The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work - Alain De Botton [55]
Everything in the accountants’ building appears elegant and well-maintained. There are none of the cobwebs endemic to the ordinary world. People cross the corridors and elevated walkways with purpose. Five thousand employees are split into divisions headed Audit, Tax, Banking, Capital Markets, Real Estate and Risk Advisory Services. They are assisted by two hundred support staff who fix chairs, wheel biscuits into client meetings, reroute emails and clip together identification badges. A basement stationery store, stocked more prodigiously than Aladdin’s cave, boasts a supply of three thousand highlighter pens, which could ring the earth in fluorescent yellow ink and which invite you to think of the many countries and situations they will run out in, for instance, one pen expiring in a hotel in Kiev, after covering the many salient points in a five-hundred-page document headed Weighted Average Cost of Capital in the Copper Mining Industry.
In the wider view of the public, accountancy may be synonymous with bureaucratic tedium, but from close up, this particular conglomeration of numerical talents presents the observer with a case-study of the discrete charms of offices, with their intriguing blend of camaraderie, intelligence and futility. The headquarters on the bank of the Thames is the setting for a range of behaviours at least as peculiar as anything that an ethnographer might uncover among the clans of Samoa.
I resolved to spend time in the accountants’ glass tower, as well as in one or two of their homes, in order to build up a snapshot of an average day.
2.
It is six o’clock on a late-July morning, in a village fifty kilometres from the office, in the Berkshire countryside. To define what is painfully coming to an end, thanks to the pitiless insistence of an electronic chirrup, as ‘being asleep’ doesn’t scratch the surface of what has really been going on for the last seven hours, ever since one of the accountants I am shadowing lost contact with her conscious self while watching a regional news item and was transported off on the back of the swan of sleep. She may only have been lying under a duvet, in a room undisturbed except by the occasional sweep of car headlamps across the ceiling, and yet she was all the while being shuttled on turbulent journeys animated by unexpected faces and emotions.
She was back in the school gymnasium, taking an algebra exam and sitting next to a boy who was also, and without evident incongruity, a colleague from the Retail and Consumer Products unit. Then came a supermarket queue and the Queen shouting that someone had stolen her earrings, a scene which dissolved into a meeting on a ferry with a lover whom she hadn’t seen in ten years, but who spoke of their break-up with an accuracy her waking mind could never have mustered. It is a wonder that we manage to be so outwardly docile, an arm or leg only infrequently stirring, while we travel on such ghost trains.
Once the alarm has rung, the accountant has little choice but to head for the bathroom without doing justice to her visions. Sentimental associations and impossible longings are shut down, and the self is reassembled as an apparently coherent entity, with stable commitments and a prescribed future. Yet in the haze of dawn, she feels for a few moments as if she still had a foot in both worlds, parts of herself holding on to the dreams as others soberly go through the motions with the taps and the toothbrush. But with time, the drawbridge to the night is pulled up, and soon all that is left is the noise of running water and, on a ledge by the window, a bottle of shampoo on which is printed in bold letters, in an implicit assertion of the supremacy of diurnal reality, the familiar yet peculiar phrase ‘All-in-One Conditioner’.
How quiet the nation was only forty-five minutes ago, and yet how much hair-rinsing, necktie-tying,