The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work - Alain De Botton [57]
Familiar vignettes stream by outside: a power station, a patch of waste ground, a postal depot, a copse of ancient trees, a group of schoolgirls in grey-and-blue uniforms, a band of cumulus clouds spreading from the west, a shopping mall across a motorway, some underwear swaying on a line, and then gradually, the backs of suburban villas, heralding the train’s arrival into central London itself.
At the accountants’ building, employees are already beginning to course through the plate-glass doors. They have stepped off railway carriages at Victoria and Farringdon, London Bridge and Waterloo, driven through tunnels, been rattled by diesel buses, run down airport concourses, jogged across parks and cycled over hills and high streets, in each case hiding from the rest of the world the centre of the spider’s web to which they were headed. What varied breakfasts they have eaten, too. Danish pastries, the remains of last night’s curry, sausages, Scotch eggs and bowls of Cheerios and Coco Pops, jauntily named to lend their commuting consumers hope.
The employees proceed upstairs without looking around them. To feel at home in the office is not to notice the strange silver sculpture in the lobby and to forget how alien the place felt on the first day. The start of work means the end to freedom, but also to doubt, intensity and wayward desires. The accountant’s ten thousand possibilities have been reduced to an agreeable handful. She has a business card which she hands over in meetings and which tells other people – and, more meaningfully perhaps, reminds her – that she is a Business Unit Senior Manager, rather than a vaporous transient consciousness in an incidental universe. How satisfying it is to be held in check by the assumptions of colleagues, instead of being forced to contemplate, in the loneliness of the early hours, all that one might have been and now never will be. She has a meeting scheduled with a team from an insurance brokerage in half an hour, leaving her time to buy a muffin and coffee from the cafeteria. The start of the day in the office has burnt off nostalgia as the sun evaporates a coat of dew. Life is no longer mysterious, sad, haunting, touching, confusing or melancholy; it is a practical stage for clear-eyed action.
3.
In a meeting room on the seventh floor, ten people have gathered to discuss the progress of an audit of a company in Birmingham which manufactures plastic packaging for the food industry. They range in seniority from a partner, in shirtsleeves at the head of the table, to a new recruit in an emphatically striped suit, who left university last summer. There is banter and affectionate teasing reminiscent of exchanges between a teacher and a group of cocky but respectful students. ‘Watch the game last night, hedgehog?’ the partner asks the young man to his right, whose hair is artfully gelled into spikes. ‘Naturally, Robinson, but we’ll wipe that smile off your face next weekend,’ counters the latter.
Five junior members of the audit team have been in Birmingham every week for the last month, staying at a motel near the plastics factory, on the southern approach to the city. During the day, they have been working in the company’s finance department, going over files and running data tests on their laptops. In the evening, they have frequented the Star of India, a Bengali restaurant located across the dual carriageway from Colditz (as they have nicknamed their accommodation). Travel policy stipulates that staff below the manager grade will be reimbursed up to £20.50 for the evening meal.
It isn’t easy to encourage the accountants to expand on what they do. They feel that any curiosity shown by a civilian must conceal mockery – yet more of what they have been used to encountering from the wider