “these people might imagine themselves to be the Mafia, and as such in a position to push us around as they see fit, but in fact they hold no power whatsoever, and we should stop cossetting them and demand they take this important work a sight more bloody seriously. I have had it up to here with their lofty demands of me, and us, and someone should tell them that.”
Alas someone had told them that. Me. One should never get too angry before a straightening cup of Monday morning coffee. I had not forwarded my remarks – no, I had replied to what I had been told, and expressed my rather hot views to their owner, Principal, and Director of Operations, as well as half the hierarchy of my own University.
Within about 90 seconds or so, I started to get a bit of feedback from my colleagues. One of them kindly asked if this was part of some brilliant strategy on my part (thanks, Angela, your faith in me was always touching). Others just said “LOL – you know you Cc-d them all, right?” Yes, thank-you for letting me know, though. My boss ‘popped up to see me’ and gently suggested I should perhaps take the rest of the day off. I figured accepting this olive branch was the right move, before someone asked me to resign.
By the time I returned to work, it was as if it had never happened. The matter was quietly dropped. In fact (I learned this some time later), my boss had used the evidence of my feverish outburst to politely indicate that the partner institution might be wise to take heed of the pressure they were putting his staff under, and make their demands more reasonable.
Got away with that one. I really did.
Like a lot of us, I have pulled more than a few stunts down the years, and got away with it. Never had so much as a written warning, in fact. I like to think it is my innate charm, and eagerness to please people, but I’m in fact sure it’s just been blind luck. Hopefully my run will continue for another 12 years, and I can retire quietly as if none of it was real. Probably for the best that I never made really high office, although you never know what might still happen.
There have been some oddities – like the time I came back from a meeting to find someone had been installed on my office who had driven to the University, directly, following his release from prison in the North West of England that morning. He had got it into his head that the miscarriage of justice that had befallen him emanated from mendacious evidence given by a member of my staff. As such, he expected me to broker a meeting between them, so that honour could be served. He didn’t have a gun or anything, and was only about five feet tall and more tearful than lethal, but, well, it was a small office and I was not unhappy when a nice big security guard intervened.
On another day, some years before these events occurred, I contrived to bring about a situation where I missed a bus from London to South Yorkshire with 18 MBA students in tow – a number of them quite drunk after having spent the day in the pub watching an India vs Pakistan cricket match. The £1,400 charge on my company credit card took a bit of explaining, but they are all still alive, and thriving.
I’ve slept in my office. I have locked myself into a closed-off wing of a hospital. I have attempted to bump start a company car (in reverse) on an icy estate, by pushing it, standing outside the car with one hand on the steering wheel and my other hand on the brake pedal. That one was good – it got away from me (funny, that) and came to rest in some bushes. I was trying to work out what to do when a bunch of binmen turned up, pulled me out and produced some jump leads to resolve the issue. Thanks for that, chaps.
I’m sure such cases of professional misadventure have dogged a lot of us. It’s just they always seem rather more prominent on my internal, unpublished CV than instances of smooth and untroubled success. Don’t get me wrong – I’ve done some good stuff, here and there, and have made lots of friends through work. I’ve held some positions of genuine responsibility and got bigger and better jobs off the back of them. I’ve given speeches, handed out degree certificates and been entrusted with recruiting students in foreign countries, armed only with an inappropriate wardrobe choice (I specialise in wearing tweed at the Equator) and whatever my wits would come up with next. It’s been fun.
One thing I do wonder about, though, is where else life might have taken me. Beyond a certain point in one’s life, the trappings of that life and the need to pay for them becomes the reason to stay in one’s job and not risk a change of career. I’m always quite impressed by people who manage to bring about such a fundamental change in their work and hang onto their home at the same time. I lack the imagination, I fear, and in any case, I am not sure what else I could realistically do. Lifeguard, professional footballer or wine taster are all out, let’s face it. I am the classic example of a generalist. I have a comprehensive command of precisely nothing whatsoever. I can do a bit of a lot of things. In some ways, it’s been a bit of a virtue, and I am perhaps lucky I have never had to choose to do a particular thing. Nowadays, all of the people in my line of work who are younger than I am seem to have Master’s degrees, or even PhDs, and make use of the vernacular you’d see in a Bluff Your Way In Business index. In their world, things are managed ‘on the ground’, one ‘reaches out’ to other colleagues, and they are generally in the habit of ‘just checking in’, with you at around 4.58pm. Meetings are routinely ‘slotted in’ during the hours of 12.30pm and 2.00pm (don’t get me started – what happened to lunch, for goodness sake?) I’m awfully glad I do not have to get involved in all of that competitive nonsense – it’s really very tiresome. It’s another very good reason to work from home whenever one can. Perhaps the fact that I don’t (and won’t) get involved makes me look like the sorts of dinosaurs I remember from my own early working days? Maybe we all finish up looking like that at work as we get older and the youth starts sporting? Maybe, just maybe, I think about this sort of thing too much.
I don’t hate work, but I don’t love it or live for it, either. It’s turned out to be a series of jobs, rather than a career. I envy my creative friends who are taken up by and lost in a genuine vocation, which speaks to their soul. I’ll not really give it a second thought when I stop doing it. If someone paid me to publish stuff like this instead, or if I ever think of a book to write rather than a series of rambles to self-publish? Well, I’ll do that, I guess. Time yet for more stuff to happen, of course.
Now, my New Year’s Resolution to write 12 of these starts to look a bit unlikely to be completed, doesn’t it? This is number 4. Still – all writing is progress, and if it brings enjoyment, great. I suspect, as I am about to go into hospital for an operation and spend two weeks recovering, that I will attempt to at least write a couple more before we drift into 2022.
Next time, I shall offer up some thoughts on, well… let’s see. Might be sport, might be politics, might be cooking… might be something else. Assuming I am spared an early demise under general anaesthetic, it won’t be too far away – I promise you that.
suggzy 