The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work - Alain De Botton [54]
1.
Standing with your back to the Tower of London, looking across the Thames, you might notice a family of new office blocks lined up along the south bank. They took only six months to build – having been assembled out of steel frames sheathed in simple coats of tinted glass – and still do not quite seem to belong to the city, being oddly clean and impervious to the history which surrounds them, conveying a non-native sense of optimism better suited to downtown Toronto or Cleveland. Just to the east of them, in a plaza decked out with privately maintained trees and fountains, groups of foreign schoolchildren arrive by bus to take pictures of the river, while businesspeople, thrown off schedule by the rare boon of a punctual train or a clear road, sit on benches attending to messages transmitted invisibly to their phones through the luminous morning air.
A discreet logo at the top of one of the towers is the only outward sign of having reached the European headquarters of one of the world’s largest accountancy firms. Despite such reticence, the building affords the inquisitive passer-by with notably unguarded glimpses of the goings-on inside. Seemingly more aware of having a view than of being one, the employees rest their besocked feet on boxes of printer cartridges, unselfconsciously consume lunch at the windows, swivel on their ergonomic chairs, stand in semicircles in obscure group exercises and write acronyms on white boards in rooms full of concentrated-looking colleagues – their behaviour unfolding behind triple glazing as if in an eerily silent film, accompanied only by a musical score of seagulls, river traffic and the easterly wind.
On entering the building, one encounters a lobby designed so that the head of any newcomer will ineluctably lean backwards to follow a succession of floors rising up to apparent infinity, and in the process dwell – as the cathedral-builders once invited one to do with their vaulted naves – on the respect that must be owed to those responsible for putting up and managing this colossus. However, unlike at Chartres, quite what one should be honouring is unclear. Perhaps hard work, precision, a certain ruthlessness and the surprising intricacies of the audit process. A plaque affixed to a wall declares, ‘We like people who demonstrate integrity, energy and enthusiasm.’
To judge by the number of people seated on the lobby’s red-leather sofas, it isn’t unusual to be kept waiting awhile for an appointment, surreptitiously to enforce an impression of the importance of one’s hosts on the upper floors. A receptionist, no less aware of the solemnity of her role than a priestess at the Temple of Delphi, is on hand for a short initiation ceremony, handing you a badge and directing you to the sofas with a tenuous promise of rescue. There are free newspapers and bottles of water emblazoned with the firm’s name. Waiting feels like the oldest of human activities, stretching back to the senators pacing outside the emperor’s quarters in imperial Rome and the merchants lined up to see the caliph in the marble-lined palaces of medieval Córdoba. In the background, a bank of lifts emits random pings as security guards patrol the turnstiles, hoping for a confrontation to interrupt the tedium of their day.
As one does in a doctor’s surgery, one may be tempted to look at one’s fellow visitors and wonder about the problems that have brought them here. They are unlikely to be straightforward. The accountants don’t cater to life’s superficial needs. Their jobs did not even come into being until late in the history of business, only after millions of people had gathered in cities and been grouped into industrial phalanxes – for, until then, accountancy merely occupied a few sporadic moments at the ledger by candlelight in a back room. The advent of dedicated financial specialists, who are unable to fish or build a house or sew a coat but are entirely committed to answering questions of amortisation, standard engagement revenue and transaction tax, seems a culmination of a long history