Back in the juggling game again

For two years I tried to live the dream, running a small web and phone-based business from home. The costs of running it exceeded my original estimates, and after the first few months I had to go out and do early-morning jobs to get enough money to feed myself and pay my own bills. After nearly a year of this dual existence I recognised I was beaten, and started trying to get back into the contract market. Apart from the obvious CV problem of a blank 2 years, I also faced a grim situation where there were too many applicants and too few vacancies. After 3 months of persistence I finally got a contract 50 miles away, at a rate half that I usually worked for. But at least I would be able to pay everything and keep bankruptcy off my list of life-experiences.

My new workplace was the largest open-plan office I have ever been in. It was the size of three football pitches laid end-to-end. I found it disconcerting to stand at my desk, which was at one end of the building, and look over rows and rows of partitions towards what was almost an horizon, without seeing anything that was identifiably another end wall.

I received a summons to visit security to get my pass, and walked into a room with an empty counter in front of me, a chair to my left, and a wall of lockers to my right.
"Sit on the chair and state your name", said a voice.
I sat, stated, and waited.
"There'll be a brief flash", said the voice, and there was.
"How do you spell your name?" the voice asked. I spelled.
"OK, your pass will be ready soon, enjoy your time here".
A small hatch opened in the lockers, and my pass was there. For all I knew the voice had come from a computer system. But the photograph was of me, and my name was written on it.

I sat in a cube, which contained three other people, each of whom sat in a corner facing away from the other occupants. In the centre of the cube was a round table, without any chairs. Alongside each of the computer desks was a long narrow locker with a top that folded up and away, exposing a single shelf about four feet long. I was told that I couldn't use the locker at my desk because it contained the regular occupant's stuff, and she would be back sometime soon. I would move to the desk space currently occupied by the contractor whom I was replacing once he had trained me and left.

I had parked my car in a free space behind a row which was marked 'Reserved for Visitors'. When I went out to it at lunchtime I found a large white notice on the windscreen, telling me to call security immediately. I went back inside and called the number.
"You've parked in the row reserved for visitors", I was told.
"But I thought that was the row in front of me".
"Both rows are reserved for visitors"
Since I wanted the work so badly I didn't ask why they hadn't labelled the second row similarly to the first row. I went back out and moved the car.

My new job used email a lot, so much that I found a third of my time was taken up with reading emails and filing them in various places. I discovered that our cube communicated almost exclusively by emails. Very rarely, they would all swing round on their swivel chairs and converge on the round table for a face-to-face discussion. After the third such discussion one of them realised I hadn't been added to the correct email server and was not seeing the message calling for a conversation. I soon realised that nobody spoke to anybody else without an email request first.
"Just like 'Dead Like Me'", I said, and then had to explain to them the similarity with George's new job, sitting in a small office with one other occupant, who only communicated by the email system, even when George had spoken directly to the back of his shiny head.
"Cool", they said.

I left my little notebook computer on the desktop by accident one evening in the second week, and next morning found it gone, and a curt note telling me to report to security. This time there was somebody waiting behind the counter.
"All laptops are meant to be locked away at night", I was told. I explained that I was hot-desking and didn't have the key to the locker.
"Then you can't be allowed to use the company laptops," he said.
"It's my own computer".
That got a reaction. He phoned the IT security department to get instructions, and was told to virus-check it.
"You won't be able to," I told him, "It's not a Windows computer."
He phoned IT security again, and was told to make me fill out and sign a form stating that any security breach, Information Loss, or other damaging event resulting from the misuse of my non-standard computer was absolutely my responsibility.

Within two weeks I had met security three times, and I should have only have met them once to get my photo taken. I walked back to my cube feeling that I was now a known troublemaker.

The long-term absentee returned, and I transferred to my new desk, displacing the outgoing contractor to a spare slot in an adjacent cube. The returnee spent all her first day on the phone ringing round old friends. It was the first time I heard anyone actually say "24/7". I had been out of touch for too long in my home business.

I began to notice the little personal touches in cubes as I walked in and out of the building, and decided to bring in some of my photos. I pinned them up to the sound-deadening material. The next morning they were gone. I broke the rule about emailing first, and announced to everyone "My photos have gone!"
"It's cool", said my trainee.
"No it's not," I said, "It's extremely hot, heavy, sweaty, far-from-cool. Who's walked off with them?"
It was security. I was not supposed to put up personal items in my cube. I sat there facing the blank wall of lockers where I had posed for the security pass photo, and asked why other cubes had photos up.
"They've been here long enough for us to get to know them," was the reply.
"And in my short time here I've only been called to security four times. What do I have to do to get you to know me well enough?"
"Not what you've been doing so far. We're keeping an eye on you."

But someone else in the department had spoken up for me, and I was allowed to put my photos back up. Over the next few weeks I rotated them every other day, and was secretly cheered to see how many people would stop by our cube just to see what the changes where. But despite that, I was not fitting in to this enormous Happy-Time as well as I had hoped I would; it was turning out to be all the worst parts of Dead Like Me without any of the humour. As the weeks reached out towards the end of my contract I began to look for a way out.

Coincidentally, a large crow or raven on the outside of the building began looking for a way in. I first spotted him launching himself from the spiral fire escape and cannoning into the plate glass floor-to-ceiling windows. I walked over to the adjacent pane and looked through it at him, wondering if he was affected by radio waves or disturbed by a reflection. He stopped doing it when I watched him, but when I went back to my cube he started doing it again. A day later, he changed tactics, and was walking along the gravel at the foot of the glass, pecking at the the flashing that covered the junction of the glass and the concrete base. I phoned security and told them that a large bird was trying to find a way into the building.
"Who's calling?" they asked.
I told them. There was a pause, and a heavy sigh.
"Would you please only call us for genuine security issues".

I got my way out after a lucky conversation, returning to an old client at the end of my contract period. In one of my last few lunch half-hours, I walked around the outside of the building and put some bread down by the fire escape for the bird. On my last day, as I cleared out the locker and un-pinned my photos from the cube wall, the phone rang. It was security.
"You've been observed feeding birds outside the building."
"It was only one bird, it was the one I reported to you for trying to find a way into the building."
"Putting down bread is a security violation, it encourages rats and vermin. You must stop doing it."
"And if I can't control myself?"
"Then we'll cancel the access rights on your card".
"Has anybody told you that I'm leaving?"
The voice at the other end sounded almost sad. Perhaps I had been the one bright spark in their otherwise boring existence.