I do love office life. Friendship, politics, intrigue, gossip, love amongst the filing cabinets, and that’s just the incoming correspondence.

The hunt for the perfect job

It has taken me a number of years to realise that there is no such thing as the absolutely perfect job –  perhaps not for me anyway.

Still, that doesn’t stop my eternal belief that someone, somewhere must want me to turn up for work every day brandishing my LK Bennett tote bag and installing my high heels collection in a glass walled office in which I am paid to do a bit of light internet shopping, make myself cups of tea and exchange witty comments near the photo copier, which I obviously don’t have to use.

The interview – Yourself, myself and everything in between

Being between jobs, or unemployed, as some people prefer to call it, I have observed a lot in interviews, that’s when I’m not talking 19 to the dozen or trying to enthuse about a job I’m really not sure about.

One of my most hilarious  (hindsight is a wonderful thing) interviews consisted of “competency based” questions rather than a gander through my CV and asking if I had an armed bodyguard in Liberia when I used to do some work trips there. The answer is sadly no, and I got used to seeing disappointment in a person’s eyes as I answered the question truthfully.

Interviewers (frequently women), are so terrified of putting a foot wrong that an entire health warning is usually uttered before they get asking you to recall a time when you showed leadership and teamwork skills. “My name is X and this is my colleague Y. This is a two way process and I am going to write things down and at times I may need to lose eye contact with yourself “[see my hatred of this term in another to be written blog post].

Still, I have to admit that I was as bad as the rest of them. When my eyes weren’t fixed on the sheet on which they took down my answers word for word in a cheap black biro, I was the first to chirp about “key stakeholders” (other de-valued and depressed employees), “cascading information” (putting the newsletters out in electronic and paper format) and working well across all sectors – e.g. asking all the people in accounts and communications if they would like a cup of tea.

I have also learned that each workplace has its own version of business bullshit bingo, or BBB for short. Meetings are a “huddle”. Meeting documents (or memos and agendas in my day) are “huddle packs”. Any small meeting under an hour in duration is an “Espresso seminar”, but I don’t think you actually get a coffee – it’s just someone talking quickly. More on this below. Terrorising fellow colleagues on the office floor before reporting petty misdemeanours is a “Walkabout”, and let’s not forget the heart-warming 360-degree appraisal, more on which later.

My opinion on such things is that if I want to read badly disguised, anonymised criticism of “myself”, then I can always sit in a meeting [breakout] room alone, sniffing a packet of magic markers and dancing round a flip chart.

However, I digress, because as we all know, there are times that it simply isn’t enough to humiliate “yourself” with direct interviews [which always consist of two people so you can’t falsely accuse anyone of fondling you]; sometimes you have to stand in front of the equivalent of the employment firing squad and put your life into the hands of a recruitment consultant.

The perils of the recruitment consultant

Of course, before you actually get a job, you have to find one and in this most of us will turn to the mystery that is the recruitment consultant.

Going to see a recruitment consultant can be rather like going in to the reptile house at your local zoo – it’s a fascinating experience but perhaps one you don’t want to repeat too often, and anything more than a brief visit will make you feel over warm and uncomfortable. One of my friends once described a recruiter’s job as “selling false hope”. On the occasions I have been into London recruitment offices, I have been struck by a number of points:

• None of the female employees feel able to wear a decent pair of tights;
• Often, they won’t have read your CV beforehand, other than to look for gaps;
• If you are female, they will often ask you if you have ever been a PA. Or if you would like to be one. This has happened to me more than once.
• If you have a law degree, you will be asked to either show interest in (a) being a Company Secretary, or (b), a legal secretary. These are both worthwhile jobs, I would just be useless at both.
• Of course, you know you have hit the big time when you get asked if you would like to go into “compliance”. Had I wanted to spend my days scanning passports, then I would of course have applied to work for G4S in airport security, because then you get to take pictures of travellers as well and ask them if they are going anywhere nice.
• The offices themselves  can look like Social Services (same bad, standard issue sofas that don’t match any other furnishing in the room. Ditto sick plant and incongruous lamp). Sometimes these will be accompanied by a crystal award from ten years ago and an Investors in People gravestone-type plinth.
• Even if you are a former legal professional who is now an event manager, they will try to talk you into taking a job answering the phones in an office “to gain valuable insights into working for a large corporation”.  Again, this happened to me. Can’t you just read about the company on their website?!

First day at the office

Life in overthrown Libya and most offices have a lot in common. At the heart of most of them are one or two rich and misguided dictators disguised in chinos, a checked shirt and unusually bad footwear.

Whilst your male employer may not physically resemble Colonel Gadaffi or indeed his creepy son with the very white teeth, underneath the disguise of the blazer and pimp like shoes, they’re quite similar. I began musing on this theme when my (unpaid) working day in London as an (admittedly elderly) intern was rudely interrupted one day with the fateful words: “someone has left a BOWL in the SINK!” Naturally all eyes darted around the room trying to find the perpetrator of such a savage and inhumane act.

Can you imagine ignoring the taped up sign exhorting people NOT TO DO SUCH THINGS? I was just beginning to imagine the IKEA crockery being dusted for fingerprints when a lesser mortal scuttled to the sink muttering their apologies. So, be warned.

Actually, let’s not recount anyone’s first day in their new job. Unless your new boss or immediate team are a bunch of lovely people with no outward personality defects, it’s going to be an eye opener. What I would love to ask recruitment consultants (But there isn’t a space on the badly photocopied form for this to fill in with the splotchy pen) is: Can you find me a job without a first week? Can I just avoid the horror of it all? The cutting people off on the phone, learning my way around “the System” and asking a stonily quiet roomful of people whose names I don’t know if they would like a hot drink to be met with silence.

Well, almost. It’s either that or complex orders, thick and fast (“Sharon likes her milk in first and two and a half sugars”) – how can you tell the difference???, and the new and exciting information that “Actually there’s a coffee club as NO ONE here drinks INSTANT coffee [but management won’t pay the £2.50 per week for a new packet]”. Make of that what you will! Indeed, a good reason to stay in your current job could be to avoid, forever, the horror of the first week in a new job (and your kindly meant leaving gift from your old place, which is often more insulting than it was meant to be).

For me, the highlight of the office tour is the tuck box, where for forty pence your post lunch food fantasies can come true. Honestly, the things I wouldn’t do for an ageing bag of wheat crunchies at four o clock in the afternoon. With a kit kat straight afterwards.

Other aspects of office life

It’s amazing what people do in an open plan office. My number one fave some time ago now has been the lengthy booking (by a colleague) of a “Relaxing couple’s spa away day” for her and her beloved. A relay of phone calls culminated in a momentous decision: “I’ll go for the mineral scrub and body wrap and my boyfriend (he doesn’t have a name) will have the massage from the 21 year old girl with a happy ending…..”

 The office away day

If you like reaching out, key take aways, circling back and touching base, then the office away day is for you. All you need are a buffet, a ban on alcohol, some flip charts, spirit pens to sniff and you’re there. If you can chuck in the potential for some borderline sexual harassment in the subterraneous corridors of a three star hotel, then even better.

Obviously the best part of any away day is the motivational speaker that they wheel out to re-ignite you at 4.00 pm when you are straining to hear wine bottles being unscrewed in the back room. That’s after you’ve pocketed the mints and very flimsy pen. They could come in handy for gifts.

The motivational speaker will have written a book (of course!) of which your office will have purchased several copies to prop up the photocopier. He or she will usually have a martial arts background – open stance, it’s all in the mind….and a t shirt with a positive slogan on.

The last management guru I saw in action (designer facial hair, check, i-pad, check, man bag, check), looked like he was going to whisk one or even some of the lucky ladies present upstairs for a bit of tantric sex after he had finished his “espresso seminar” (I did not make this term up!) about how scorpions and something else can live together in harmony, in a hole, which summed up office life rather well, I thought. And reminded me of Colonel Gadaffi’s final moments in a drain pipe. He was the sort of man who practiced yoga at 5.00 am, then went for a run, then proclaimed: “Today is a gift!”, before making his own granola.

So, there you have it, today is indeed a gift, it’s just well wrapped up in the huddle pack which you’ll extract your key takeaways from in the espresso seminar, next to the breakout room where you can also collect your P45.  Until next time.