In 1987, when I was 19, I started at my first ‘proper’ adult job. This was as a lowly civil service clerk, or administrative officer – filing, basically. It was a post within the Lord Chancellor’s Department – as it was known then – but which today is called the Ministry of Justice, which doesn’t sound totalitarian or sinister at all. It was an epochal life stage, and a winter that was full of scents and sensations, the way winters are in the summer of one’s years.
How would we deal with a hypothetical situation where somebody – identity unknown – had dry-boiled the office kettle?
Part of the process of this new job was an order to attend, along with other similar junior newcomers across the civil service, an induction day at a central London office. This meaningless day has remained with me ever since, jammed into my brain – from which actually important or significant life events have melted like infusoria in the eye. The vividness of the day’s recall is doubly odd, as it was about the last time I defied decay and ventured outside without either glasses or contact lenses. Anybody further than four feet away was a blur (nowadays it’s more like six inches).
To begin, we had to pair off with the person next to us, find out everything about them in five minutes and then introduce them to the room. ‘This is Janet,’ I found myself saying. ‘She lives in Pinner, likes Simple Minds and dislikes cruelty to animals’. I can’t remember what I said about myself. I dread to think. Janet was a very ordinary person, at least on the surface. There used to be scores of young people like Janet. Maybe there still are but we never, ever see them or hear from them.
We moved on to the basics of office life, and a lesson on the sending of what was known, in these pre-internet days, as a ‘transit envelope’. This involved slipping a piece of paper into the said envelope, adding the recipient’s department to a fresh dotted line on the back, and popping it in your Out Tray. You’d think this would be a simple enough procedure but we spent a good hour on it, with reminders about addressing the envelope clearly, not pouring coffee over it, and refraining from any ‘quirky’ additions in our written instructions.
At lunch we were free to do as we wish. In that way of young chaps who will never meet again, I repaired with the closest bloke to the nearest pub, which was down a narrow alley. With its Christmas twinkles and diffused warm light, this 45-minute interlude has become a Leaky Cauldron-style site of magic in my memory. This was December 1987, so Kenneth Williams or Emeric Pressburger might’ve walked in.
For decades I wondered idly where it had been, what it was called, it seemed so otherworldly. I was content to nurture this unanswerable little puzzle. Then somebody on Twitter posted a photo of the Red Lion in Crown Passage, St James, and bang, there it was, another mystery shattered, thanks to the internet.
I returned, just a pint and a half down, the world’s edges slightly softened. We had a long talk about fire safety, bomb threats, evacuating buildings etc. I squinted at the white board and asked my neighbour for clarification on something written there. She looked me and my lunchtime pal up and down and said, ‘I’m surprised you two can see at all!’ This is the kind of person I thought was extinguished. In fact, they were reincarnated in the 2010s with blue hair and pronouns and a whole new, much worse, set of gripes and snipes.
There followed a workplace role-play exercise. How would we deal with a hypothetical situation where somebody – identity unknown – had dry-boiled the office kettle? By coincidence, somebody actually did dry-boil the kettle in my office a few months later. During the many months of unspoken aggression, dagger glares of suspicion and hints of accusation that followed, the role-play turned out to have been no bloody use whatsoever.
I still dream about that office regularly. It was a place of magnificent misfits who – decades before it was a thing – certainly did bring their ‘whole selves’ to work. There was the immaculately coiffured lady who did the job for something to do, who pleaded poverty one moment and the next spoke of leaving a taxi running in Hans Crescent while she popped into Harrods for a couple of hours; a small coterie of contemporaries who were, at the height of acid house and hip hop, fully committed to another 1960s Mod revival; a man who dressed like the Penguin from Batman, waddling about the building, who everybody assumed was an eccentric barrister – but who turned out to be an administrator at an even humbler level than mine.
I like to think that such flotsam and jetsam are still there in our flattened, modern world. Nowadays an induction day like this one would doubtless involve unconscious bias testing, LGBTQ+ compliance, Progress Pride lanyards, etc. It is probably done online. My training day was the nearest I came to a rite of passage, an entry into the adult world. I think that’s the reason it stuck in my brain, and why I have never dry-boiled a kettle.
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