The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work - Alain De Botton [63]
Through the windows, people are walking by the river in casual clothes. Their leisure makes one wonder as to the deeper logic of the work unfolding in the building. However, large questions have a habit of feeling irrelevant when one is in the middle of an activity; one is simply preparing a document for a four o’clock meeting, or because André has requested it or Katrin needs it for a presentation in Bangalore. Then again, the accountants are experts at summing up the meaning of our working lives. The company derives the greatest share of its income from its employees’ skill in preparing year-end financial statements which declare, following lengthy preambles about operational assets, capital receipts, loans and liabilities, that the whole point of a year may be summarised as follows:
Current Year (in £) Previous Year (in £)
Turnover 50,739,954 30,719,640
Gross Profit 10,305,392 7,003,417
Such numbers express a truth about office life which is no less irrefutable – yet also, in the end, no less irrelevant or irritating – than an evolutionary biologist’s proud reminder that the purpose of existence lies in the propagation of our genes. The starkness of the year-end accounts only emphasises the extent to which generating money is really an excuse to do other things, to rise from bed in the morning, to talk authoritatively in front of overhead projectors, to plug in laptops in foreign hotel rooms, to give presentations analysing market shares and to yearn at the sight of Katie’s knee-length grey woollen shorts. Long before we ever earned any money, we were aware of the necessity of keeping busy: we knew the satisfactions of stacking bricks, pouring water into and out of containers and moving sand from one pit to another, untroubled by the greater purpose of our actions.
8.
About those shorts: Katie is the twenty-two-year-old assistant to the head of the Northern European Retail division. Today she is putting together an itinerary for her boss’s tour of Scandinavia in two weeks’ time. She has a copy of Discover Copenhagen on her desk. She has booked him into a quiet upper room in that city’s Imperial Hotel and scheduled a 7:30 breakfast with key staff from the local office, including Søren Strøm, Lasse Skov Kristensen and Morten Stokholm Buhl.
But Katie herself may be the only person in the vicinity able to concentrate on anything other than the captivating nature of her face and figure. So insistent and inappropriate are the thoughts that her beauty generates, it is easy to slip into a severe, impatient manner with her which may be mistaken for disinterest or even rudeness. Yet the company’s code of conduct explicitly states: ‘We have no tolerance towards sexual harassment in the workplace. Sexual harassment includes demeaning comments about a person’s appearance; indecent remarks; questions about a person’s sexual life; and physical contact that violates a person’s dignity or creates an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive working environment for them.’
Superficially, the code seems wholly and admirably concerned with championing the rights of innocent parties. There may, however, be a more cynical and less altruistic aspect to this unsparing paragraph, for what is really being protected is perhaps not a particular individual afflicted by indecent attention so much as the corporation itself. The feelings elicited by Katie’s shorts are incendiary because they threaten to subvert the firm’s entire rationale. They risk bringing to light an awkward