Chapter 21
I remember working at Canary Wharf for two free things: the free travel to work and the free soft drinks machines in the accountancy firm where I completed a task best summarised in two words: boring filing.
Canary Wharf is a collection of tall shiny reflective buildings dedicated to money. I worked in the HSBC tower, which, with fear at its peak post-9/11, was deemed a target for terror. As soon as I entered the office, I was shown the concrete stairwell down which to evacuate in the highly probable event a plane hit the HSBC tower. Which I didn’t understand. Why would the HSBC tower be the next target for terror when so many other tall buildings represented western capitalistic greed?
The true physical threats were the free soft drinks. I marvelled at their freeness because my prejudice said a New Zealand company offering the same generous work perk, if the office opened at 8am, would have its vending machines emptied by 8.01am and taken home to stock fridges.
In a nondescript office hallway on an upper HSBC tower floor, standing in front of a Coke-branded vending machine, I battled the temptation to push all the machine’s buttons, from the top to the bottom, like the white keys on a piano. I wanted to empty the machine and hear the cans crashing into the metal receptacle then walk away, because I hated filing, and I hated London. I was feeling destructive.
Worn pavements, people in a hurry, homeless asking for cash and ambitious people chasing cash. London wasn’t for Ellie and me. We felt smothered by the concentration of buildings, traffic and the lack of green space. We wanted a beach, skiing, tramping and skydiving and we missed living in a house with a garden. It seemed London was a city where big salary earners lived in nice areas with parks and took planes overseas to nice places for expensive holidays, and everyone else lived in an expensive box shared with twenty other people.
Unwilling to give up and leave, or commit to London by moving into a flat, we decided to improve our living arrangements by moving from our dumpy Earl’s Court hostel to The Bayswater Royal Hotel: an upgrade to a room with daily continental breakfast and a private bathroom at the same price as the hostel. We looked forward to no drunk or drugged residents keeping us awake at night, and felt we were in for a treat.
The Bayswater Royal Hotel with two staff didn’t have many guests.
On reception was a rotund, super-helpful, constantly smiling Indian man who did not seem to notice the threadbare carpet, cracked tiles, plaster falling from the ceiling, broken furniture and guests’ disappointment. His limited comprehension of guests’ expectations extended to a verbal request two weeks into our stay when one morning he asked we return after 4pm. “The men are coming to give the cockroaches some medicines today,” he unselfconsciously informed us.
The other hotelier, Mr Disgruntled, was a tall skinny Indian man who never smiled and said little. He begrudgingly made and served our breakfast and hated all guests, especially when they spoke to him. Mr Disgruntled was the personality opposite of Mr Rotund and they worked together like an Indian version of Fawlty Towers, a British nineteen-seventies television comedy based round a couple running a hotel.
I think Mr Disgruntled liked to precook breakfast, because everything seemed reheated.
Every morning at 6.30am, Mr Disgruntled served our Continental breakfast of two rubbery slices of lightly-toasted white bread and boiled eggs. The boiled eggs had been boiled, and boiled again then perhaps boiled once more because a light greenish-grey colour was prominent around the hard yolks indicating suspicious freshness. We ate them of course. We were paying for it. And so were the twelve-in-total other guests we saw eating breakfast in the month we stayed at The Bayswater Royal Hotel.
The Bayswater Royal Hotel was close to the Queensway Tube station where I caught the Tube to Canary Wharf to file pieces of paper in alphabetical order for eight hours a day.
The entire time I worked at Canary Wharf, the gates at Queensway Tube station were open, so passengers could avoid buying a ticket and walk through the open gates.
Tube stations required inserting a ticket to lower gate arms and allow entry. Every morning I would walk through the open gates, feeling because London hadn’t delivered me the job of my dreams it should at least provide me free transport.
The problem was, I had to get out at Canary Wharf and exit without a ticket.
During rush hours at Canary Wharf station, a continuous line of identically dressed office workers clutching briefcases and handbags surged through the gates. Going through the gates, it was not uncommon to bump into or brush up against the person in front.
To get through the gates without a ticket, I would lift my handbag to touch the person in front’s body at hip-level where the laser detected a person was exiting the gate and push through behind them. Not breaking the laser meant the computer thought a person, be it a really long person, was passing through.
Sometimes people would not notice. Other times, due to a lull in people traffic, the exit gates were quiet so after pushing through behind someone, the person would turn and look at me as if to say, “What are you doing?” thinking a dirty old man or pickpocket had pressed against them.
Sometimes I would pretend to have tripped, other times I would turn and look behind me as if someone had pushed me and act surprised when I found no one there. Once the person in front saw the culprit was a young woman their faces slackened to mild annoyance and because they were busy rushing to meetings to discuss annual forecasts and profit margins, in an instant they didn’t care.
On my return trip, I bought a one-stop ticket but took the train all the way to Queensway where I walked through the open gates.
Ellie and I had to make changes. Healthy cockroaches and reheated continental breakfasts were unsatisfactory. We made the decision to move, finding a room in a Brondesbury Park flat where we moved in with three Australians: Hally, a graphic designer, Dave, an engineer – a couple we became good friends with – and Dirk, also an engineer.
Our living situation much improved, work was the same: poorly paid mindless uninspiring office administration jobs for me, and poorly paid repetitive gym work for Ellie.
I knew things were grim when Ellie – the optimist in our coupling – said of her gym jobs and the women who went there: “They need to work on it in their own time. It’s the six-week cycle. A woman comes down the factory line and disappears off the end of the line in her original state.” She was tired of women going to the gym to lose weight and looking to an external helper thinking they could work out three times a week for an hour and buy, eat or drink something quick-fix. “It isn’t going to happen. They need to do the hard work.” She felt she couldn’t do anything to make those fatties thin.
Around this time my frustration and negativity kicked into overdrive. I started to see only sad things. Commuting to work when the tube station announcer a delay, I knew why. Looking around seeing other blank faces dragging themselves to work I wondered who next would leap onto the tracks pursuing escape.
But Ellie and I persevered, giving London three more months because that was when the flat tenancy expired.
Over the next few months I bussed, tubed and took trains to different offices. I processed attendee RSVPs for a conference. I worked a few evenings in a copy and printing department of a business in St Paul’s. On a reception at the top of a building, I took stationery orders and was offered a permanent job: I ran screaming through the streets of London. For two days I stuffed envelopes with a group of five others and listened to a middle-aged guy drone on about how he was starting up his own record company; we all kept quiet until one young guy finally asked him why he was stuffing envelopes for seven pounds an hour. The older guy had an answer of course, he was a salesman, he needed to “build capital”. I hardly spoke. By this point I had entered a state of learned helplessness brought about by my own failures.
In some offices staff knew my temporary status so didn’t extend their welcome beyond showing me the staffroom and toilets. In other offices, I was treated like a permanent employee with invitations to coffee and after-work drinks. I would decline after-work drinks, I wasn’t being paid and off the clock I couldn’t keep up the positive façade. After-hours I was like Cinderella’s horse-drawn coach turning into a pumpkin. I couldn’t mask the truth: I found each office job boring and the office environment dull and uninspiring. I didn’t care about my colleagues and the life milestones they ticked off with the passing years: education, partner, marriage, mortgage, children, work promotion, car upgrade, kids to school, house upgrade, affair, divorce, work promotion, children’s weddings and death. I wondered at what point my co-workers had lost themselves to the order of things and felt unsafe deviating. Although I didn’t know my dreams, I wondered why the people I met weren’t chasing theirs. I never considered they might be fulfilling their life’s ambition as an accountant in the HSBC tower or as a psychologist for homeless people in Bloomsbury Mews. Because I felt sad and trapped, everyone seemed sad and trapped.
In my last London job, it was like I had I travelled back in time and met the children-selves of the adult patients I had met at the outpatient clinic in Bloomsbury Mews.
I worked as a medical secretary at a children’s outpatient clinic.
Watching the children come into reception, I wondered which child would become Miss Juniper, the lady who thought her friends were stealing her dresses to wear to dances. I considered the ethics of warning each child their future adult self might one day believe this or actually buy a blue dress. I was left with the predicament of choosing to save one life and mess with time itself, or say nothing and leave Miss Juniper to a life of anti-psychotic medications, doctor consultations and mental conditions diagnosed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
Besides the recurring theme of the menial in my temping jobs, I was sometimes requested as a New Zealand temp, as was the case at the children’s outpatient clinic. I was the temporary New Zealander until the new permanent New Zealander replaced the previous New Zealander who had left to travel and return to New Zealand.
The children’s outpatient clinic was much like the adult clinic except the glass reception window was thinner and patients arrived with their mothers. Otherwise, I booked appointments, typed dictaphone notes and answered the phone.
From my desk and through the glass, I eyed the presumably unstable, traumatised, hostile and mild-to-extremely psychotic children as they drew pictures with crayons of evil people who had done horrible things to them. Pictures they would no doubt present in appointments where they would explain to doctors these were the bad people who had touched them, and how they wanted to burn something down. Or they would explain they were pictures of their nightmares; pictures inappropriate for the family fridge.
In the reception office I worked with a traditionally dressed, fifty-year-old, recently-widowed Indian woman. What she saw in a skinny sometimes-hungover twenty-two-year-old which she felt qualified as an empathetic ear, I don’t know. But her grief was heavy and I did my best awkward attempt to listen and say the right things. I was not callous or indifferent to her emotions, but I didn’t know how to deal with a stranger’s grief.
The grief-sharing situation made me reflect on life as an office temp, and the continuous stream of strangers and range of uncomfortable situations a temp encounters.
As the new person in any workplace, you have no idea who to avoid. And as a young person, you are particularly attractive to “avoidables” who know you are without the necessary skills learned over time to avoid them. Avoidables tell you their problems and share intimate details they would otherwise never share with a permanent co-worker. They might bore you discussing subjects only interesting to them, gloat or talk at you, and ask questions but ignore your answers. Avoidables love temps.
In these desperate moments, I would refer to teachings from the Church of Mum, particularly her sermon on, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything.” Instead of talking, I would stand quietly, making sarcastic comments in my mind until growing tired of my inner voice then disappear to the toilet to pass the time, to become known as the temp with irritable bowel syndrome for all my visits to the bathroom.
But for all the workplace avoidables, there are as many kind-hearted co-workers ready to interrupt and save you from details of lives that make you want to place your head on a photocopier’s glass and slam the lid down on your face until blood comes out your nose. If words could transfer thoughts from your pummeled brain to the photocopier’s data processor, the printed paper would show your mangled face with a thought bubble, “I had to make it stop.”
I was done with office work, done with London and swore I would never again work in an office.
Ellie and I wanted another kind of England; the lost-in-time romanticised England of countryside and pubs and country lanes and accents born of geographic isolation.
We wanted a backyard with grass.
After buying a Ford Escort station wagon for five hundred and fifty pounds, we loaded our few possessions and drove out of London. On the motorway, with every mile moving us further into the green, we felt we would never look back.