I was woken up by the sound of gunfire. I shifted position, buried my head under the pillow, in the faint hope that being sandwiched between layers of cotton might make it feel better. It didn’t. After a while I became vaguely conscious, and wished I hadn’t. My head felt as if someone inside it was taking a hammer to my skull, and my mouth felt like there was a toilet brush wedged in it. The gunfire continued, blended with an oddly familiar voice. I always hate passing out with the TV on, because it’s usually the first loud programme of the morning that wakes me up. On this particular morning it was the news which had so stridently penetrated my sleeping brain. There was a war going on in some place with too many consonants. The off switch was out of my reach so I let the newsreader carry on babbling. After a while, he moved on, and began droning on about some fresh local atrocity, which wasn’t what I wanted to hear at this time of day. The previous night had been a heavy one. The office politicians had decreed that we needed to build team spirit by going for pre-Christmas drinks at some nasty chain pub near Liverpool Street for a drink. For some strange reason, I had felt duty-bound to accept, so I went along, even though those things are always horrible. Of course I had run out of things to say very quickly, having feigned interest in people’s school fees and golf handicaps and Volvos and houses in some suburban nowhere for as long as I felt able. The reason I’d come to London in the first place was to get out of the commuter hell I’d grown up in, and I wasn’t going to let my thoughts be dragged back there by talking to some tedious cunt from accounts. The only others who were young and single were the IT boys and the secretaries, and there was something slightly scary about both groups. So, of course, I headed for the bar, where I kept half an eye on the football while throwing vodka down my neck. Man United were scraping a home draw against some anonymous team from Eastern Europe that they should have walked all over. I was already well on the way to being drunk when the first group of parents judged that they had stayed for the requisite polite amount of time. By the time the third wave had got the train back to their significant others, I was quite pissed. The crowd was thinning out, and because I had nothing to say, I had to occupy my time with drinking until closing time. After that I’m not entirely sure what happened. Some of the others went to Brick Lane for a curry, and I trailed along with them, less out of a desire to be sociable than a need to drink more. Judging from the state of my head now, I must have been fairly hammered. I don’t remember anything between going into the curry house and waking up this morning. I expect that I embarrassed myself by disagreeing with everyone in a belligerent manner, and I probably called someone a cunt. I think that’s why they took me along, because I’m usually good for a laugh like that. Besides, it’s always good to have someone more pissed than you at these office gatherings, to draw attention away from your own misdemeanours. Somehow I had made it home and into bed. I didn’t manage to undress or take off my shoes, but at least I made it home. Hopefully I didn’t wake up my housemates, or phone them at three o’clock, or any of the other dodgy things I might have done. I’m safe in bed now, and unless I did something really bad, I can avoid them this morning, and any repercussions will have to wait until they get home from work this evening, by which time any misdemeanours will have faded to the level of comedy incidents. Unless they were bad. Like throwing up on the sofa. Like setting fire to the kitchen trying to fry bacon. Like barging into Adam’s room to ask if he had any tobacco while his girlfriend was there. Like trying to climb into bed with Lisa. Like shouting abuse at Rachel and pissing in her wardrobe. All of which are possible, but surely I’d remember if anything significant had happened. A hideous buzz interrupted the slow second class train of my thought. Instinctively, I went for the snooze button, but it was too late. The alarm had roused some kind of consciousness of the fact that I had to get out of bed. For a moment I considered not going to work, but that would just give everybody too good an excuse to say that they had told me so. I floated into the shower and let the water trickle onto my head for a while, then towelled myself off and poured myself into my suit. I noticed that the sleeve was torn, and there was a dodgy stain on the thigh of the trousers. The rip wasn’t too bad, and the stain would hopefully go unnoticed. On the way to work, as my feet spattered through the puddles, I kept thinking that someone would jump out at me and say “Surprise! I saw you fall over on the way home!” The fat girl opposite me on the tube would stand up and shout, “Surprise! You made a really bad attempt to chat me up in a kebab shop!” The suited businessman next to me would lean over to me and whisper, “Surprise!” I saw you pissing against my front gate!” My mum would phone and say “Surprise! You phoned us up at two in the morning to ramble incoherently about your favourite drugs!” No. There wouldn’t be a surprise. There would be no accusatory finger from the sky, no disembodied voice saying “It was you”. Things are never that straightforward. The knowledge that I had done something wrong would drip out slowly in little glances and whispers, and nobody would say anything to me directly, but they might ask “How’s your head this morning?” in a tone of voice they considered to be ironic and witty. My misdemeanours would remain a mystery to me for quite some time, unless I could manage to overhear some scandalised gossiping, and I usually avoided situations where I might. Most of the time, I could avoid the usual pleasantries at work. I had acquired something of a reputation as a loner, which suited me fairly well. It meant that I was often spared the jabbering about new boyfriends or new babies or new cars or new houses, which reminded me that I was still alive. It made me remember gladly that I hadn’t become a respectable citizen yet, caring about interest rates or doing DIY. I was still something of an undergraduate in their eyes. I hated my job. I know everyone says that they hate their job, but I really hated mine. I hated the job I had to do, which was repetitive, teeth-grindingly dull, and insulting to my intelligence. I hated my chair, which seemed designed to give me back problems. I hated my desk, which was only just big enough for a computer keyboard and one sheet of A4. I hated my computer, which did everything at a painfully slow speed, and lost the will to live every time it was asked to do anything remotely difficult. I hated my monitor, which gave me eyestrain headaches. I hated the offices, which were cramped and noisy. I hated the air conditioning, which extracted as much moisture as possible from my throat while keeping me either sweltering in the heat or shivering with cold. I hated the people I worked with, who were the worst possible combination of the arrogant and the ignorant. I hated the coffee machine, I hated the coffee it spat out, and I hated the cups it spat it into. I hated the canteen, where I pumped money back into the company (who I hated) in return for limp sandwiches (which I hated). I hated the cheap suit that I wore. I hated the journey to and from work each day. I hated the pitiful amount of money the company deigned to give me, and I hated the amount the tax man took off me before I even saw it. There wasn’t much about the job that I didn’t hate. The main part of my job allegedly consisted of data entry, but in fact mainly involved timing bursts of activity in order to coincide with the arrival of someone who gave a shit. Having graduated with a reasonably OK degree from a reasonably OK university, an unfortunate attack of social conscience and honesty had led me to decide that I wasn’t going to sell my soul to a big corporation. No matter what, I wasn’t going to join some graduate trainee brainwashing scheme. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a clue what I was going to do instead, so I did some temping for a bit, which somehow mutated into a semi-permanent position working as a lackey to those who had sold their souls a few years earlier, typing, filing, scanning, calculating, earning less than half the money they were getting for whatever high-powered, high-flying thing it was that they did. But I still had my soul, or so I told myself when I got my payslip each week, and realised that after paying my rent and the interest on my credit card bills, I could just about afford to have a night out at the weekend. I stare blankly at the screen. Numbers and letters dissolve into a meaningless jumble of shapes before my eyes. Pieces of paper surround me in no particular order. Everything is numbers. Language, truth, logic, life; these things no longer have meaning. I sit in my corner and wait, counting the time, counting the money. £6 an hour makes £1 every 10 minutes makes 10p a minute makes 1p every 6 seconds makes 0.1666666p a second. I imagine how much more productively my time could be spent, all the good I could be doing for the world, all the fun I could be having. How much do I really need 0.1666666p anyway? I feel every second slip away, bringing me closer to death. They’re getting value for money out of me. They’re getting my will to live. Or not. It isn’t that bad really. At least I’m not out in the rain. At least I’m not in any real danger. At least I’ve got an uncomfortable chair to sit on. At least I can sit and daydream about the girls on reception without too many interruptions. At least I never have to buy pens or Post-It notes. It’s the little victories that get you through the day. If you’re a temp, they amount to things like sneaking a personal phone call here and there, like having a game of Minesweeper and Alt-Tabbing back to Excel the second before your boss walks in. If you’re there for the long haul, it’s all about the little marks of respect like getting yourself a more comfortable chair or a bigger monitor or a reserved parking space. They become worth fighting for, because the fighting is a distraction from the job. People have to have an opponent, a struggle, because otherwise they have to face the awful reality that their jobs are futile. As far as I could tell, the whole office served no worthwhile purpose, added nothing of value to the world. We were just distributing pieces of paper around. In theory, the pieces of paper corresponded with something out in the real world, but I had long since given up caring.
Simplicity is the highest goal, achievable when you have overcome all difficulties.