Dear Alison,
March 18th. It's time for our biannual letter lovely girl. You're young so I'm going to tell you something about life now. Life is good at first. For most people. Then, at other times, it becomes perplexing or even bad. Let's call this phase I'm currently going through one of the perplexing ones. I remember how once, you said that you envied the security of my career? Well things have changed. And I'm not quite sure if it's for better or worse.
At the beginning of this year, they tourniqueted me off into this small office in the second floor, a glorified storage room really. The whole thing felt like a bit of a sideways promotion. The irony is, in these government jobs, especially in recent years, the powers that be have gone out of their way to whittled down and amalgamated our roles. You got kids showing up every day with their IT skills like they came out of the womb with a phone in their hands. The powers that be load up the unlucky ones (those left over from the old regime), to the breaking point with extra projects and nebulous responsibilities. You've done enough temp work to know what I'm talking about. The long powerpoint point presentations with all the bells and whistles? The committees which usually descend into a battle of egos, the participants much like a pack of monkeys fighting over a prized banana?
The point is, somehow in the middle of all this scrambling around, they missed me. I mean you should have seen this place a year ago. There were fully grown men walking out the front door in tears. The axe just kept falling like they were dispatching the fat little nieces and nephews of a disposed regime. My theory is they gutted so much of HR and accounting (along with all the other sections), that somehow they overlooked me.
That day I kept checking my emails, wondering when I was going to be summoned and axed. Instead, I got an automatically generated email saying please pack up your things and move to the office I now occupy.
And then, for my annual report, it was the same thing: another automatically generated email, one of those calendar invites. I was to show up at such-and-such's conference room at 11 am the following week. Please be prompt, said the invite. I hesitated for a minute before I hit the 'accept meeting' response button. I went to that conference room expecting to be retrenched. But guess what? No one showed up. I sat there and waited for 20 minutes and nothing. So I went back to my office and waited for lunch.
And it has been this way since January. My phone never rings anymore or, if it does, it's a wrong number. I get group emails about this person's baby shower or some office health initiative. I arrive every day at 8:50 and leave at 5, like clockwork. Then, the following day, I come back and do it all over again. I go to mandatory meetings. I barely recognised anyone anymore. I nod at people and smile. Ha! People would rather fake familiarity than disrupt the flow of their day. Keep moving, eyes down. This is the way to survive. Don't get tangled up with the over-friendly old guy in the office. Older people tend to have erroneous questions about technology or complaint about change. Things aren't the way they used to be, we moan. And besides, this drills down deep into the natural order of things. The old fall away from the herd, unable to keep up, falling away to perish in the wilderness. Falling away to get taken by lurking predators. From my little window, in my office, I can see part of the Harbour Bridge. I can see traffic flowing in and out of the city. My pay goes into my bank account on a regular basis and the super comes out.
At home, Jane does her thing and I do mine. It's a pretty subdued home life. We're in our late fifties. Things tend to seriously slow down at this age. You know those TV ads for superannuation or sex pills you see on the tube? With some healthy looking 60-year-old couple, comfortably retired and sun-kissed, frolicking on a beach somewhere? It isn't like that for use. We bought late and our mortgage is huge. If only we could be those actors in that commercial. I look out my office window and I see more than just the bridge: I see an incredibly tough job market for someone my age. So I guess it's not much of a plan but I guess I'll see this thing out until the end. Why should I blow the whistle on myself?
It is not easy. My responsibilities have whittled down to next to nothing. Basically, if I put my head down, if I work steadily, I can finish up what I really need to do by Tuesday morning each week. And the rest of my time? Well...it's not unlike a theatre performance. Outwardly, I look like a man in an office steadily driven by some kind bureaucratic purpose. Inwardly, I'm on autopilot all the way.
And this was the status quo until quite recently. At the beginning of this week, in fact, Tanner caught me just outside my office. He's one of the last people I recognised on this floor. He says to me, I know what you're doing mate. I know your game. I'm not sure why Tanner was doing this. Why he started playing mind games with me but he did. Most likely Tanner is himself in danger of being discovered as a useless cog in this new, ever evolving machine. I can honestly say I have done my best over the years to stay out of the office politics. Having said this, I do recognise the strategies and tactics when I see them. As his own career is most likely in some precarious state, what Tanner is attempting to do is throw attention onto me. As I say, I have seen this before. The inept hiding their ineptness by sabotaging someone else. A classic manoeuvre. Find someone to hid behind. And doing so would likely buy him some precious time to bolster his value. I know what he'll do. Not being a gossip himself rather a facilitator, (being a gossip would compromise the image he has carefully manufactured over the years as a steadfast worker) he will find one of the main office gossips. The conduits. He'll be sly about it. He'll mention my lack of purpose in an off-handed way but then he'll recant, saying, promise me you won't say anything about this. Of course not, they will say, not meaning it. And then this information will begin to make its way around the building. It's all about feeding the information up to the powers that be while maintaining integrity. If lunch room gossip doesn't work, he'd start actioning me into various group emails or requesting I show up for key meetings. In effect volunteering, me for projects and committees. I know just the man to help out with this! He will say. He will draw me back into the general circus and then get me up on that bloody high-wire for all to see. And all this because I had a series of alterations with him a decade ago. Otherwise known as the great Klein-Tanner war of 1999. (I'm being facetious of course but we really did have a long, protracted war of wills that year with many nasty battles and skirmishes).
As this is the case I will instigate a counteroffensive. It will basically consist of a mixture of defensive strategies which I won't go into now. I'm still formulating my plan. I could take the high road but then what? Retire on canned beans? I don't think so. Besides, there is no way I'm going to let a man like Tanner show me the front door. I don't think so.
Anyway, that's it for me. What about you? I look forward to your response. I always look forward to your letters. They take me out of my life. Are you still working at your father's wrecking yard? Amongst all those cubed cars? It's a rare thing these days to find someone willing to sit down and commit themselves to a letter.
Kind regards,
Franklin.
March 18th. It's time for our biannual letter lovely girl. You're young so I'm going to tell you something about life now. Life is good at first. For most people. Then, at other times, it becomes perplexing or even bad. Let's call this phase I'm currently going through one of the perplexing ones. I remember how once, you said that you envied the security of my career? Well things have changed. And I'm not quite sure if it's for better or worse.
At the beginning of this year, they tourniqueted me off into this small office in the second floor, a glorified storage room really. The whole thing felt like a bit of a sideways promotion. The irony is, in these government jobs, especially in recent years, the powers that be have gone out of their way to whittled down and amalgamated our roles. You got kids showing up every day with their IT skills like they came out of the womb with a phone in their hands. The powers that be load up the unlucky ones (those left over from the old regime), to the breaking point with extra projects and nebulous responsibilities. You've done enough temp work to know what I'm talking about. The long powerpoint point presentations with all the bells and whistles? The committees which usually descend into a battle of egos, the participants much like a pack of monkeys fighting over a prized banana?
The point is, somehow in the middle of all this scrambling around, they missed me. I mean you should have seen this place a year ago. There were fully grown men walking out the front door in tears. The axe just kept falling like they were dispatching the fat little nieces and nephews of a disposed regime. My theory is they gutted so much of HR and accounting (along with all the other sections), that somehow they overlooked me.
That day I kept checking my emails, wondering when I was going to be summoned and axed. Instead, I got an automatically generated email saying please pack up your things and move to the office I now occupy.
And then, for my annual report, it was the same thing: another automatically generated email, one of those calendar invites. I was to show up at such-and-such's conference room at 11 am the following week. Please be prompt, said the invite. I hesitated for a minute before I hit the 'accept meeting' response button. I went to that conference room expecting to be retrenched. But guess what? No one showed up. I sat there and waited for 20 minutes and nothing. So I went back to my office and waited for lunch.
And it has been this way since January. My phone never rings anymore or, if it does, it's a wrong number. I get group emails about this person's baby shower or some office health initiative. I arrive every day at 8:50 and leave at 5, like clockwork. Then, the following day, I come back and do it all over again. I go to mandatory meetings. I barely recognised anyone anymore. I nod at people and smile. Ha! People would rather fake familiarity than disrupt the flow of their day. Keep moving, eyes down. This is the way to survive. Don't get tangled up with the over-friendly old guy in the office. Older people tend to have erroneous questions about technology or complaint about change. Things aren't the way they used to be, we moan. And besides, this drills down deep into the natural order of things. The old fall away from the herd, unable to keep up, falling away to perish in the wilderness. Falling away to get taken by lurking predators. From my little window, in my office, I can see part of the Harbour Bridge. I can see traffic flowing in and out of the city. My pay goes into my bank account on a regular basis and the super comes out.
At home, Jane does her thing and I do mine. It's a pretty subdued home life. We're in our late fifties. Things tend to seriously slow down at this age. You know those TV ads for superannuation or sex pills you see on the tube? With some healthy looking 60-year-old couple, comfortably retired and sun-kissed, frolicking on a beach somewhere? It isn't like that for use. We bought late and our mortgage is huge. If only we could be those actors in that commercial. I look out my office window and I see more than just the bridge: I see an incredibly tough job market for someone my age. So I guess it's not much of a plan but I guess I'll see this thing out until the end. Why should I blow the whistle on myself?
It is not easy. My responsibilities have whittled down to next to nothing. Basically, if I put my head down, if I work steadily, I can finish up what I really need to do by Tuesday morning each week. And the rest of my time? Well...it's not unlike a theatre performance. Outwardly, I look like a man in an office steadily driven by some kind bureaucratic purpose. Inwardly, I'm on autopilot all the way.
And this was the status quo until quite recently. At the beginning of this week, in fact, Tanner caught me just outside my office. He's one of the last people I recognised on this floor. He says to me, I know what you're doing mate. I know your game. I'm not sure why Tanner was doing this. Why he started playing mind games with me but he did. Most likely Tanner is himself in danger of being discovered as a useless cog in this new, ever evolving machine. I can honestly say I have done my best over the years to stay out of the office politics. Having said this, I do recognise the strategies and tactics when I see them. As his own career is most likely in some precarious state, what Tanner is attempting to do is throw attention onto me. As I say, I have seen this before. The inept hiding their ineptness by sabotaging someone else. A classic manoeuvre. Find someone to hid behind. And doing so would likely buy him some precious time to bolster his value. I know what he'll do. Not being a gossip himself rather a facilitator, (being a gossip would compromise the image he has carefully manufactured over the years as a steadfast worker) he will find one of the main office gossips. The conduits. He'll be sly about it. He'll mention my lack of purpose in an off-handed way but then he'll recant, saying, promise me you won't say anything about this. Of course not, they will say, not meaning it. And then this information will begin to make its way around the building. It's all about feeding the information up to the powers that be while maintaining integrity. If lunch room gossip doesn't work, he'd start actioning me into various group emails or requesting I show up for key meetings. In effect volunteering, me for projects and committees. I know just the man to help out with this! He will say. He will draw me back into the general circus and then get me up on that bloody high-wire for all to see. And all this because I had a series of alterations with him a decade ago. Otherwise known as the great Klein-Tanner war of 1999. (I'm being facetious of course but we really did have a long, protracted war of wills that year with many nasty battles and skirmishes).
As this is the case I will instigate a counteroffensive. It will basically consist of a mixture of defensive strategies which I won't go into now. I'm still formulating my plan. I could take the high road but then what? Retire on canned beans? I don't think so. Besides, there is no way I'm going to let a man like Tanner show me the front door. I don't think so.
Anyway, that's it for me. What about you? I look forward to your response. I always look forward to your letters. They take me out of my life. Are you still working at your father's wrecking yard? Amongst all those cubed cars? It's a rare thing these days to find someone willing to sit down and commit themselves to a letter.
Kind regards,
Franklin.
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