Management Mole
by
John Mole
In the long run we are all temps
A revealing picture of what it is like to be managed... a chuckle on almost every page... many uproarious scenes... something for everyone involved in an office culture...Financial Times
Mole's words, and those of the people he met, are far more valuable than fashionable theorists. Anyone who has ever worked in an office will find the book hilariously funny. Punch
First published in Great Britain in 1988 by Bantam Press a division of Transworld Publishers Ltd ISBN 0-552-13424-4
Management edition published in Great Britain in 1992 as Brits at Work by Nicholas Brealey Publishing
ISBN 1-85788-001-3
This edition Published by Fortune at Smashwords
Copyright 2011 John Mole
Discover
other Smashword titles by John Mole
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
When I was ten years old I sent sixpence off to the Rover comic for a booklet on 'Learning To Swim At Home'. First you practised treading water in front of the bedroom mirror. Then you did the arm movements. For the leg movements and breathing you lay on the bed. Having mastered the basic techniques you lay on your stomach on a dining room chair and put it all together. The butterfly was the hardest to do without falling on the floor. Theoretical swimming had many advantages apart from not getting wet. Twenty lengths on the chair was good exercise. It was enjoyable. You learned something. It improved your self-confidence when you went to the beach. But it was no help at all when you went in the water.
When I worked in a bank most management books I read and courses I went on were like this. Theories of organisation, motivation, planning, influencing, assertiveness and leadership did not seem to fit the real world. Some years ago I quit my job as General Manager of a branch of an international bank to write full-time. But I still wondered what it was like to be on the receiving end of the management techniques I read about and tried to put into practise. So I went back to work at the lowest level of the kind of businesses I used to manage. The result is a kind of travel book, a journey through another country with its strange peoples and customs.
'What do you do?' asked Jenny.
'Clerical. General office work. Anything really,' I said.
'Yes, but what do you do?'
After a business degree and fifteen years in international banking I wasn't qualified to do anything. It came as a shock. I thought I could just pop down to the employment agency and start work. I was a decent chap, a reliable sort of fellow. I could keep a conversation going about the dollar and the oil price and the American budget deficit. I knew which knife and fork to use, how to read an airline schedule. I could chair a meeting and make a speech and write a memo. But I couldn't do anything that would get me a job. Outside the organisation for which I used to work I counted as nothing. Knowing the alphabet was the most useful thing I could think of.
'How about filing?' I asked.
Jenny gave me a form to fill out. On the bottom was a list of about thirty occupational skills. You ticked what level of experience you had. I had no idea what some of them meant. Bought ledger? Life claims? Some of the names I recognised from the bank I used to manage. I had read job descriptions and signed evaluations and given pep talks to reconciliations clerks and foreign exchange settlements clerks and payroll clerks, I can see their faces now on the other side of the desk. I made decisions about how many we should have and what they should be paid and who should supervise them. But I had only a hazy idea of what they did all day. I ticked that I had some experience in the job titles I recognised and hoped I could muddle through.
I had no machine skills either. I had signed capital investment approval forms for computers and word processors and microfilm equipment and interviewed operators and sent people on training courses but I wouldn't know where to find the on/off switch. Half a dozen yoga lessons didn't make me proficient in Lotus. A couple of novels on a word processor was the extent of my keyboard experience. I converted forty thousand words per month into words per minute but it didn't seem worth mentioning.
I went through this ordeal with nearly twenty agencies. Some were part of chains that advertised on the tube and in the papers and were smart and modern. Others were up narrow flights of stairs, a couple of tatty wooden desks and bare boards. The smartest were those that specialised in secretaries, the scruffiest those that specialised in accountants. I was impressed with all the interviewers. They were sympathetic and polished and professional. Some of them had remarkable memories for names and where their clients lived and what sort of work they did.
'What were you doing before, John?'
'Ah. This and that.'
I thought it would look suspicious that a former general manager of a City bank, out of work for two years, claiming to be a writer, should be looking for a job as a temp. At the first couple of agencies I played down what I had done before, making it sound as if I had led a careless, reckless life, bumming round the banks of the world, a cashier here, a reconciliations clerk there, troubleshooting in payroll, a hired gun in the post room. I made it sound quite romantic and implausible. I didn't get anything from these agencies. Then I told the unvarnished truth, that I'd given up a good job to write novels. They thought I was crazy and harmless and hard up and found me work.
Educational qualifications too were a problem at first. I wasn't sure if it was as unethical to leave out academic achievements as it was to make them up. But I didn't want to be thought overqualified. And it was perfectly true that I had five '0' levels, just as every month in the year has twenty-eight days. Again I needn't have worried. A degree in French and German makes you neither under nor overqualified for a career in commerce. It is irrelevant. And a Master's Degree in Business Studies from the European Institute of Business Administration sounds like something they send aspiring executives in Bombay from a PO box.
By the fifth interview I was getting desperate. I sat opposite Jenny in a little windowless room with furry wallpaper. (Jenny is a popular name for recruitment consultants. I was on the books of five Jennies, which made my weekly phone-round very confusing.)
'You can do wrecks, can't you, John?' said Jenny.
'Absolutely, Jenny. Wrecks, no problems. A speciality you might say. Shipwrecks, train wrecks, you name it.'
She laughed. Fortunately for my clerical career she thought I was joking.
'Wrecks' (or rather, 'recks') is short for 'reconciliations', which has nothing to do with marriage guidance either. It is an accounting job consisting of matching up entries on two different accounts. For example, one regularly reconciles one's cheque stubs to one's bank account if one has been toilet trained too early.
To be more precise, I was engaged to do reconciliations at a small foreign bank in the City. There were three nostro reconciliations clerks at the bank I had managed but I only had a hazy idea of what they did. I knew nostro was Italian for 'ours' for what that was worth. I had come up through the marketing side of the bank where we were kept away from day to day operations. I cycled into the City in my ten year old worsted suit and a wide maroon tie and a respectable enough shirt with only two buttons missing and a collar only slightly worn. I forgot to polish my shoes. I wasn't posing as a middle-aged, out of work recks clerk down on my luck. After two years of self-employment that was what all my wardrobe was like.
There was an added spice. One of the things upwardly mobile managers boast to each other about on the squash court is how many times they have been headhunted. Being headhunted means being approached out of the blue by an executive search firm, a high class employment agency which does not wait for job hunters to walk in but goes out to find executives with well-paid and challenging jobs and asks if they would like better paid, even more challenging jobs. The number of times one has been headhunted is as important a success symbol as a Gucci briefcase and a key to the executive lift. My head was hunted only once. I couldn't even brag about it because it was for a job with lower status and pay than the one I was doing at the time. So much for my reputation in the marketplace. The spice was that it was the Marketing Manager's job at the very bank where I was now about to start my new career. I arrived at five to nine and chained my bicycle to the parking meter outside the entrance to Trident Court. Trident Court is a fancy new development with an internal atrium. Glass lifts go up and down the outside of the buildings, fountains spatter and tinkle on the floor, hanging gardens cascade from balconies. Through the network of bars in the glass roof I could see blue sky and clouds. The receptionist, who also ran the switchboard, was an elderly, grandmotherly lady. She was very pleasant and chatty until I told her I was a temp. She went back to her newspaper which she read from cover to cover with ooh-ahs and chuckles and well-I-nevers while I passed the time with the Bank of England bulletin. I waited for an hour.
'Are you the Temp? I'm Monica. Sorry to keep you waiting. Forgot you were here.'
I was rarely referred to by name. I was the Temp. Today I was the Temp in recks to distinguish me from the Temp in Filing and the Temp in Settlements. Temps have special status. They are the untouchables of office life. They do not receive circulars, go to meetings, get invited to official or social occasions. They are cloaked in invisibility. They materialise when someone has to take the blame. The Temp did this. The Temp did that. The Temp we had last month must have lost it. Invisibility has its advantages to managers. Temps are the first line of defence when Head Office orders a staff cutback or a hiring freeze. They can be kept off the monthly staff returns by firing them the day before month end and rehiring them two days later, or charging them to Professional Services or Miscellaneous.
Monica, who worked in Human Resources, took me from the plastic mahogany and subdued lighting of the executive floor to the metal desks and neon operations two floors below. About thirty people sat at metal desks shuffling and ticking and passing and sorting piles of paper. Some of them gazed into screens as if they were crystal balls. No one seemed to be speaking but it was noisy and confusing. As we passed people looked up, stared at us blankly, and got back to the piles of paper. The window looked out on the atrium through a curtain of hanging plants. It was like working in a jungle tree house. The window ledges were piled high with files and ledgers and in some places metal cupboards had been pushed against the glass as if to keep out wild animals.
'Settlements,' said Monica.
'Ah yes, settlements.' I nodded knowingly.
We went through a pair of fire doors into another large office. This one was divided up by free-standing partitions into a complicated maze, like a puzzle where you have to get a silver ball to the middle. The dead ends were work areas. The partitions were covered in a fuzzy brown material, repulsive to the touch. Monica stood on tiptoe to get her bearings but was not tall enough to see over the top of the partitions. I thought of lifting her up like a ballerina but on my first day that would have been too forward. We took directions from a passing Indian gentleman and ventured through the maze.
'Accounts,' said Monica. 'You'll be working for Greta.'
This was interesting. It looked as if the work flow in settlements was conducive to a completely open office layout while accounts required small isolated units. Then why did disembodied hands rise above the furry walls with files and papers, why did disembodied heads peep round the sides? It was as noisy as Settlements because people shouted to each other over the barriers or talked on the phone to the person in the next cubicle. I asked Monica.
'Accounts have always had their own offices,' she said.
'Why?'
'Dunno. They like their privacy, I suppose.'
We found my new boss. She sat in a cubicle formed by three partitions and a tall filing cupboard. Three desks were pushed together in the middle. There was little floor space and it was mostly filled with piles of paper and brown cardboard boxes bursting with bank statements. The desks were also covered in paper and boxes. Greta was in her early twenties. She looked tired and harassed. She had purple bags under her eyes. A cigarette smouldered in her fingers and another on the edge of the ashtray already overflowing with butts. She groomed the parts of her she could see in the mirror but was neglectful of the rest. The front of her hair was carefully combed and her pink make-up ended abruptly at the white skin under her jaw. Monica introduced me.
'This is your temp,' she said.
'At last. You can sit there,' said Greta, pointing to the chair facing her across the desks. Monica left while she could still remember the way back. I put my coat and fluorescent cycling belt on the third chair and sat down. Greta handed sheaves of paper across the litter that separated us. They were printed blue and looked like the gas bill.
'Can you put these into date order?'
They were deal confirmations. When a bank does a deal with a customer, for example, a foreign exchange transaction, it sends out a confirmation with details of the amount, currencies, rate and so on. These were copies the bank keeps for its own records. The task of putting them into date order was not very demanding because they all had the same date on the top. I felt a growing sense of complacency. This was not going to be so difficult after all.
I had never seen anyone work so hard or intensely as Greta. She scrabbled through print-outs and files and confirmations like a dog through leaves. She added up a pile of what looked like travellers' cheques and at the same time telephoned Settlements with a query about the Frankfurt account. The fingers of her right hand whizzed over the calculator while her left hand riffled through the cheques like a card sharp while she held the telephone between her shoulder and chin and gabbled about Deutschmarks. Her brain could operate simultaneously in at least two modes. She chain-smoked king-size cigarettes. She lit them with a Snoopy lighter and took long drags, holding in the smoke as if they were joints, screwing up one eye. The acrid smell of stubs smouldering in the ashtray filled our cubicle. She bit her nails too, although I don't know how she found the time. For a brief moment she would cease her frenetic activity and stare down at the mess on her desk, stupefied at what still remained to be done. There was an instant of relief and expectation, like the dishwasher between two operations in the sequence. Then she started churning away again. It was bewildering and enervating to watch. From time to time she jumped to her feet, brushed ash off her skirt, and without a word scurried away with a handful of paper or a confirmation. I relaxed from my task and took the opportunity to extinguish the fag ends in the ashtray. She came back even more fired up than when she had left. I wondered if a thyroid condition made her work so hard.
Meanwhile I plodded on, sorting through the confirmations. Greta would look up at me and when I caught her eye would avert her gaze. After half an hour she spoke to me.
'Haven't you finished yet?'
'Nearly.' Five minutes later I handed over the pile I had been working on.
'What order is this? I said put them in date order.'
'All the dates are the same. But I was checking to make sure,' I said, pointing to the date on top of the slip of paper.
'Of course they're all the same. That's the deal date. They were all done on the same day. You want the value date.' She stabbed her finger at another date at the bottom of the slip of paper. 'Have you ever done recks before?'
'Sure. Lots of times. I'm a bit rusty, that's all.'
She did not look convinced. But I knew what a value date was. It is the date on which the money actually changes hands as opposed to the date on which the transaction is agreed. Greta was right. A lot of them were different. I set to methodically, determined to get it right. There is nothing like personal criticism for breaking the ice. When she paused to light a cigarette I seized the opportunity for conversation.
'Do you always work so hard?'
'We're behind. There should be three of us. That's why I asked for a temp. I have to clear all the backlog of filing.' She nodded to the cardboard boxes washed up against the walls like jetsam.
'How long have you been short-handed?'
'Six months. I come in at half past seven to get a head start. I'm usually away by half past six.'
'You've been working at this pace all that time?'
'I'm the supervisor.'
'But you've got no one to supervise. They'll never hire anyone else if you work like this. Slow down and they'll have to get someone else.'
She did not seem grateful for my advice. She looked disparagingly at the little pile of confirmations to which I had dedicated my morning.
When I had sorted the confirmations into value date order I had to fold them in half. This took another fifteen minutes. Why I had to do this was not immediately obvious and I did not like to ask in case it was standard recks procedure. Then she handed me a long computer print-out. It was a bank statement from the Zurich branch. All my confirmations concerned Swiss franc transactions. What I had to do was 'tick back' the confirmations to the statement to make sure that the deals had gone through and the value dates were correct. I had to write down the entries I could not account for on a separate sheet. This took me until the middle of the afternoon. It was painstaking work and not so easy as it sounded. Sometimes a single entry was covered by two or three confirmations, sometimes one confirmation had several statement entries. For example, the interest on a deposit would sometimes be added to a repayment of principal, sometimes it would be separate. I did not realise this at first so that my exception sheet was half as long as the original statement. Then the penny dropped and I started again.
Greta did not slow down. Her pace was unrelenting. At noon she took out corned beef sandwiches from her bag and ate them while she worked. Half way through the afternoon she took out of her bag a plastic spoon and a large slice of Black Forest gateau. She was an archetypal heart attack candidate. At one o'clock, when I said I was going out for a brisk walk and a salad, she looked at me as if I had said something outrageous. The workload was not self-imposed. Her industry was not a symptom of glandular or psychological disorder, which was my first assumption, but was necessary. If large payments are not made or received or are misdirected to the wrong bank or the wrong account, it can cost thousands of pounds in lost interest payments. Errors can be corrected if they are discovered before the value date. In most cases you have twenty-four hours to find them. If they are not corrected the bank that made the original mistake pays for them. Greta had taken this responsibility fully on herself.
My Swiss franc reconciliation was a very small part of this responsibility. After lunch she pointed out numerous errors in the exception sheet and set me to doing it again. She said it should have taken half an a hour to do what I had done.
Only when the main accounts, dollar, sterling and Deutschmark, had been reconciled, at about four o'clock, did Greta relax slightly. She telephoned a friend. She asked me what my name was. In return she told me something about herself. She had left school at seventeen and gone to work for a much larger bank. After three years she had moved to this bank and after a year was put in charge of reconciliations when her boss was moved up to Loan Administration. That was six months ago. She was twenty-one years old. She looked closer to thirty. She came in at eight in the morning and rarely left before half past six.
At half past four the phone rang and Greta handed it to me. It was Jenny from the agency. I thought it was nice of her to call and see how I was getting on.
'I'm afraid they don't want you any more, John. You're not quite what they're looking for. It's nothing personal. Hello? Are you there?'
Greta had her head down, scribbling on an exception sheet. The skin on her neck had turned the same pink as her make-up. An initial numb disbelief was replaced by a turmoil of emotion. With the logical part of my mind I was grateful that I would not have to come back to this furry little cubicle tomorrow and sort confirmations until the weekend. I was grateful for the anecdote of how I was fired on my first day. I was grateful for the new experience. I was interested in how I should react. But these dispassionate thoughts were overwhelmed by the surge of anger and resentment and humiliation and hurt that welled up from the primitive part of the brain.
'Not good enough for you, am I?' I said, trying to keep my voice from sounding squeaky.
'I'm sorry. I should have told you myself.'
'How was I supposed to know what you expected of me? Telepathy?'
'It's nothing personal. Honestly.'
'Why didn't you tell me at the beginning what I was supposed to do?'
'It's nothing personal. Really.'
I handed over my time sheet for Greta to sign. She did not have the authority. Monica would have to sign it. I found her on the fourth floor. I kept up the attitude of injured innocence.
'So why wasn't I good enough?'
'It's not that. We wanted someone with more experience.'
'I think I could have been told what was expected, what you wanted me to do.'
'Greta is under pressure. She has a tremendous backlog.'
'She'll have it for longer if she doesn't show someone what to do.'
'I'm sorry. It's nothing personal.'
I was slow and incompetent. But I don't think that was the whole story. It would have helped Greta to have me stay for the week and get rid of the filing. I worked slowly and methodically and Greta worked as if she were possessed. It is extremely irritating when a colleague or partner does not share the same sense of urgency. I did not help myself by admiring her industry and asking her several times if she always worked that hard.
I went straight to the agency and gave the time sheet to Jenny. She was very charming and asked if I was still available. They did not have anything just at the moment but she was sure there would be something. Just keep in touch.
'I hope I haven't messed you around.'
'It's quite all right, it happens all the time, it's nothing personal.'
It is bad form in many companies to talk about redundancies or dismissals or firings or the sack. Unwanted employees are 'let go', as if they had been longing to escape, a euphemism for the unpleasant, like passing on or eternal rest. I once went on a day's course on how to 'let people go'. The trick is to make them feel it is the best thing that has happened in their lives, that they are being made redundant through no fault of their own, that their pay-off is better than anyone else is getting. Above all you should make it sound as if the job is being got rid of, not the person, that you should leave them with self-esteem and self-confidence intact. This advice certainly makes the firer feel better. When I had to tell people that their jobs were no longer needed it helped me to get over the awkwardness to tell them they were wonderful people and there was nothing personal in our decision.
But it was personal. It was deeply and devastatingly personal. I was shaken by being fired. Looking back on it now it seems trivial and amusing but at the time it made me depressed. It went deeper than not getting material for this book. Since leaving school I had thought that if necessary I could always go out and get a job, any job, to earn a living. This conviction now seemed ill-founded. If I felt like this after a day, how would I have felt after a lifetime? Being thrown out of a temping job after a day is not in the same league as being thrown out of a career and a livelihood. But it was a taste.
The market was quiet. It was the period before Christmas when people do not go on holiday or change jobs before the Christmas bonus. The weather was mild and there was no flu around. I watched avidly for news of a cold snap or an epidemic. I signed on at more agencies. I soon discovered that the jobs that are posted on the window are no indication of what they have to offer inside. It made me genuinely depressed. The image I was projecting of a fellow down on his luck, soft spoken, avoiding eye contact, sitting hunched, fitted better and better. When I told myself that this was a lot of fun, fascinating experience, that I was writing a book, that I was not condemned to this life for real, it was as if I was talking about another person.
I took a typing test in the West End. I sat down at a word processor and copied out a passage about how Andrew Carnegie was a skilled telegrapher before he made his millions in the Pennsylvania coal fields. The two spelling mistakes in what I was copying posed a dilemma. Should I correct them in my copy and be penalised for making a mistake? In the cut and thrust of business, integrity goes by the board. I reproduced them. I did forty-five words a minute which is not as fast as Carnegie but could get me a typist's job. The minimum is thirty-five. At last I had found something I could do.
'And there are no mistakes,' said Jenny, sounding surprised. This was another Jenny, not the one who told me I was unwanted.
'Are there supposed to be?'
'You don't have to worry about mistakes. It's the speed that counts.'
'So when do I start? You've got plenty of secretarial jobs advertised. '
'Those aren't for men. We don't mind, of course, but the clients want girls.'
'That's sex discrimination. I'll take you to the European Court.'
'Can you do shorthand?'
'No.'
'There you are, then.'
But there were no jobs.
'What about filing?' asked another Jenny at an agency in the City. She was very apologetic. 'I'm ever so sorry. It's the best I can do. I had a messenger job but it went. I hope you won't get too bored. Try and stick it for a week. It'll help me out.'
'Me? Filing? I'm a champion.'
It was at a subsidiary of a South African finance company in the City. To show keenness I got there at a quarter to nine. The name of the company, which did not mention South Africa, was on a very small brass plate inside the door of the office building. It was on the third floor. The door had a security lock opened by a number code. I rang a bell to be let in by a large bald man in a beige uniform. Inside, it was smartly decorated and furnished from floor to ceiling in beige. I browsed through the annual report from Johannesburg. The Corporate Mission Statement said that the company did not discriminate on the basis of race, colour or creed. Geraldine came out for me. She was a brisk, grey-haired lady. She showed me what number to punch to get in and out of the front door by myself.
'We change it every year for security,' she confided.
She took me back to the main office. There were only twenty people in the company, all on one floor. The Manager had a separate office decorated with photographs of wild animals. Geraldine, his secretary, sat in the corridor outside. The rest was open plan. There were no partitions. Clumps of beige desks were positioned far apart and in such a way that no one could look at anyone else. One clump had three dealing positions with phones and screens and keyboards. I was led to the filing area in a windowless corner and introduced to Victorina, my boss. She was a very tall girl, endowed by nature with the height to reach the top shelf of a filing cupboard without a stool. She was in her early twenties and looked fit and tanned. Her height was in her trunk not her legs so she towered over me even when she sat down. This was also convenient for sorting and collating as she could reach over two desks without difficulty. We sat in a laager made by four-drawer filing cabinets. Trays and cardboard boxes piled high with papers surrounded us. She had been away for three weeks, getting married and going on her honeymoon, and needed help to catch up with the backlog.
There were three types of file: Correspondence, Business and Information. My first job was to divide up the paper into these three categories. It was not as easy as it sounds. There was a grey area between each category. Even filing has its mysteries. But I had learned my lesson from Greta. I dived in and looked industrious. I asked Victorina about herself and she told me about her husband.
'He's the Systems Manager at a stockbroker. It's a very good job. He gets a Sierra. And a good bonus. The trouble is most of it goes to his first wife. His children are still at school.'
'How did you meet?'
'I play netball at lunchtime. When it's not raining. His office is in a basement. The window looks onto the court. He watched me for four years. One day I heard someone ask my name and I looked down and there he was, like a rabbit in a hole. Isn't it romantic?'
I thought it was a pretty story. It gave hope to the men with their hands stuffed in the pockets of their brown raincoats who stand around the City netball courts ogling the long-legged girls in short skirts and loose T-shirts dancing around on the other side of the wire netting.
It took a full day to sort the pending material into three categories. We were constantly interrupted by people wanting files. I found this irritating. Victorina enjoyed it. She discussed the contents of a file like a librarian checking out a favourite book. She had created an elaborate checkout system that involved index cards and file-out cards that had to be signed by the borrower and the filing clerk. It seemed unnecessary for a clientèle of twenty people all in one room. You could just go round at the end of the day and collect them all up. Victorina was offended by this suggestion. She was possessive of her system and her territory and the service she provided.
'This place would collapse without the files, do you know that? What those people do today depends on what they did yesterday. You and I are information specialists.'
As well as a checkout system she had developed a cross-referencing system for the information files. She would not let me near this in case I messed it up. She dissected bank bulletins and stockbrokers' news sheets and Financial Times special reports and other junk mail that plops through business letterboxes into topics she thought relevant to the company's business. She showed me the Index. It was a surreal catalogue of the subjects that had caught her fancy. There were files on Soap in the Southern Hemisphere, Shortages in the Sudan, Platinum and Pollution Control, The Problems of Metal Fatigue, Israel and the Kiwi Fruit. It had a delightful, random absurdity, like reading down the spines of a collection of National Geographics. The week I was there no one asked for an information file. I asked Victorina if she minded.
'They know it's there. That's the important thing.'
She reported directly to the Manager. I did not see them speak. He stayed in his office most of the day, speaking on the telephone and poring over reports. People who collected and returned files stopped for a chat. She had most to do with Geraldine, the Manager's secretary, since they organised the social club together. Twice a week they had a workout in the boardroom to Jane Fonda tapes. Once a fortnight there was a game of football or netball or darts or Trivial Pursuit, men against the women. When she went off at lunchtime to play netball in front of her new husband I had a good read of the correspondence files. I looked for titbits to feed my liberal prejudices and justify my presence to the ANC sympathisers among my family and friends. I'm not sure what I expected to find but it all seemed innocuous. After Britain and Italy the bank did most business with Zimbabwe.
'How do you feel about working for a South African company?' I asked Victorina when she came back, glowing and happy after a five-nil victory.
'The apartheid you mean? I'm not for it. But what's it got to do with me? Everyone's so friendly here. This is the nicest place I've worked.'
'Why?'
'I used to be in a big bank. There were fifty of us in one room. I'd much rather be in a small organisation. You learn more. There's something new every day. It's more of a team. You're appreciated more. In most places you only get recognition from your immediate boss. Here they all appreciate what you do. And they let you get on with it.'
'There must be disadvantages.'
'If you don't get on with someone it's a disadvantage in a small place. You can't avoid them. And there's not so much scope for promotion. But it's great here. I wouldn't want to do anything else. You learn something new every day.'
Learning something new was what people at all levels of the hierarchy, of all ages, in all kinds of job most often said they wanted out of their work.
'Welcome to the madhouse,' said Sharon.
I sat down in front of a blotter smothered with doodles of skinny brides in flowing wedding dresses. I was taking the place of Wanda who was on her honeymoon in Marbella. Sharon sat behind me. She was the supervisor. She had a round, pleasant face, a high skittering giggle and a complicated hairstyle that made her look as if she had just come out of the bath. She wore tight skirts and blouses pinched under the bust and wide belts that gave her a pronounced hourglass shape. Angela sat in front of me. She was older and had grey hair and protruding teeth. She wore the same trim dark suit and black high heels every day and carried a leather executive case. She varied her outfit with a range of blue blouses. She came from Leeds. In front of her was Li, a fat and jolly Chinese woman from Hong Kong who wore flowing Laura Ashley dresses. The fourth desk was occupied by Percy, an IBM personal computer.
We had a partitioned area to ourselves facing the door to the lavatories. The door was unmarked. Directions to the lavatories were usually given as 'down the corridor, second door on the left opposite recks'. Strangers would stop at Li's desk and ask her what her job was. In reply she simply pointed behind them to the door. We were guardians of the toilets as well as the nostro balances. I asked why the door was unmarked but no one knew.
I was back on nostro reconciliations at another North American bank. It was hard not to be typecast by the agencies. After a day of nostros I was classified as experienced. I was also experienced in the ways of temping. As soon as I arrived at the North American bank I asked my new colleagues what their names were, where I could hang my coat, what time I was expected to start in the morning, what time we finished, when I could go for lunch and for how long, whether there was a staff dining room, where the coffee machine was, whether there were any special house rules, where the toilets were and what my job was. I knew that this information, while not deliberately concealed, was rarely volunteered. The most you were told was where to sit.
My experience was not unique and it was not just because I was a non-existent temp. Li had joined the bank as a regular employee six weeks before. On her first day the Human Resources Manager's assistant gave her forms to fill out and answered some of her basic questions about hours of work and how many luncheon vouchers she was entitled to. She was taken down to meet Archie, the Assistant Operations Manager. He spent half an hour telling her about the bank, what sort of business they did, how they fitted in to the worldwide organisation. Sharon showed her where to sit and went through her daily tasks. She gave her a written job description, a legal requirement, but it wasn't very helpful since they had changed the job since the description was written two years before. That was the extent of her induction into the organisation. There was no easy way of finding out what all the other terms and conditions of employment were either. Sharon said she would take her on a tour of the bank, show her where the other departments were and introduce her to the people she would come into contact with in the course of her work. But she hadn't got round to it. The week before I arrived she had gone to a staff meeting. Several of her colleagues were surprised to see here there because they thought she was a temp. She still felt a stranger.
Her husband was also from Hong Kong. They had met when they were both at accountancy school. She gave up her studies when they started living together. They now had a three-bedroom semi in South London and a three year old child whom she took to a child minder on her way to work. They were building up a private practice and spent most of the weekend seeing clients. They did the accounts for a dozen Chinese restaurants. Most of the time when we were alone we discussed food.
'Don't you get homesick?' I asked after jotting down the recipe for Szechwan fish soup.
'Terrible. We went back for two years. My husband got a good job in Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank. But we missed out here. We have to start career all over again. In Hong Kong he goes back to being typical Chinese husband. I have to stay in and look after the family. Everyone has eyes on you. Your family, your neighbours, everyone. If a woman flirts with someone else then the whole street comes round and beats you. My job here gives me independence. And status. At home I am a house slave. Here I am a professional person.' Sometimes she came in late, distraught and upset. She would work solidly all morning, with not a word to the rest of us, breaking her concentration only to fire vituperative bursts of Cantonese into the phone. When she did this Angela would tum round to Sharon and frown and shake her head. Sharon ignored her.
Sharon and Angela usually went out for lunch. On my first day they went out for a drink with a friend in Telex who was getting engaged at the weekend. They went out for a drink about three times a week, usually on the pretext of celebrating something. There were Promotion Drinks and Transfer Drinks and Payrise Drinks and Joining Drinks and Leaving Drinks and Engagement Drinks and Wedding Drinks and Back from Honeymoon Drinks and Sunshine Drinks (going away on holiday) and Back From The Sunshine Drinks and Reunion Drinks and New Car Drinks and Moving House Drinks and Buying A Three-Piece Suite Drinks and Getting Pregnant Drinks and when all else failed Just For A Drink Drinks. There was no precedent for a New Temp Drink but later on I was sometimes invited along, although the rounds were expensive. Sharon drank large Bacardis on the rocks and Angela Canadian Club with ice and water. We went to wine bars and cocktail bars, rather than pubs crowded with beer drinkers. To avoid paying City prices for bar snacks we ate sandwiches at our desks before we went.
During the time I was there Li always made excuses and stayed behind to read Elements of Banking. Once when Sharon and Angela had gone I asked her if she was teetotal.
'I drink white wine. But English people are very standoffish. It's hard to be accepted. I am a professional person. Sharon and Angela are not professional people.'
'You don't like it here, then?'
'Oh, I like it. Before I was at a stockbrokers. Working conditions were very bad. And the managers, they treat you like dirt. The office was dingy and they were always down your back. Here is light and airy and air conditioning is good. They are very relaxed. They let you get on with job. Here I am on probation for another six weeks. Then we shall see.'
'See what?'
'I am a professional person. I wanted to be in accounts here. Not in this job. This isn't my sort of work. Sharon and Angela and Wanda are happy to do this. But they're, you know ... My husband and I are professional people. He is an accountant. I only took this job to get in the bank. They told me I would be assistant manager to Sharon when my probation finishes next month. Then I want to transfer to accounts. They're OK but they aren't our sort, are they? I have to get promotion because the child minder is so expensive. And we send him after to private school.'
I asked Sharon about Li over a third Bacardi on the rocks. We were having Sharon's Anniversary Drink. She had been at the bank for three years and six months.
'Li's a very hard worker,' I said.
'I've had trouble with her. She'd only been here a week when she told me she was going to be my deputy. First I'd heard of it. She complained because I wasn't teaching her what my job was. I asked Archie but he'd heard nothing about it either. I thought she was trying it on. Then we went to Human Resources. It was true. They'd promised her she'd be my deputy. But I don't want Li as my assistant. I'd rather have Wanda. Anyway, she wants to move into accounts.'
'Why? What's wrong with Li.'
'Nothing. She just needs to settle in. Anyway Wanda's been here longer. It wouldn't be fair.'
One morning Angela was late. She looked tired and preoccupied. We were already hard at work. Angela talked while she worked. The rubber finger stall on her index finger was a red blur. Sharon was bent over a print-out, her nose close to the paper, ticking off numbers with a sharp yellow pencil. Li pondered over a confirmation, her chin in her hands.
'My little girl was sick on my bed at three o'clock this morning. Poor little mite. It must have been the sardines. She was making a funny noise in her throat. I woke up thinking it was burglars. Sort of scratching at the door downstairs. But it was Annie.'
'Ah. Shame.'
'It went all over the counterpane. I didn't find all of it until I made the bed this morning. I had to take it to the cleaners. Over my nightie too. It woke up my little boy. Roger needs his sleep. He can't get around so easy during the day so he uses a lot of energy. He couldn't get out of bed this morning.'
'Ah. Shame.'
'I'm keeping her off food for the rest of the day. I'll go out at lunchtime to buy a chicken breast for her dinner. Roger likes that too.'
'How old are they?' I asked, anxious to ingratiate myself.
'Annie's eleven. She's only got one eye.'
'She's active though, isn't she?' said Sharon.
'It's still quite old for a Siamese,' said Angela. 'I get worried when she's poorly.'
'What about Roger?' I asked.
'He's only seven. He's a Scottie.'
'Tell him about Roger, Angela. It's ever such a shame.'
'He was run over by a motorbike two years ago. He had to have both his back legs amputated. He was in intensive care. I wouldn't have him put down. You wouldn't, would you, if it was a person. My boyfriend Colin fixed him up with a little trolley. He used those little rubber pushchair wheels. The vet agreed. He refuses to put down a healthy animal.'
'He's happy as anything, isn't he, Angela?'
'Except he does need a bit of help to go to the toilet. Have you got any little ones?' she asked me.
I assumed she meant pets, not children. I told them about Guinness, our dog. I related how he had gone out one Saturday night two years ago and been run over by a car. He had been in intensive care too. It had left a foreleg paralysed.
'Ah, poor little thing.'
'The vet wanted to amputate it but we thought it would change his personality.'
'Ah. Shame.'
'Because it trails along the ground it gets sore and infected. He has to wear a glove.'
'Ah. Sweetheart.'
'It wasn't easy to find anything that fitted. At first we tried toddler sized sheepskin mittens.'
'Bless him.'
'But you can't buy them in the summer. I tried all over.'
'Ah. Shame.'
'And leather covers from piano pedals.'
'Ah, Precious.'
'And little boxing gloves.'
'Ah. The darling.'
'We made them ourselves with heavy duty PVC and nylon thread. But they didn't work. Then we discovered golf club covers. He takes a number four wood.'
'Ah. The petal.'
'Every month or so I have the same conversation with the man in the sports shop. Is it for you, Sir? No, it's for the dog. What's his handicap? Ho Ho Ho.'
For half an hour we discussed dogs we had known. It was a safe topic of conversation, the first stage of my gradual absorption into the work group. Li did not join in. She sat with her chin on her hands, absorbed in her work.
'Do you like dogs, Li?' asked Sharon.
'When I was little girl in China if we had coughs my granny give us dog soup.' She interpreted our silence as a desire for further information. 'It was hot food, you see. Chinese food is hot or cold. Dog is hot. Fish is cold. If you have fever or boils that is hot sickness. You take cold food. If you had cough or rheumatism that is cold sickness. You take hot food. See?'
'Sounds logical,' I said.
'Mongrels are preferable for cooking to pedigree. All that inbreeding is not good. Makes the meat bad to eat. Mixed breed is better. More healthy. But a plain colour is preferable to a mixed colour or spots. Spots is the worst. Never eat Dalmatian. The best is a smooth and yellowy coat. Like Labrador. Very tasty. But I have not eaten dog since I came to England,' she added, wistfully. Once again she interpreted stunned silence as an invitation to continue. 'Cat is good for cold sickness too. But you must be very careful not to eat the fur. Not even a little bit. Bad for you.'
'Thanks for the tip,' I said.
The others didn't say anything.
Perhaps this was one case where induction would not have helped to integrate the new employee. But it was the exception.
Sharon put me in charge of the sterling account. 'You know what to do, don't you?' said Sharon.
'Sure,' I said breezily, 'but every bank is different. Why don't you just go through it once to make sure I follow your procedures.'
Sharon sighed. She saw through that one. She handed me a pile of computer generated forms.
'These are confirmations. Split them. Put the two copies into two different piles.'
The print-out I was sorting into piles was confirmations of foreign exchange and money market deals that had been done the previous day in the dealing room. With hundreds of transactions taking place every day, each one processed by several computers and input several times by human beings and sent over telephone lines and satellites, mistakes will happen. They can be expensive. If, say, ten million dollars is sent to the wrong account, the correct account will be overdrawn. If interest rates are 11 per cent per annum this will cost about $3,000 a day. The job of reconciliations is to match the entries in the accounts every day to see what has gone astray. Sharon assumed I was aware of the background. After fifteen years in banking I was, in a hazy sort of way. Her technique of explaining the job was to take me through it step by step without explaining the reasons for what I was doing. This is probably how she had been taught herself.
'Is there a job description?'
Sharon sighed. 'Yes, we've got those somewhere, if I can find them. We lost all that stuff when we moved into the new building last year.'
'Don't bother then. Is there a procedure manual?'
'Yes, we've got one of those. We have to for the auditors.'
'Can I see it?'
'Sure. Trouble is we don't do it that way any more since we had the new computer system.'
'What if you go under a bus?'
'Angela and Wanda could muddle through.'
After sorting the confirmations into piles I had to highlight with a yellow felt-tip the value dates, the dollar amounts in one pile and the sterling amounts in the other pile. I gave the dollar piles to Angela and kept the sterling for myself.
Then Sharon gave me the London Statement, the bank's internal record of the deals that had been done. I had to tick off the confirmations against the entries on the account. I asked why I had to do this as the same computer generated both the London Statements and the confirmations from the same information. Sharon sighed and told me to get on with it. I was mystified by this procedure, but I didn't want to make a nuisance of myself by asking.
I was then given the statement for our account with a British clearing bank. I ticked off the entries that matched those on the internal account. This was not as easy as it sounds. Several entries on one statement could be merged into one entry on the other. There were reverse debits and reverse credits, cancelling previous entries and so on.
All through the day people came in holding scraps of paper and asked us questions about deals that had gone astray. Most of them were recent but some went back a year or so. These people were from Accounts and Cash, the section which received and paid out the cheques and drafts, and Foreign Exchange Operations. Foreign Exchange Operations is the back up to the dealing room. When a dealer makes a deal he scribbles down the basic information on a deal ticket - the amounts, the rate, the customer. The ticket goes to Foreign Exchange Operations who check it and add all the other information necessary to put the deal into the computer and complete the transaction. It is their job to make sure that payments are correctly made. It is reck's job to make sure this happens and that money we expect is actually received. If we saw a missing item we told them, if they had a query they came to us. The two sections had to work very closely together.
Milla from Foreign Exchange Operations was our most frequent visitor. She had an Eastern European accent and a cheery smile. She was plump and blonde and jolly and very conscientious. It was her job to track down missing items. A bank with thousands of transactions every day is an impenetrable haystack to look through. She usually started with us. But no one had explained to her that that was what we were there for, that it was our job to help her. Every time she came in to our area, sometimes a dozen times a day, she apologised profusely for disturbing our work, blaming herself for being such a nuisance, promising she would not come back again until tomorrow. 'Here come de Big Pest,' she announced every time she came in.
After reconciling the two statements and the deal tickets there were still a lot of unmatched entries. Sharon gave me another print-out with the unmatched entries of previous statements going back about eighteen months. This was the Reconciliation Sheet. There were four columns, debits and credits to the internal account and debits and credits to the account with the British clearing bank. I had to search through these and look for ones that matched entries on today's statements. I was left with about twenty entries that had no match. The biggest, over half a million pounds, I had to point out to Sharon who alerted the Cash Department.
It wasn't just a question of deleting some numbers and adding others to the right columns. The columns of credits and debits on the Reconciliation Sheet had to balance-off to zero. This was done on Percy, the personal computer. At the end of the day I sat in front of the screen and called up the file called Sterling Reconciliation. This was the moment of truth. It took half a minute to make the calculation. The screen gave me the instruction to wait, which I obeyed with bated breath. It flickered and flashed and there was the balance. If it was within a pound of zero I had done my day's work without a mistake. Usually it was not and I had to go through all my workings. Sometimes I discovered the error within minutes, a couple of times I had to redo the whole day's work.
I was in sole charge of the sterling account. Sharon only interfered if I asked for help or was not finished by five o'clock. I saw the daily reconciliation through from splitting the confirmations to signing the Reconciliation Sheet. It was my responsibility. I owned it. People came straight to me if they had a query. I felt important and made an effort to make sure I knew the answers.
There was no doubt about whether I had done the job expected of me. I had to make it balance to zero at the end of the day. At ten to five we cleared our desks. We weren't supposed to leave papers lying around. Li put away the print-outs. Sharon turned Percy off and locked the diskettes away in the filing cupboard. Angela took her china cup and saucer and apostle spoon to wash up. On the dot of two minutes to five the four of us were standing at the lift. We went home feeling we had accomplished something. In my old job the horizon was months, if not years. There was no beginning or end. Anything of importance was decided by committee or needed endless justification and explanation to other people in meetings or on the phone or in memos and reports. At the end of the day it was hard to look back and see what you had actually achieved.