My Office Chair

Anne was on holiday last week, and when she returned to her office found they'd had a re-organisation in her absence, and she was now stuck in the middle of the office on a bank of four desks. Oh, the comedown!

Unable to sleep last night with a sore throat I found myself remembering just how status-driven seating was at CU. There must have been a manual somewhere saying what staff on each pay-level were entitled to. A big manual.

As an example of how obsessed people were with their standing, I remember one line manager who was finally entitled to an office. It was built for him (one of those internal pre-fab things), he measured it, and complained because it was one inch too narrow. They had to come back and re-build it.

At the Head Office in the City the window seats were highly-prized. At least until the Baltic Exchange bomb.

When I arrived at Croydon I finally had a large rounded desk, high-backed, swivel-chair with arms in which I could turn around to look out of my very own window and have a quick snooze, and had another chair for visitors. None of which meant anything to me at all. I considered myself the least status-driven person there. So, no surprise that I was seconded onto a Business Change Project Group.

This group was charged with dragging CU into the 20th Century - stripping out the pointless bureaucracy; driving a coach and horses through the hierarchies, and the petty politics; updating into a lean, mean, speedboat; plucking that low-hanging fruit; standing at flip-charts talking absolute fucking bollocks to morons from Bristol to Glasgow. This group (naturally) was very keen on that year's management consultancy must-have: Hot-desking.

Except for me and Simon Clare. Who had worked our way up from banks of desks and brown pump-action armless-chairs-from-hell, to positions of absolutely no power at all at head office where our only obvious role was to be shat on by all sides.

We refused to move to this project group without taking our chairs and desks with us....

So it's something to praise:
a) that I no longer work somewhere where the pettiness seeps into your soul and makes you act like a twat.
b) that I have my own comfy swivel chair, from the comfort of which I intend to watch every World Cup game

I wonder what desk Simon has these days...


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