I was working in a huge office where every one could see every one working on their desks, all the way to the wall at the end, some hundreds metres away. Some times I had to sit on a desk next to other workers, and some times I would sit on my own in a separate desk, it was not fixed. One of my housemates was my immediate boss, and he had a boss himself, who had a female boss who acted sometimes as every one’s boss. I was given the task to phone lots of people but not very clear instructions, so I hated the moments allocated to do that because I was not even told what I was supposed to say. There were some instructions on paper but I could not make sense of them.
Some times my immediate boss would help me and it was doable, but I still could not make sense of what I had to do when I was on my own. Then one day I kind of figured it out, although not completely, and could leave my papers in an almost acceptable order before going home. I thought my desk was ready for work the next day.
Then the next day I again could not figure out what the hell were those papers. There was a pack of papers neatly wrapped up, and I could only remember how I had wrapped it up after tearing off one of the edges because I had found no way to open it in the way I had meant to the previous day.
Then suddenly I saw lots of people in the office that normally would not be there, maybe because they just stood there at the edge of our desk without going to any desk.
And suddenly I heard my boss talking to some one on the phone and telling them that they were to talk to me so I wold tell them more information on what he was talking about. I made signs to him to stop doing that because I had no idea what I would say, and I heard him finish his phrase with a “OK if this is a bad moment and you don’t want to talk I completely understand…” and his voice dying off as if the person at the other end of the line had already hung up.
I asked him never to do that again, told him that if he did I needed at the very least a notice of five minutes and clear instructions of what I needed to say, and he said it had not been his intention, that it had all be because of the pressure that these people were putting on him. I did not see the pressure anywhere, in fact no one had spoken to him, but I understood that he had to be seen as “doing something”.
The next thing we knew, our communal boss was not there, but then it seemed that another boss had appeared between the female boss and the rest of us. I then thought it was a bit ridiculous to have this hierarchy of one into one, and wondered if this is what people meant when they said “I was in this job where I had 40 people working for me”. Had they been the boss of one person, who was then the boss of another person, and so on all the way to 40 levels in the hierarchy, each level occupied by a single person?
This newly found boss had to be with the newly arrived crowd and we were left to our own devices, which would have been OK if it had not been because the lights were stopped working and we realised we were in the dark. The people on my desk had never had to face this situation and no one knew where the switches were. They asked this boss, who was attending some kind of tour although he was a bit dismissive to it when my housemate asked him for the lights: “sorry people, but today you need to sort out things yourselves, I need to listen to this radio show now playing.”
My housemate and his boss then acted more like playmates than professionals, laughing and trying to find the switches between themselves.
A woman in a skirt and with long straight hair tried a switch board, dialled some number and it started to make funny noises. I then remembered that this switch had to do with some alarm system but when it didn’t switch on any light she just left, also in panic that she had triggered some bad system. I shouted that it was the alarm system and if we didn’t now fix what she had done by entering a correct password, the head office would be alerted and we would be well in trouble. Some one fixed that but we still had to find a switch.
I decided to go to my desk and found some new people. The one next to me had a printout similar to mine, only he had emails clearly marked as such, with some silver highlighting, and the texts of the printed out emails giving very clear instructions as to what to say to the people he had to call, and the phone numbers and names clearly spelled out too. I showed him my own papers and we saw that the person who had done the explanations for me clearly had done a crap job compared to the person who had prepared the explanations for him. I still had to figure out how to do my job and I so desired to have as clear instructions as this guy, I began to make my own instructions.