How quiet the nation was only forty-five minutes ago, and yet how much hair-rinsing, necktie-tying, key-searching, stain-removing and spouse-shouting will occur over the next thirty, as the events in the accountant’s house are replicated in a hundred thousand other homes within a gigantic circle drawn around the capital, from Folkestone to Aylesbury, from Haslemere to Chelmsford. Alarms are going off in Rottingdean and Harwich, alarms balanced on pine shelves and on marble-topped night tables, alarms which vibrate and others which set off the announcements of silky-voiced newsreaders detailing the trajectories of cyclones and currencies.
After showering and dressing comes a bowl of Crunchy Nut; then a scramble for a handbag and a raincoat for the walk in the chill air to the train station. Once outside, it seems extraordinary that the natural world should still exist and be so apparently undisturbed and serene, so indifferent to human concerns, with a new sky which has wiped away yesterday’s squalls and holds no grudges, a scene of innocent beauty that bolsters any attempt to search within oneself for reserves of resilience and good humour.
The train will be on time, say the screens at the station, and the accountant walks to the end of the platform under Victorian arches spongy with the paint of decades, past advertisements for West End plays and day excursions to historic castles. A plane crosses high overhead, a veteran of a still earlier departure, perhaps with a child on board at this very moment gazing down and seeing, within the circumference of a window, the full extent of the railway line threading its way from the coast to the city. Back on the ground, from a distance, swaying slightly from side to side, its headlamps on and sparks flashing around its wheels, a green-liveried train comes into view, sounding its toylike horn against a wide horizon.
Entering the carriage feels like interrupting a congregation. The cold air cuts into daydreams which must have begun far up the line and swelled across the wheat fields. The settled passengers neither look up nor give any other overt sign of taking notice, but they betray their awareness of the new arrival by dextrously readjusting their limbs to allow her to struggle past them to one of the remaining unoccupied seats. The train moves off, resuming its rhythmical clicking along tracks laid down a century and a half ago, when the capital first began plucking workers from their beds in faraway villages whose outlying farms had once marked the boundaries of their inhabitants’ known world.
There is something improbable about the silence in the carriage, considering how naturally gregarious we are as a species. Still, how much kinder it is for the commuters to pretend to be absorbed in other things, rather than revealing the extent to which they are covertly evaluating, judging, condemning and desiring each other. A few venture a glance here and there, as furtively as birds pecking grain. But only if the train crashed would anyone know for sure who else had been in the carriage, what small parts of the nation’s economy had been innocuously seated across the aisle just before the impact: employees of hotels, government ministries, plastic-surgery clinics, fruit nurseries and greetings-card companies.
Newspapers are being read all around. The point is not, of course, to glean new information, but rather to coax the mind out of its sleep-induced introspective temper. To look at the paper is to raise a seashell to one’s ear and to be overwhelmed by the roar of humanity. Today there is a story about a man who fell asleep at the wheel of his car after staying up late into the night committing adultery on the Internet – and drove off an overpass, killing a family of five in a caravan below. Another item speaks of a university student, beautiful and promising, who went missing after a party and was found in pieces in the back of a minicab five days later. A third rehearses the particulars of an affair between a tennis coach and her thirteen-year-old pupil. These accounts, so obviously demented and catastrophic, are paradoxically consoling, for they help us to feel sane and blessed by comparison. We can turn away from them and experience a new sense of relief at our predictable routines; we can be grateful for how tightly bound we have kept our desires, and proud of the restraint we have shown in not poisoning our colleagues or entombing our relations under the patio.
Familiar vignettes stream by outside: a power station, a patch of waste ground, a postal depot, a copse of ancient trees, a group of schoolgirls in grey-and-blue uniforms, a band of cumulus clouds spreading from the west, a shopping mall across a motorway, some underwear swaying on a line, and then gradually, the backs of suburban villas, heralding the train’s arrival into central London itself.
At the accountants’ building, employees are already beginning to course through the plate-glass doors. They have stepped off railway carriages at Victoria and Farringdon, London Bridge and Waterloo, driven through tunnels, been rattled by diesel buses, run down airport concourses, jogged across parks and cycled over hills and high streets, in each case hiding from the rest of the world the centre of the spider’s web to which they were headed. What varied breakfasts they have eaten, too. Danish pastries, the remains of last night’s curry, sausages, Scotch eggs and bowls of Cheerios and Coco Pops, jauntily named to lend their commuting consumers hope.
The employees proceed upstairs without looking around them. To feel at home in the office is not to notice the strange silver sculpture in the lobby and to forget how alien the place felt on the first day. The start of work means the end to freedom, but also to doubt, intensity and wayward desires. The accountant’s ten thousand possibilities have been reduced to an agreeable handful. She has a business card which she hands over in meetings and which tells other people – and, more meaningfully perhaps, reminds her – that she is a Business Unit Senior Manager, rather than a vaporous transient consciousness in an incidental universe. How satisfying it is to be held in check by the assumptions of colleagues, instead of being forced to contemplate, in the loneliness of the early hours, all that one might have been and now never will be. She has a meeting scheduled with a team from an insurance brokerage in half an hour, leaving her time to buy a muffin and coffee from the cafeteria. The start of the day in the office has burnt off nostalgia as the sun evaporates a coat of dew. Life is no longer mysterious, sad, haunting, touching, confusing or melancholy; it is a practical stage for clear-eyed action.
3.
In a meeting room on the seventh floor, ten people have gathered to discuss the progress of an audit of a company in Birmingham which manufactures plastic packaging for the food industry. They range in seniority from a partner, in shirtsleeves at the head of the table, to a new recruit in an emphatically striped suit, who left university last summer. There is banter and affectionate teasing reminiscent of exchanges between a teacher and a group of cocky but respectful students. ‘Watch the game last night, hedgehog?’ the partner asks the young man to his right, whose hair is artfully gelled into spikes. ‘Naturally, Robinson, but we’ll wipe that smile off your face next weekend,’ counters the latter.
Five junior members of the audit team have been in Birmingham every week for the last month, staying at a motel near the plastics factory, on the southern approach to the city. During the day, they have been working in the company’s finance department, going over files and running data tests on their laptops. In the evening, they have frequented the Star of India, a Bengali restaurant located across the dual carriageway from Colditz (as they have nicknamed their accommodation). Travel policy stipulates that staff below the manager grade will be reimbursed up to £20.50 for the evening meal.
It isn’t easy to encourage the accountants to expand on what they do. They feel that any curiosity shown by a civilian must conceal mockery – yet more of what they have been used to encountering from the wider world since they first announced their career choice at graduation. But with perseverance, their reflexive self-deprecation gradually gives way to a more earnest pride in their mastery of a labyrinthine craft.
I chat with Emily Wan. She is twenty-eight years old and a recent transfer to London from the firm’s Shanghai office, where she found a place after graduating with exceptional grades from Jiao Ton
g university. She compares the audit process to a piece of carpentry. Capitalism could not function without her, she smiles. The procedures used for audits are identical the world over, enabling accountants to work seamlessly with foreign colleagues, as pilots might. The rules have been codified into a four-thousand-page bible, the Global Audit Methodology, which I take to reading in bed. In Birmingham, every team member has been charged with substantiating a different aspect of the client company’s balance sheet: one investigates its register of fixed assets, another its debt, a third its liabilities, a fourth its creditors and a fifth its provisions. At the close of the process, the senior partner will sign off on six hundred forms which legally underwrite the accuracy of the stated accounts – thereby enabling potential investors to have sufficient trust to let their money sail off on lengthy and intangible digital journeys in the company’s direction.
At present, the team is devising ways to check the reliability of the VAT billing system. They are charting the flow of a hundred million pounds through the client’s internal plumbing in the previous six months. Due to a missing file, there has been an irritating delay in the completion of a Non-Audit Services Annual Independence Continuance Form for Annuity Engagements.
Though the distinction between what is ‘natural’ and ‘man-made’ often dissolves on close examination, we are undeniably far from the human condition as it first manifested itself in Africa’s Rift Valley 250,000 years ago. It is hard not to admire the dedication directed towards the small print. Levels of commitment that in previous societies were devoted to military adventures and religious intoxication have been channelled into numerical needlework. History may dwell on stories of heroism and drama, but there are ultimately few of us out on the high seas, and many of us in the harbour, counting the ropes and untangling the anchor chains.
It is apparent that accountancy lends its practitioners a particular way of looking at the world. The accountants ask me not how or why one writes a book, but whether tax on a title is payable across a few years or must wholly be paid at the moment of publication. They are like renal surgeons for whom one is first and foremost always a kidney.
More impressively, they seem to have no desire to undertake the kind of work which makes any claim to leave a lasting legacy. They have the inner freedom to exercise their intelligence in the way that taxi drivers will practise their navigational skills: they will go wherever their clients direct them to. They may be asked to deal with the financing of an oil rig one week, the tax liability of a supermarket or fibre-optic cable plant the next – without being detained by pressing internal projects and the pathologies and suffering these entail. They have no ambition to become known to strangers or to record their insights for an unimpressed and ephemeral future. They are well adjusted enough to have made their peace with oblivion. They have accepted with grace the paucity of opportunities for immortality in audit.
4.
In a ground-floor conference room, twenty-five new recruits are in their second week of a three-year-long accountancy training course. Last week they were given an overview of the principles of financial reporting, and this week they will be walked through the mechanics of company assurance systems. In an attempt to keep up their spirits, the firm has also bused them to an elegant hotel outside London to meet the chairman and to a spa for an afternoon of treatments and massages. They have in addition been introduced to the company psychotherapist, the in-house dry-cleaner, the director of information technology and the head of the accountants’ gay and lesbian association, whose members convene for drinks on the first Tuesday of every month. And now, because the trainees have been listening to a lecture for more than half an hour and many of them are showing signs of fatigue, the course tutor opts to release them early to sample a spread of croissants and Danish pastries outside.
For most of human history, the only instrument needed to induce employees to complete their duties energetically and adroitly was the whip. So long as workers had only to kneel down and retrieve stray ears of corn from the threshing-room floor or heave quarried stones up a slope, they could be struck hard and often, with impunity and benefit. But the rules of employment had to be rewritten with the emergence of tasks whose adequate performance required their protagonists to be to a significant degree content, rather than simply terrified or resigned. Once it became evident that someone who was expected to remove brain tumours, draw up binding legal documents or sell condominiums with convincing energy could not profitably be sullen or resentful, morose or angry, the mental well-being of employees commenced to be a supreme object of managerial concern.
The jobs in the world’s glass office towers cannot be administered by the fear of an external power. Watchtowers are of no use in encouraging staff to engage their higher faculties in the drafting of annual tax-deferment schedules, requiring senior managers to handle their charges with patient and costly respect. These overlords have been deprived of the cavalier attitudes of eighteenth-century ship owners, who were enviably free to propel their slaves into the mid-Atlantic at early signs of scurvy. The new figures of authority must involve themselves with day-care centres and, at monthly get-togethers, animatedly ask their subordinates how they are enjoying their jobs so far.
Responsible for wrapping the iron fist of authority in its velvet glove is Jane Axtell, head of the accountancy firm’s Human Resources department, based on the sixth floor. She recently organised a landscape-painting competition to help the auditors to release their untapped creativity, and is now, in an effort further to boost morale, engaged in lining the building’s corridors and reception areas with plaques bearing the legend ‘Our Values Statement: Who We Are and What We Stand For’.
There would certainly have been less for a diarist such as Saint-Simon to report on in Louis XIV’s court had Axtell been present at Versailles. Thanks to her, the company now has in place a zero-tolerance policy towards bullying and gossip, a twenty-four-hour hotline for distressed employees, forums in which complaints may be lodged against colleagues and a tactful procedure by which a manager can let a team member know that his breath smells.
Underlying these innovations is the belief that workplace dynamics are no less complicated or unexpectedly intense than family relations, with only the added difficulty that whereas families are at least well-recognised and sanctioned loci for hysteria reminiscent of scenes from Medea, office life typically proceeds behind a mask of shallow cheerfulness, leaving workers grievously unprepared to handle the fury and sadness continually aroused by their colleagues.
Contrived as the strategies instituted by the Human Resources department may seem, it is in fact their very artificiality which guarantees their success, for the laboured tone of away-day seminars and group feedback exercises allows workers manfully to protest that they have nothing whatsoever to learn from submitting to such disciplines. Then, like guests at a house party who at first mock their host’s suggestion of a round of Pictionary, they may be surprised to find themselves, as the game gets under way, able thereby to channel their hostilities, identify their affections and escape the agony of insincere chatter.
There are, admittedly, few historical precedents for Axtell’s job title or her professional lexicon (‘client relating’, ‘personal branding’) – a scarcity which may lead one to judge her as an unnecessary sickness. But this would be to misconstrue the sheer distinctiveness of the contemporary office, a factory of ideas dependent upon the ability of tens of thousands of employees to communicate properly amongst themselves in order to fulfil the needs of intemperate and exacting clients and so, by extension, an entity acutely vulnerable to internecine fighting, to the petty withholding of information between departments, to the nurturing of poisonous grudges over inequitable pay scales, to the appearance of dandruff on the collars of managers, to the splitting of infinitives in company releases and to the offering of clammy hands to crucial contacts – and hence an entity not above the communal salve discreetly embedded within karaoke nights and ‘Emplo
yee of the Month’ schemes, which reward their winners with river cruises and boardroom lunches with the chairman.
5.
For a long while, I try to meet this chairman, but first he is in Russia, then in India and then in the United States, though during this latter period, I am certain that I see him entering a lift at the London headquarters. Then he is for another interval officially upstairs but too busy to see me, until finally, I am allotted half an hour in which to talk to him about the future of the firm and the challenges facing his profession.
We sit across from one another in a bare room, chaperoned by the head of Public Relations, the purpose of whose presence is unclear, except to reinforce the implication that I should tread with care.
A show of surface geniality barely hides the chairman’s impatience with writers. This morning, as on every other weekday, he was up at five, went jogging for forty minutes and was at his desk before seven. He rules over 12,000 people spread out across offices in Denmark, Cameroon, India, Senegal, Sweden, Scotland, Albania, Northern Ireland, Moldova and South Africa.
Yet despite his remit, he has renounced almost all the instruments and symbols of authority. He is universally known by his first name. He has no jet or chauffeur. He shares a secretary. He takes the train to work. He doesn’t even have his own office. The architects designed one for him, with views of Tower Bridge, but he insisted on sitting in the middle of a regular floor at a desk no different from that of an intern. Its only distinguishing feature is a piece of laminated plastic, to the right of the telephone, on which is printed a quote from a speech by Theodore Roosevelt, in which the president spoke of the need for every man to strive for excellence and, ‘if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat’.
The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work Page 13
