Present Day
“What an incredible opportunity!”, he said, excitement cascading from his eyes like a pair of joyous fountains. “I won’t let you down sir, you won’t regret this, I promise you that!”, his face was beaming with a gross mixture of pride, anxiety and existential dread. He was wearing a quality suit to try and impress everyone at the ‘very important’ meeting, which all of the decision-makers in the company would be attending. The nervous sweat dripped down his back, filling the dimple of every vertebra on its way down. “We have very big plans for you, you could be doing my job one day”, the older gentleman said with a limp, non-committal handshake that felt like it was carted out for anyone that he was told to congratulate for anything. The younger gentleman suddenly felt his gratitude fading. Standing in the conference room with his quote – unquote “superiors”, he noticed the emptiness in their words, the fallow nature of their eyes. It felt as if he was looking at his potential future and he began to question what he saw. He couldn’t help but begin to think back on his time in the company up to this point and wonder if he was making a huge mistake.
Jake had worked in the offices of SADCo Ltd. for about three years by then. He had moved upstairs from the large, cold warehouse of the company, where he had always felt that his intellect was wasted. He also felt that, while there, he was going to freeze to death in the warehouse while aimlessly wandering around the jungle of shelving and boxes. Eventually, the cold steel of the shelving racks began to lose their allure to him, so, he decided to try for one of the office positions upstairs. He was initially unsuccessful from more than one application to join the ‘upstairs people’, where the rooms were warm and the chairs have some lower back support. After more mild suffering in his occupation, Jake got an interview with a different company that he applied to on a whim and, he thought, the rest of his life was about to begin.
5 Years Earlier
The interview happened on a Tuesday. It went well. Everyone was pleasant and polite, they all seemed interested, and Jake impressed with his knowledge and willingness to learn. Later in the week the phone call came through and he was offered the job. Finally! Things were going to be a little less miserable for Jake. Granted, he wasn’t depressed or anything to that extreme, he just hated his job, the lack of challenge and the conditions of it. That’s not a crime, plenty of people feel that way about their jobs, it’s completely normal. Jake felt the same and he thought this was his way of changing that. He went to Ryan, the warehouse manager in SADCo, and told him about his job offer and the reasons he had applied for it. “Hold on, let me call upstairs”, Ryan said in response to the news. He dialled one of the many extension phone numbers the company had internally and got through to someone that Jake couldn’t quite make out the voice of. After a bit of lighthearted back and forth on the phone, Ryan hung up, turned in his chair to Jake and asked him, “can you go upstairs to the office, after lunch, for a meeting?” Jake was slightly lost. He had come in with his notice of resignation in hand and was convinced he would barely be noticed. Now he was being brought upstairs for a bollocking about leaving a job that he didn’t even like? “This is bullshit”, he thought. Why should he feel bad about leaving this shitty job anyway? He went way beyond his remit every day of the week, comes up with ideas and ways to improve the warehouse. He’d done courses to make himself a better employee. He had come in early and stayed late, as well as working weekends when needed and the rest of what he does on a day-to-day basis. Why should he sit and listen to some desk jockey who had hardly ever seen Jake in person? Except for that one time at the Christmas party when everyone kept getting him drinks with their free drink vouchers (while some also got his name wrong). But hey, “James”, had a great time that night.
Jake made his way up the cold, metallic stairs towards the distinctly generic office space door. He clasped the stainless steel doorknob, turning it with urgency to just try and get it over with. A waft of room temperature air hit him straight in his face. It was comforting not to be able to see the steam from his own breathing, puffing like a miserable mist in front his face. Few things ruined Jake’s mornings as much as going down to the warehouse and seeing his breath in vapor form. It was always a reminder of the place he was in and how much he hated it. When he walked through the door, a couple of the office chairs spun around at a leisurely torque, had a quick look at him and then most of them swung back around to their screens. “Everything okay Jake?”, asked Des. Des was one of the few people in the office who actually had any dealings with the warehouse, so Jake already knew him and liked him for the most part.
“Hey Des, how’s it going? Ryan sent me up here for a meeting”, Jake explained.
“A meeting…with who?”, Des asked.
“I don’t know, he just said to come up here after lunch”, Jake replied.
“Okay…let me ask around”, Des said.
Des proceeded to stand up from his desk and asked if anyone had scheduled Jake for a meeting. “I could’ve done that”, Jake thought to himself. No one seemed to know about this meeting that Des was talking about. Des went out to the few offices that were separate from the rest and Jake followed. Knocking on a few doors, Jake and Des eventually found that the General manager, Breda, was the one that Jake was to have a meeting with. “Hi Jake, I was about to come and get you, please sit down. Thanks for that Des”, she said. Des left and Jake prepared himself for battle. He was expecting all sorts of things to be thrown at him about being ungrateful, all the opportunities he had been given, the time they had put into him and how they couldn’t believe he was walking out on them. He was shocked when none of that happened. Breda’s soft Tyrone accent disarmed people, it was her superpower. Jake was disarmed by it too. Breda got straight into the issue at hand.
“Hi Jake, how are you? Ryan was telling me that you’re looking at moving on from here, is that right?”, was what she opened with in a pleasant tone that definitely had a hint of guilt-tripping under it.
“Eh…yes, yeah, I had applied for a couple of positions up here with you guys but didn’t get them, so I really felt I had to go elsewhere. It wasn’t personal or anything like that, I’m just fed up of warehouses.” Jake answered as unnerved as he could.
“That’s fair enough”, Breda replied. “We had a chat about it, and we’d be sorry to lose you Jake, so, I’d like to offer you an administrative role here if you were interested.”
Jake was taken aback. He had tried more than once to get a role like this within this company and had gotten nothing. And now, as soon as he had something elsewhere, they wanted him. Out of principle, he wanted to say no. Why would he? They had ignored him when it would have been much easier to offer him a role he had applied for within the company, but they waited until this moment. Why then, had they passed him over so many times if they were just going to offer him this if he decided to leave? It would have made more sense to stay though. He would be closer to home; he knew most of the systems and products already and most people had at least some idea of who he was. It was like they were playing a needless game of chicken with themselves. The only thing that had changed now was that Jake had somewhere else to go if he wanted. It was like they had waited for him to threaten something like this before they were ever going to actually give him what he had previously asked for. Like they were playing a game of chicken with him too. That thought made Jake very uncomfortable. No company would ever put that much thought into their employees and their movements, especially not one like SADCo Ltd. He knew that he wasn’t the first person this had ever happened to, he just didn’t understand why it was happening to him, he didn’t think he was that important. It just seemed strange to do this U-turn with him, but he wasn’t complaining about having options. Weighing everything up, it seemed like the best idea to take what Breda had just offered him.
Jake was excited. He was going to have his own desk, his own computer, his own space, his own office chair in a warm office with heating for the winter and air conditioning for the summer. He didn’t have to freeze or melt in an environment without temperature control. He would be comfortable, and he wouldn’t have to deal with any physical hardship for the sake of work. It all sounded so much nicer than what he had been used to. He arrived at SADCo Ltd. and entered the front door code ‘1977’, the year the building was built, into the keypad. He walked past the warehouse that he used to work in and went upstairs to the office. It was an open plan office; the desks were installed by a commercial outfitter with red partitions between them that surrounded the top halves of the desks. The floor was covered by royal blue carpet tiles that, under some office chairs, had the colour worn out of them to be replaced by a pale blue. There was a stain on one of the ceiling tiles where there was some dampness that was scheduled to be worked on. The back of the office felt a bit claustrophobic as the office printer, shredder and stationary storage cupboard and other facilities were back there. There were five separate departments in the office, but they were not separated by any doors, they simply sat at different rows of desks to stay separated. It didn’t feel too isolated thanks to the fact that the departments weren’t separated by any doors or walls. There were two doors out of the large office, one to a hallway where a few high up individuals offices were, and the other door went to the stairway to the warehouse and toilets. There were two meeting rooms out in the hallway and three offices. Raymond, the CFO, Breda and John, the CEO, all had their offices out in the hallway. John had the largest office, obviously, and always arrived to work RIDICULOUSLY early. The toilets were downstairs and were absolutely freezing! Sometimes it felt like walking into a freezer and sitting on a block of ice. It was like the toilet was in Siberia. Jake’s desk was near the middle of the office. He would be in amongst everything and none of it would be out in the cold. Well, not exactly ‘none of it.’ He had agreed to help out in the warehouse if it was needed. He would cover for ill warehouse staff or if it just got too busy down there, which was a huge improvement on what he had been doing. Things were going to get better for Jake, the feeling of dread before work had melted away, finally, relief.
By Owen Coyne
Taken to the Corner 