We're coming up to the shortest day of the year in this neck of the woods and darkness comes calling earlier each day. I've finally managed a window seat with a view after all these decades of working and yet for most of the afternoon all I have to look at is my own sad reflection against a murky background.
Last week I moved desk to the 15th floor and the thought struck me that this is the highest point I've reached in my working life. My early working years were spent on the first floor of an Accountancy practice. It was over a clothes shop and my abiding memory was the six weeks before Christmas when the shop owner would stick on a tape of Christmas Carols and play them in an unmerciful loop. The speaker was just below my window and the experience has left me with a trigger impulse whenever I hear "Jingle Bells". It makes me want to club somebody with a calculator.
I made it to the giddy heights of the 6th floor when I worked in London. It was in a building in Croydon which had been rebuilt after the war. If they had left the pile of rubble there, it would have been more comfortable and more aesthetic from the outside. My lowly status at that point did not qualify me for a window seat and I was consigned to the dark interior, between the pungent aroma of the toilets and the rattle of the lift shaft. The only time I got the sensation of working above ground was on the regular occasions when the hum of the lift shaft stopped and we were faced with six flights of stairs to climb.
My quest for a corner office with sweeping views of a City landscape continued however. My next stop was Luxembourg, a city of gleaming sky scrapers and an eye catching vista. I made it to the 7th floor this time but was again banished to the interior of the building. My desk faced a featureless wall with a locked door at its centre. In my three years there, I never found out what was behind that door but it did lead to me to learn my first sentence in French. Every night without fail, the cleaner would try to get through that door and when it refused to yield, she would turn to me with the sort of sad face that all office cleaners have and garble something in French that I took to be a request for the key. She may have been expressing her undying love for me, but each night I would answer “je ne pa le cle pour la porte ici”. For my non French speaking readers, that means “I don’t have a key for that door”. For my French speaking readers, I apologise for any misspelling, but I did German in school, so bite me.
After Luxembourg, I went back to Ireland, where the buildings are as vertically challenged as the men. Regulations in Dublin prohibited buildings of more than six stories. Ironically, this made land close to the City highly valuable which led to large bribes being paid by builders to the people who make building regulations. Funny how the world works, isn’t it?
I worked on the first floor, but was at least beside the window this time. This allowed me a great view into the cheap hotel next door, where on Friday afternoons groups of English hen parties would flock to the City and undress in their hotel room under the lusty gaze of horny bankers in the building opposite. It wasn’t as much fun when the stag parties would do something similar.
My first impressions of Melbourne were hopeful. Every small town in Australia has a CBD (Central Business District), as though you’re only allowed to have a bank or solicitor’s practice on one designated street. In Melbourne however, the CBD deserves the title. Collins Street is a majestic boulevard of gleaming towers and shimmering glass. The building I work in was once the tallest building in Australia, so my hopes of finally achieving a view were high.
To my horror, I was initially consigned to a converted, windowless meeting room on the fifth floor. This became known around the building as “The Fish Bowl”. That was unfair as fish have a 15 second memory and so the room looks different each time they look around. We had no such luck and it was like being trapped in a Samuel Beckett play.
Thankfully, Australia is a young and fast moving country and so last weekend I moved again. This time to the 15th floor and the highest peak of my working life. I moved into my sixth desk in the two years since I’ve been here and the process was pretty flawless. Due to my inherent laziness I still hadn’t got around to unpacking from the previous move and was able to lift everything on mass. It took me ten minutes to create the required Fung Shui required in my new space. My phone now faces due North and points at the sun at midday, thus deflecting all evil calls. My calendar is angled at 45 degrees which allows the past to slip quietly away while the future rushes towards me.
Fung Shui however can do nothing however about the fact that I am now sitting in what amounts to as shoe box. Our office move was premised on the need to save space in these economically threatening times and so we’ve been squeezed into an area that was previously inhabited by Pygmies and circus dwarfs. I do however, have a cracking view. To my right, a bunch of eager builders are working on the latest addition to Melbourne’s skyline. To my left is a City Apartment building of the sort favoured by short stay businessmen and high class hookers (often in the same room!). It has a roof garden and every evening some of the more exotic residents come out for a stroll.
