blp
04-05-2006, 07:31 AM
This is the beginning of a novel I haven't worked on for quite a while. Thinking about giving it some attention...
Chapter 1 Fun Office
I woke up. The blinds were up on the big window and it was slowly getting light. Huge looming, blue/grey clouds moved swiftly to the left across a patch of lighter blue/grey and a distant aeroplane, as tiny as a fly, flew straight to the right, blinking a tiny, white light above its wing. The glass of the window was flecked with rain. It looked like a screensaver.
In a few minutes it had dissolved into an ordinary morning. The clouds had lost their shapes and blurred into a uniform covering, the light had become a paler, less saturated blue and the plane was gone.
I lay in bed without moving and for some reason I thought about being a child and believing you could make yourself into any type of person it seemed convenient to be. Anyone whom I observed or read or heard anything about when I was a child seemed a convenient person to be because I was not aware of his or her capacity to feel pain.
It was an airy, well-lit office with plants and thermoses of coffee in the kitchen and parquet floors and a culture that was all about trying to be a sort of second family to the employees. My cousin Alex was creative director and he took me on as a freelancer in the writing department.
On Thursdays we finished half an hour early and had beers and snacks in the kitchen while a member of senior management led a QA session. On Tuesday mornings, masochists could come in early for a breakfast meeting with one of the directors who would update them about issues like share options, pensions and sales targets, an event sweetened slightly by the bait of free almond croissants and pain chocolate. There was a giant notice board in reception where the head of design had pinned Polaroids of every employee in the company, usually with a humorous comment written in black felt pen on the bottom (I was looking bug-eyed and crazy in mine and below it was the spoonerist legend: ‘Mook Lay, head of hydroponics’). So it was like a lot of offices at the time in its attempt to seem sort of zenny, zany and a bit like your home but with faster computers. Too bad there was no air conditioning or heating and outside was a construction site that rattled the air all day with high decibel drilling. And too bad the product we were making was financial training for ****s. I mean suits. And too bad the whole enterprise was also run by ****s who were just trying to make a fast buck. I mean ****s.
The whole thing, the whole of Clerkenwell at the time in fact, was a shimmering, phoney utopia, a soothing flat-screen presentation about the good new life that masked the same old stupid world, now extra stupid. You constantly met people at the time who appeared to be messengers from the future when really they’d only had a quick Vexed Generation android makeover and then carried on going home and rocking out to InXs rather than Aphex Twin. Alex, for instance, suddenly had a wardrobe of mainly grey, asymmetrical jackets and shirts and exceptionally dark blue jeans and a pair of black framed, rectangular glasses. He’d never even had glasses before. I tried them on once and I didn’t believe they changed things at all. And although he was creative director, it gradually emerged that he didn’t know how to do any of the things his underlings were paid less than him to do, like animate in Flash or programme in HTML and JavaScript.
About half the people at UHEC got their jobs like I did, through contacts. This figure is actually below the average according to the adviser at the last restart interview I went to when I was unemployed. He said that a whopping 64% of people get their jobs through someone they know. So if you don’t know someone, I guess you’re ****ed. I say that sympathetically and empathetically because the only person I knew was Alex, which was never a favour I much wanted to call in. I know I should be grateful when I go into art galleries and coffee shops and the menials there are my age and on half my money and I have to think, ****, that could have been me. But Alex is a **** and the work at UHEC is actually crushingly tedious most of the time and it’s at least partly Alex’s fault. It was him who clucked dully, when UHEC was small and without a real agenda, that multimedia financial training was a ‘growth area’, big stupid fat piles of cash dancing before his eyes like table dancers, thereby ruthlessly anally retaining all the more creative possibilities open to a multimedia company at the time. And at the worst times, this feels like some kind of strange punishment that he was preparing especially for me.
It’s still supposed to be really creative. We write animations that are designed to make finance fun, with talking animals and weird, outdated depictions of yuppies and odd, incongruous toilet jokes. We have a little creative play area with building blocks, beanbag chairs, table football, comics, a Playstation, fashion magazines, Japanese toys and various other bits of gaudy trash. It doesn’t help us be creative, but apparently it looks good to the investors and clients who, apparently, feel like they’re visiting somewhere highly modish and exciting when they come down to ‘London’s trendy Clerkenwell district’ (pace the UHEC Brochure and mailshot) to keep an eye on their stake and soak up the fizz of our bleeding edge dynamic.
The real perk used to be that there was often nothing to do for days and weeks because the company’s ‘strategy for moving forward’ was still being decided. Changes to the strategy for moving forward happened roughly hourly for awhile and always meant downing tools while people like Joachim Qude and David Creswick went off with the consultants to the natural light room to stroke their chins and palm pilots, draw diagrams on the whiteboard and eat muffins. My friend Ricky and I spent these times playing network Quake, surfing the net and making dumb Flash animations while people like Louisa paced around saying ‘I just wish someone would give me some ****ing work to do.’ until, a week or so later, David Creswick would emerge with the New Way: we are going to be a PORTAL; or, no, we are going to be the leading international purveyor of cross-platform e-Learning for the financial sector; or, no, we are going to provide only bespoke e-Learning courses for b to b delivery; or, no, we are going to be solely a bespoke animation house. And so on. And then we would all go to work writing process documentation to ‘expediate [sic] the implementation of new era UHEC production processes.’ (pace David Creswick email #4,589,995).
This book is going to be about me. If you want to know what went wrong with the internet or, perhaps, find out that it actually didn’t go wrong, try reading between the lines of one of those books with names like ‘Surfing the Zeitgeist’ or ‘Corporate Funk Power’ that used to clutter up our offices. It’s all fairly subjective anyway. Personally, for me, nothing has really gone wrong. I still have a pleasantly undemanding job. It hasn’t given me much to think about, but that’s okay, I think. I’m trying to be level about this and put the blame in the right place. Basically, I think I can say that my problems have been personal, to the extent that I understand them at all.
Chapter 1 Fun Office
I woke up. The blinds were up on the big window and it was slowly getting light. Huge looming, blue/grey clouds moved swiftly to the left across a patch of lighter blue/grey and a distant aeroplane, as tiny as a fly, flew straight to the right, blinking a tiny, white light above its wing. The glass of the window was flecked with rain. It looked like a screensaver.
In a few minutes it had dissolved into an ordinary morning. The clouds had lost their shapes and blurred into a uniform covering, the light had become a paler, less saturated blue and the plane was gone.
I lay in bed without moving and for some reason I thought about being a child and believing you could make yourself into any type of person it seemed convenient to be. Anyone whom I observed or read or heard anything about when I was a child seemed a convenient person to be because I was not aware of his or her capacity to feel pain.
It was an airy, well-lit office with plants and thermoses of coffee in the kitchen and parquet floors and a culture that was all about trying to be a sort of second family to the employees. My cousin Alex was creative director and he took me on as a freelancer in the writing department.
On Thursdays we finished half an hour early and had beers and snacks in the kitchen while a member of senior management led a QA session. On Tuesday mornings, masochists could come in early for a breakfast meeting with one of the directors who would update them about issues like share options, pensions and sales targets, an event sweetened slightly by the bait of free almond croissants and pain chocolate. There was a giant notice board in reception where the head of design had pinned Polaroids of every employee in the company, usually with a humorous comment written in black felt pen on the bottom (I was looking bug-eyed and crazy in mine and below it was the spoonerist legend: ‘Mook Lay, head of hydroponics’). So it was like a lot of offices at the time in its attempt to seem sort of zenny, zany and a bit like your home but with faster computers. Too bad there was no air conditioning or heating and outside was a construction site that rattled the air all day with high decibel drilling. And too bad the product we were making was financial training for ****s. I mean suits. And too bad the whole enterprise was also run by ****s who were just trying to make a fast buck. I mean ****s.
The whole thing, the whole of Clerkenwell at the time in fact, was a shimmering, phoney utopia, a soothing flat-screen presentation about the good new life that masked the same old stupid world, now extra stupid. You constantly met people at the time who appeared to be messengers from the future when really they’d only had a quick Vexed Generation android makeover and then carried on going home and rocking out to InXs rather than Aphex Twin. Alex, for instance, suddenly had a wardrobe of mainly grey, asymmetrical jackets and shirts and exceptionally dark blue jeans and a pair of black framed, rectangular glasses. He’d never even had glasses before. I tried them on once and I didn’t believe they changed things at all. And although he was creative director, it gradually emerged that he didn’t know how to do any of the things his underlings were paid less than him to do, like animate in Flash or programme in HTML and JavaScript.
About half the people at UHEC got their jobs like I did, through contacts. This figure is actually below the average according to the adviser at the last restart interview I went to when I was unemployed. He said that a whopping 64% of people get their jobs through someone they know. So if you don’t know someone, I guess you’re ****ed. I say that sympathetically and empathetically because the only person I knew was Alex, which was never a favour I much wanted to call in. I know I should be grateful when I go into art galleries and coffee shops and the menials there are my age and on half my money and I have to think, ****, that could have been me. But Alex is a **** and the work at UHEC is actually crushingly tedious most of the time and it’s at least partly Alex’s fault. It was him who clucked dully, when UHEC was small and without a real agenda, that multimedia financial training was a ‘growth area’, big stupid fat piles of cash dancing before his eyes like table dancers, thereby ruthlessly anally retaining all the more creative possibilities open to a multimedia company at the time. And at the worst times, this feels like some kind of strange punishment that he was preparing especially for me.
It’s still supposed to be really creative. We write animations that are designed to make finance fun, with talking animals and weird, outdated depictions of yuppies and odd, incongruous toilet jokes. We have a little creative play area with building blocks, beanbag chairs, table football, comics, a Playstation, fashion magazines, Japanese toys and various other bits of gaudy trash. It doesn’t help us be creative, but apparently it looks good to the investors and clients who, apparently, feel like they’re visiting somewhere highly modish and exciting when they come down to ‘London’s trendy Clerkenwell district’ (pace the UHEC Brochure and mailshot) to keep an eye on their stake and soak up the fizz of our bleeding edge dynamic.
The real perk used to be that there was often nothing to do for days and weeks because the company’s ‘strategy for moving forward’ was still being decided. Changes to the strategy for moving forward happened roughly hourly for awhile and always meant downing tools while people like Joachim Qude and David Creswick went off with the consultants to the natural light room to stroke their chins and palm pilots, draw diagrams on the whiteboard and eat muffins. My friend Ricky and I spent these times playing network Quake, surfing the net and making dumb Flash animations while people like Louisa paced around saying ‘I just wish someone would give me some ****ing work to do.’ until, a week or so later, David Creswick would emerge with the New Way: we are going to be a PORTAL; or, no, we are going to be the leading international purveyor of cross-platform e-Learning for the financial sector; or, no, we are going to provide only bespoke e-Learning courses for b to b delivery; or, no, we are going to be solely a bespoke animation house. And so on. And then we would all go to work writing process documentation to ‘expediate [sic] the implementation of new era UHEC production processes.’ (pace David Creswick email #4,589,995).
This book is going to be about me. If you want to know what went wrong with the internet or, perhaps, find out that it actually didn’t go wrong, try reading between the lines of one of those books with names like ‘Surfing the Zeitgeist’ or ‘Corporate Funk Power’ that used to clutter up our offices. It’s all fairly subjective anyway. Personally, for me, nothing has really gone wrong. I still have a pleasantly undemanding job. It hasn’t given me much to think about, but that’s okay, I think. I’m trying to be level about this and put the blame in the right place. Basically, I think I can say that my problems have been personal, to the extent that I understand them at all.