Once upon a time there was an office, and at one end of that office, behind the door which led to two toilets, there was a ‘kitchenette’. This consisted of a beige worktop with an inset stainless steel sink and a cupboard below, some mug hooks on the wall above, a small fridge, a kettle and all the bits and bobs for making tea and coffee; and the tap, that dripping tap. No one could remember a time before the drip. There was also an assortment of mugs, perhaps fifteen or sixteen, unmatching, some with brown tea and coffee stains, some covered inside with a network of spidery cracks and lines, some chipped. There weren’t enough hooks for all of them.
If visitors were expected, bottles of still and sparkling water were bought from the posh supermarket in the morning. And the woman who bought them would also bring sufficient glasses for the visitors, her own glasses from her own kitchen dresser. She would count out the right number, plus one for the boss and two for luck, stand them upside down, in rows, in a shallow cardboard box and put the box carefully on the front seat of her silver Toyota. She would then fold a frayed towel, slide it under the box and position it so the glasses would be as level as possible on the passenger seat. With her cargo arranged safely, she would drive to work avoiding potholes and sudden braking for skittish horses and drivers not used to country lanes. On arrival at the office, the silver Toyota’s owner would unload her best crystal glasses and the bottles of Scottish or Alpine mineral water, lay them out in the meeting room, make the boss his first cuppa, and only then would she take off her jacket and hang it on the back of the kitchenette door.
One day, someone suggested that the office should buy the very latest coffee machine. More visitors were arriving. Increasing numbers of mugs of coffee were being drunk, many of them made by the early morning supermarket shopper. There were more and more journeys, cautious journeys, where the silver Toyota was driven at a steady speed, its fragile consignment chinking and glinting in the early morning sunlight. A coffee machine was chosen, bought and installed. Filter papers, a battalion of bistro-style cups and saucers, packets and sachets of this’n’that, cellophane-sealed plastic stirrers, all these were purchased. Miraculously, homes were found for all the paraphernalia of coffee preparation, although re-organisation was required, and the silver Toyota owner found herself with less workspace at the end of the process.
The silver Toyota owner sorted out the old mugs. The chipped and stained ones were thrown in the Grundon. The whole and the unmarked were taken, in a shallow cardboard fruit box, on that front passenger seat, to the Heart Foundation charity shop at the other end of the high street from the posh supermarket.
The man-in-charge came into work in either of two new suits, flattering to his expanding waistline, made-to-measure, in an unbelievably short amount of time, while he’d been on a business trip to Hong Kong. He jested about ‘elves’ – the silver Toyota owner wasn’t sure that his joke was politically correct. Wasn’t it just a matter of very expensive tailoring? He was travelling much more frequently now. When he wasn’t filling the pages of his latest passport, he worked late into the evening. His was the last car to leave the car park. There were rumours of marital difficulties. Business continued to get busier. New recruits arrived regularly.
A water dispenser was leased. It dispensed water at three temperatures, hot, icy cold and blood heat. It was filled from large blue bottles, almost too heavy for the silver Toyota owner to lift, tip and engage. The water dispenser came with tubes of plastic-sheathed white beakers. Each tube contained one hundred of them. These beakers and the replacement bottles were delivered by a man wearing cobalt overalls, who drove a new van painted, on its sides, with a design of surf breaking. A different man in cobalt overalls turned up once a month with cloths, a plastic spray bottle of cleaning fluid, a blue clipboard and a pen printed with a smaller version of the breaking waves logo. His mission was to maintain the water dispenser and to check that it was, in fact, fulfilling its purpose. Dispensing water.
At around the same time the business appointed a consultant to assess the office’s environmental footprint and to come up with new ‘sustainable working’ policies. These would be typed up, printed, copied and bound by the silver Toyota owner and the two women she now worked alongside. They would also, ultimately, have pride of digital place in the new website, currently ‘under construction’.
Attention was drawn to the bins overflowing with used plastic beakers, to the discarded sachets and packets of this’n’that cluttering the surfaces by the coffee machine. The woman with the silver Toyota was directed to source different office products – boxes of pencils and biros proudly proclaiming that they’d been plastic beakers in an earlier life. These new boxes of consumables cost three times as much as the ones now disgraced and dust-gathering in the bowels of the stationery cupboard. The office also adopted a row of newly planted trees in a nearby municipal tree nursery. A green framed certificate arrived and was signed for, and the silver Toyota owner used her own hammer and nails, and hung it on the wall at the office entrance.
Shortly afterwards, there was one early summer afternoon when an ambulance had to be summoned. The boss was lifted onto a stretcher, his recently upgraded mobile clutched in his clammy right hand. He would not be parted from it. His skin was an odd shade of purplish grey. His tie had been loosened gently by the silver Toyota owner. The paramedics were less gentle with his expensive, handmade shirt.
He was very lucky, people said later. Other voices were heard whispering that perhaps all the strong coffee he’d drunk, and all the rich meals and good red wine he’d shared with the many visitors to the office, must have contributed to the heart attack. Even less kind voices murmured that it was strange the boss’ wife had taken so long to get to the hospital, being busy elsewhere, with her phone switched off.
It was barely two months later when the bank manger came to call. Visitors were becoming a rare diversion now. The newest employees were starting to drift away. The coffee machine broke and wasn’t repaired. The contract for the water dispenser lapsed and was not renewed. The word in their ‘industry sector’ was that the boss had lost his killer instincts, that some bubble had burst.
Weather forecasters were predicting a cold winter. Snow in the towns. Snow in the country lanes. Snow deep in the forest. Even snow reaching as far as this kingdom of commerce.
There was talk amongst journalists and politicians about a slowdown, maybe even recession lurking in the wings. Shortly afterwards, the office extension was sub-let to a vibrant new business with a youthful, dynamic, hard-working boss who didn’t wear a tie. But in this office, the office in the story, employees went back to boiling the kettle, filling it from the tap. Of course the tap still dripped.
The hooks on the back of the kitchenette door were crammed with padded jackets, thick coats and a collection of scarves. This year’s Christmas party was going to be trimmed down, a less lavish affair than in previous years. Costs had increased but our heroine had been allocated a smaller budget, with no magic wand in sight. There were mumblings of disappointment and ‘bah humbug’. Meanwhile the woman with the silver Toyota – (now badly in need of a new exhaust and a number of more serious repairs) – dealt with her colleagues’ festive niggles and grumbles while co-ordinating a small coach, dietary requests and scaled-down, (but still carefully chosen, wrapped and shipped), gifts for the remaining loyal customers.
She also tried to encourage her boss to eat something healthy every day for his lunch, and resolved, not for the first time, that she owed it to herself to move on. January. She’d do it then. Doesn’t everyone deserve a new start, a happy ending?
