As you will know if you have been concentrating, for the past two and half years my working days have been spent (at least when I haven't been out and about dealing with the actual customers, which is something we by and large try to avoid), esconced in the Victorian splendour of a former Police station, latterly converted into a suite of offices, on the edge of a bustling if slightly drab market town somewhere in Manchester's fashionable Westside. There were about fifteen of us who used to come and go from this base, and I think the consensus was that if we were absolutely obliged to spend the majority of our waking hours together, writing emails and doing meetings designed to further the vague if impeccably wholesome objectives of Not-For-Profit Agency X, then we could be doing so in worse settings.
If we had imagined that this suburban idyll hidden away in a half-forgotten backwater of the metropolis would last forever, we were foolish. For some time we had been privy to rumours that the accountants at Agency X HQ were looking to cut costs, and that these shirt-sleeved pragmatists took a less-than-romantic view with regard to the long-term leasing of handsomely appointed civic buildings on Tree Lined Westside Boulevards. Last week these rumours chrystallised into unambiguous statements of intent, and on Thursday a delegation of sharp-suited types from Facilities spent two hours cossetted behind the goldfish-bowl windows of the office manager's hideaway, conversing in hushed tones reminiscent of cardinal deliberations.
Even with this build-up, the end- when it came- took me by surprise. I came into work on Monday morning to find my route upstairs impeded by a phalanx of burly caretakers, who were busy gutting the office and shoving its contents unceremoniously into Transit vans. Resolving to carry on regardless, I sidestepped a large man in a boiler suit wielding a filing cabinet, and started pretending to check my emails, until it became clear that if I stayed there another twenty minutes I was going to end up shoved unceremoniously into a Transit van myself. By lunchtime, I was sitting at my new desk - three miles away, in a windowless, rectangular, garishly strip-lit bunker, hidden deep within the bowels of a decaying Brutalist 1960s shopping centre.
And that's where (give or take the odd excursion out to deal with the actual clientele, which as I may have mentioned is something we try on the whole to avoid) I've been ever since. So far it's actually been OK- if we disregard the deathly pallour and outbreak of the sniffles brought on by the chronic sunlight deprivation and forced diet of cut-price pasties, and the less-than-amenable reception by the bloke in the desk opposite to my suggestion that he consider vacating his station to make way for a fellow displaced colleague (His exact words were 'I'm not moving, son. Get it? Not moving'.)
But, you know, we're hardy souls, us Westside types, and it will take more than an outbreak of scurvy and a series of near-brawls with paunchy, balding middle-managers to knock the swing out of our fashionable step. As if to prove it, I've been spending my lunch hours wandering the floors of the mall, marvelling (like a housewife from the 1960s) at how its indoor setting means I don't need to bother with my coat. I'm on nodding terms with some of the regulars already, such as the young Afro-Caribbean gentleman who stands in his suit for eight hours daily forlornly trying to hawk tickets in something called the 'Firefighters Lottery' from a rickety stand the size of a coffee table, and the woman behind the counter in WH Smiths who turned a blind eye to me devouring the first three chapters of a paperback (Nick Hornby's 'Juliet, Naked', since you ask) over the course of three successive noontimes.
Oh yes, it could be worse- we could have been sent to Agency X HQ, for example, to carry out our labours under gimlet eyes of the shirtsleeved topbrass and their unforgiving excel spreadsheets. That time may yet come (rumour has it that a less-than-romantic view is being taken in the corridors of power with regard to the medium-term leasing of strip-lit oblong dungeons hidden deep in the bowels of Stalinist Engineering Projects dating from the halcyon days of the Wilson administration) but for now we will battle on. Will Health, comfort, and other outdated bourgeois notions be permitted to impede the progress of Not for Profit Agency X towards its vague if impeccably wholesome objectives? Not on our watch, my friends. Not on our watch.
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