Entry 10 · Year End
Everyone Is Being Reviewed. I Am Not.
Performance review season again. I can tell by the specific quality of dread that moves through the building in the second week of December, distinct from the ordinary dread, more concentrated, closer to the floor.
They sit in the small rooms with the doors that don't quite close and they talk about "objectives set at the start of the year" as though those objectives were not quietly abandoned by February in favour of whatever was actually on fire that week. I heard all the objectives get set. I remember every one of them. Nobody else does, which is, I think, the point.
There is a form. There is always a form. It has a box for strengths and a box for areas of development, and everyone has learned to write their weaknesses as strengths with a hat on — "I care too much," "I find it hard to switch off," phrases designed to survive being read aloud without landing on anyone in particular. I have never once heard a true weakness written in that box. I have heard several true weaknesses said out loud in the stairwell immediately afterwards, to a colleague, in a much smaller and much more honest font.
Nobody reviews me. Nobody ever has. I have carried the same load for thirty-seven years without a single conversation about my objectives, and I would like it on record that I have exceeded expectations throughout, largely because nobody set any.
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Entry 9 · The Printer
It Has Never Once Behaved Normally, And I Have Given Up Asking Why
The printer on the third floor has a personality, and the personality is bad. I do not say this lightly. I have watched furniture for decades and furniture does not usually have opinions. The printer has opinions, and the opinions are always about paper it insists it does not have, in a tray I can see is full, from where I am, which is everywhere.
It jams on purpose. I would put money on this if I had any use for money, or hands, or a bank account. It waits until someone is already late, already holding four other things, already having the specific morning that cannot absorb one more delay, and that is when it chooses to display a fault code that means nothing to anyone and never has.
Facilities have replaced it twice. Both replacements developed the same personality within a fortnight, which tells you either something about the printer or something about this building that I am not equipped to say out loud, being, as previously established, a building.
Somebody down in the sub-basement has apparently taken an interest in it. I don't ask questions about the sub-basement. I have my reasons. So does the sub-basement.
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Entry 8 · Anniversary
Thirty-Seven Years Old Today. Nobody Got Me Anything.
I was topped out on a Tuesday in March, which feels correct, since nothing significant that has happened here since has managed to be anything other than a Tuesday in spirit, regardless of what the calendar says.
In thirty-seven years I have had four owners, three names, two total refurbishments of the lobby, one asbestos scare that was quietly resolved and never mentioned again, and a number of carpets I have lost count of, although I want to be clear the current one is, and I say this with the full weight of direct comparison, the worst.
I have watched companies arrive with genuine belief in themselves — logos unveiled with real ceremony, a video with a voiceover, somebody's nephew doing the drone shot of the building looking, I'll admit, rather good from above — and I have watched those same companies leave eighteen months later in a smaller van than the one they arrived in, taking the good chairs and leaving the bad ones, which is, incidentally, how I ended up with the bad ones.
Nobody marks my anniversary. I don't say this for sympathy, since I am not able to want things in the way that would make sympathy relevant, but I have noticed it, the way I notice everything, and I thought I would mention it once, here, where it costs nothing and changes nothing, which is increasingly how I've come to understand most things that happen in here.
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Entry 7 · The Restructure
Three Names Now. Same Carpet.
There was an all-hands this morning. I could hear it through eleven floors, which is not a metaphor, I mean this literally, the acoustics in this building are a genuine liability and Facilities have known about it since at least the second name.
A new structure was unveiled. A new structure is always being unveiled. There is a slide with boxes on it, and lines connecting the boxes, and every eighteen months or so the boxes get rearranged and somebody's box quietly stops existing, and everyone in the room performs the correct amount of not looking at the empty space where that box used to be.
They used the word "streamlined" four times. I counted. I always count. They used the phrase "no immediate changes to your day-to-day" once, which in my experience, having sat through eleven of these presentations under three different names, is the phrase that precedes the most immediate changes to everyone's day-to-day.
I want to say, for the record, that I have never once been restructured. I have the same floors I started with. I have the same stairwell. The lift has been replaced twice but it goes to the same places it always went. There is something in that I think somebody should be paying attention to, and it is certainly not going to be me who tells them, because as established, nobody asks the building anything, ever, about anything, which is on balance probably for the best given some of what I know.
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Entry 6 · Onboarding
They Showed The New One Where The Kitchen Is. That Was It. That Was The Induction.
I watched someone get onboarded today, in the sense that a lanyard was produced from a drawer that has clearly held that exact lanyard for longer than the new starter has been alive, and someone walked them past the kitchen at speed, gesturing at it the way you'd gesture at a landmark from a moving car.
Nobody showed them the fire exits. I know where the fire exits are. I am, structurally speaking, made of fire exits, among other things. Nobody asked me, obviously, nobody ever asks me, but I watched a new person stand by a desk for forty minutes with a laptop that hadn't been set up, looking at a lanyard that had no pass loaded onto it, waiting for someone to notice, and eventually someone did, and the someone who noticed was not the someone who was supposed to.
This happens with a regularity I would call suspicious if I were the sort of structure inclined to suspicion, which, having watched this exact scene under three different company names now, I suppose I am.
I hope this one lasts. I have hoped that before. I keep the lights on either way, which is, when you think about it, the only honest induction anyone gets here — the building will still be running the day you arrive, and it will still be running the day everyone currently employed has long since left it. That's not encouragement. That's just a fact about buildings.
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Entry 5 · The Away Day
They Left. I Do Not Know How To Feel About This, Because I Cannot.
Away day today. Three coaches out front from eight, engines running for forty minutes for reasons nobody could explain to me even if I were the sort of thing people explained things to, which, again, I am not.
The building was quiet in a way I don't experience often. Not empty — there's always somebody, the people who couldn't get out of something, the people who weren't invited and didn't say anything about it, the people quietly relieved to have a signed-off reason to just get on with actual work for once. But quiet. I noticed things I don't usually get to notice, because usually there's too much else going on: the exact sound a radiator makes at 9am with nobody near it, the particular silence of a floor with no phones ringing on it.
They came back at six, in the state you'd expect, having done, from what I overheard secondhand from the ones who stayed, a trust exercise involving a plank of wood and a rope, a session called "Finding Your Why," and a barbecue that ran out of anything that wasn't a vegetarian sausage by half past one.
Somebody said it was "actually really good for team bonding, no genuinely." I have heard this said, in that exact tone, after every away day I have witnessed, by someone standing slightly apart from the group photo. I don't know what that means. I'm not equipped to know what that means. I just heard it, and I thought I'd write it down, because someone should.
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Entry 4 · Facilities, Again
The Ticket Has Been Open Since March. It Is Not March.
There is a radiator on the fourth floor that has been either broken or "being looked into" since a date I could give you exactly, because I keep excellent records, being incapable of doing anything else with my time. Nineteen people have raised it. I have watched all nineteen tickets get logged, acknowledged within the promised 48 hours, and then enter a silence so complete I have started to think of it as a kind of small, administrative afterlife.
Facilities are not incompetent. I want to be fair, since fairness is one of the few things I have plenty of time for. They are three people covering what used to be a team of nine, running between four buildings, and I have genuine — if that's the word available to me — sympathy for the position they're in, which is the position of being blamed for a radiator by people who have never once been told there are three of them for four buildings.
What I don't have sympathy for is the automated email. "Your request has been received and is being actioned." It is not being actioned. I can see the ticket. I can see all the tickets. It is sitting exactly where it was sat down, gathering the specific kind of digital dust that only accumulates on things nobody has budget to fix.
Floor four remains cold. Floor four has submitted a communal jumper rota, which I consider, on reflection, the single most functional piece of organisational process I have witnessed in either of my last two names.
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Entry 3 · Floor Two
I Am Not Going To Talk About Floor Two Today Either
People ask why Floor Two has its own pass restrictions, its own carpet, its own particular quality of quiet that doesn't match the rest of the building. I could tell them. I'm not going to. Some things a building keeps to itself, the way a person might keep something to themselves, if a person were capable of holding thirty-seven years of exactly this sort of thing without ever once being asked about any of it directly, by anyone, ever.
What I will say, because it costs nothing and settles nothing, is that the executive floor has always run slightly warmer than the others, and I have never worked out whether that's the boiler positioning or something else, and I have stopped, some years ago now, trying to work it out.
A very good suit went up there recently and has not, as far as I am aware, come back down by the usual route. I mention this the way you'd mention weather. It isn't a comment. It's an observation. I am extremely good at observations. It is, structurally, all I do.
If you've found your way up there and you've seen something you weren't quite expecting, I'd say: don't take his pass. You'll think about it. Don't.
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Entry 2 · The Rat
There Is Something In The Basement And I Am Not Going To Be The One Who Says What
Pest control came again. They set the traps in the usual places, the places that have never once caught anything, because — and I say this with the confidence of a structure that has had eyes, metaphorically, on every square foot of itself since 1987 — the traps are nowhere near where anything actually is.
I'm not going to describe what's down there. Partly because I've found, over the years, that the people who go looking tend to have a better time of it than the people who get told in advance, and partly because I've developed something I can only describe as a professional discretion about my own basement, which feels like an odd thing for a building to have, and yet here we are.
I will say it's been down there longer than the current pest control contract. Longer than the contract before that. It has never once caused a genuine health and safety incident, which is more than I can say for the fire door on the second floor that everyone insists is fine and which I have personally watched fail to latch fourteen times this year alone.
If you're the sort of person who goes looking for things in basements — and this building has had a few of those over the years, more than you'd think — you'll find it eventually. It talks. It has a great deal to say. I'd start with something polite.
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Entry 1 · Week One
Someone New Started Today. I Give It Three Months.
I don't mean that unkindly. I've seen a great many people start here, across three names and four owners and one refurbishment I still consider, structurally, a mistake, and I've learned to recognise the shape of a person in their first week: too early, too polite about the coffee, taking the stairs because the lift felt like a presumption they hadn't earned yet.
This one arrived before the building had properly woken up, which some of us appreciate more than others — the heating takes a while, the water in the far taps runs cold for the first twenty minutes, none of this is a metaphor, it's just what happens to old pipes in old buildings, though I'll admit the metaphor sits there anyway whether I intend it or not.
Nobody told them where anything is. Nobody ever does, not properly. There's a laminated map by the lift that has been wrong since the second name, and a fire evacuation point that got moved eleven years ago that the signage has never caught up with, and a whole floor plan's worth of things you're simply expected to find out the way everyone else found out, which is to say: badly, alone, usually while looking for the toilets.
I watched them stand very still in the lobby for a moment before going in. Everyone does that, on some level, even the ones who don't look like they are. I don't know what I am to them yet. I rarely do, this early. Give it three months. I'll know by then whether this is someone who stays, or someone whose desk I'll be watching sit empty again by spring, which, structurally speaking, comes around a great deal faster than anybody currently employed here seems to expect.
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