Technophobia!

Office Suite by Alan Bennett

West Yorkshire Playhouse, Courtyard Theatre, 1996

“How many people work in your office?” “Oh, about a quarter of them.”

“Offices are all the same,” declares Doris in Green Forms, and in one sense she’s right. Workers the world over have always tried to get away with doing as little as possible without being caught by the management. But the image of a couple of middle-aged ladies in twinsets presiding over a paper-strewn backwater is nowadays outmoded. On the other hand, maybe their preoccupations have simply been swapped for other, more insidious fears…? If Doris and Doreen were to walk into their office today after an absence of eighteen years, how much would they recognise?

The first thing they would miss would be the paperwork, which today would be stored tidily away in the sterile guts of a computer. Doris and Doreen might well argue that after a lifetime’s experience they would be able to put their hands on anything you asked them for at a moment’s notice, but today’s hard-headed business manager would have no truck with that. Today all information would need to be filed and flagged on hard drive and floppy disk, and how many comfortable matrons would be willing or able to undergo the training course?

At least, they would tell you, paperwork is user-friendly (as opposed to user password-protected?). It’s something to do with the colour-coding. The beleaguered mind has a chance to get itself in the correct receptive mode before the weary eye engages with the actual text. And green and pink are such restful colours aren’t they? “Don’t worry about us,” they coo soothingly as they sift softly across your blotter. “We’re just a couple of silly old pastel-coloured bits of bumf. Nothing to get excited about. You just finish your biscuit and the crossword. We can wait.” If only they could…

Bumf – significantly a polite contraction of the phrase ‘bum fodder’ – was invariably gathered together in buff folders, another of those colours so neutral you want to wring its vapid neck. Not that there were ever enough of them to go around. Buff folders are like bin bags. You keep cramming the stuff in until the binding starts to go and the sides split, and you end up having to tie the whole thing up with a ratty bit of string just so it can continue to fulfil its function. Because you don’t want to have to open another folder, do you? That would be silly. On the other hand, the main disadvantage of paperwork is that it encourages mess. Law Four of the office decrees that whenever two or three are gathered together in the name of work there shall be chaos. No computer in the world has ever been able to figure out why.

Annoyingly, though, it’s always other people who cause the confusion, never you. You leave the room for two minutes, you come back, and can you find the file you were working on? Your colleagues swear they haven’t touched it because it’s ‘not their pigeon’, but it’s not under your chair, it’s not under their chair, it’s not even (last resort) in your pending tray. Eventually you’ve got no option but to chalk up another kill to the office Black Hole.

Certainly computers make it easier to access information, and they have done away with the need for all those hideous fog-grey, blood-red or British Racing Green filing cabinets (was there ever a more malignantly soulless piece of office furniture?). But at what cost? Twenty years ago your main fear was of being pinned to the floor by a toppling metal coffin, or sustaining a paper cut. Are we any better off these days as we peck dolefully away at the keys, flirting with the ever-present dangers of eye strain or broken nails? We just seem to have swapped the risk of one industrial injury for another.

And just how quicker is it really, with all that logging on and off you have to do, and forgetting your password, and constantly having to reassure the bleeping little Hitler that yes, you really do want to trash that file… At least in the old days you were saved that dread moment of the mouse suddenly expiring beneath your fingers and the cursor freezing in the middle of the screen, oblivious to any entreaty or banging with the flat of the hand.

Computers apart, the rest of the machinery will look subtly different to our revenants. The phones will be smaller and lighter, both in colour and weight – but on the down side they will probably have many more arcane buttons, and pore over the instruction booklet as you may, you will never work out how to use some of them. We live today under the telephonic Fascism of the * and #, whose only function is to make us all feel technologically inadequate.

Conspicuous by its absence will be the faithful old typewriter. Once the workhorse of the office, at the start of this century it was a manually operated great trunk of a thing like an antique motor car, slightly larger than the desk it was parked on, which needed the wrist muscles of an arm-wrestling champion to operate the shift key. Over the years it became more streamlined, more portable, then electric, golf-ball, daisy-wheel, super-fast and ultra-efficient, with any number of special functions and low-light displays – yet even it had to succumb eventually to the implacable invasion of the computer screen and the keyboard, each connected to the other by a couple of grey flexes. (Can you still say flex?)

And it hasn’t stopped there. Now there are desktops, laptops, flattops, flipflops and, no doubt someday soon, toptops. One thing that might be new to our increasingly baffled ladies would be the fax machine. The next generation on from the telex, this is an invaluable tool in a busy modern office (provided, of course, it hasn’t run out of ink or paper). It has, however, had the effect of reducing human contact to such an extent that you don’t really need to speak to anyone anymore Indeed, the whole ethos of the modern office is moving inexorably towards anonymity. There is less time to talk, read the paper, consult your horoscope, or spend an idle moment deciphering that latest postcard from a holidaying colleague. These days many people work from home and are connected to the office solely by modem. They can literally phone their work in. Then there is email, the information superhighway, surfing the internet, streaking down the strands of the global web at the speed of light… it sometimes seems the only chance you have to physically interface with another human being nowadays is if you happen to bump into them on your way to the toilet. (Two minutes only, and please use the minimum of paper.)

In fact, big businesses make a point of creating new euphemisms to preclude cosiness and security. The word “redundancy” struck fear into everyone’s heart in the seventies, but do we feel any better being offered the chance for “early retirement” or even being “involuntarily liberated to pursue other opportunities”? To hear Personnel talk you wouldn’t think anyone got the sack anymore. But then maybe they don’t. Maybe with things being “wound down, wound up, phased out anyway”, in these days of downsizing, streamlining, rationalising and generally making the business leaner and fitter, the individual gets lost and only the workforce as a whole survives the shake-up. It could be 1984 if it wasn’t already 1996.

No, the returning spirits of Doris and Doreen would find little to warm their cockles in the chill, sanitised workplace of the nineties. Surrounded by desks swept clean of papers, corners shorn of filing cabinets, walls stripped of postcards and window ledges even denuded of all but the hardiest cactus, the only plant able to cling on in this harsh, dry atmosphere, all that’s left for them to do is to clutch their plastic name tags to their sensible cardigans and, joining their trembling hands for comfort, slowly tiptoe out.

Remembering, of course, to set the six-digit code on the security lock before closing the door quietly but firmly behind them.

Alan Bennett (1934-)

PS

I should perhaps have made the point more clearly at the start of this article that by the mid-nineties, when this production was going on, Alan Bennett’s double bill about the minute banalities of office work was already a period piece. Having said that, the kind of micro-environment it dissects was – and is still – so familiar that audiences then as now would find it recognisable and charming.

By a similar miracle, the article itself still seems to stand up well. Some references are more out of date than others – telex, anyone? Fax machines? – but the technology we rely on today must already have been pretty much in place by the time I came to write the piece nearly thirty years ago. The only main difference might be that things have become a bit smaller and neater over the intervening decades. And people do work from home more frequently now, and stay in touch via Zoom.

The scripts themselves are certainly vintage (in both senses) Bennett. A Visit from Miss Prothero and Green Forms, both originally written for television, were first transmitted in 1978, the former by the BBC in January, the latter by London Weekend Television in December. Both starred the magnificent Patricia Routledge opposite Hugh Lloyd in the one and Prunella Scales in the other, and both are prime exemplars of the playwright’s acute ear for northern dialogue. As a southerner, I can only hope the playwright’s fellow Yorkshire folk find his recreation of their interactions as funny as I do. Him and Victoria Wood – you can’t get a cigarette paper between them. (Since the peerless Ms Wood’s untimely passing, the present greatest northern comic today is probably Peter Kay. His ability to tap into the common absurdities we all live by, conveyed in that warm Bolton brogue, is not only hilarious and heart-warming but also, somehow, wonderfully comforting.)

Even if Alan Bennett’s plays were about nothing else – though they always are about lots of else – the scripts would be worth preserving for the pitch-perfect reproduction of northern (or perhaps specifically Yorkshire) speech and its unique rhythms. In the introduction to the published text of the plays, the author describes it thus:

“It is a speech as mannered and dramatic as Restoration comedy… People, by which I mean television producers, imagine northern speech simply as standard English with a dirty dishcloth accent, and northern women as southern women who can’t speak properly. They’re not. Northern women are another species…” and he goes on to give a series of precious examples like, for instance, positive statements made in a negative way: “When you think he only has one arm he’s not had a bad career. And she’s not unpleasant. I don’t dislike this carpet.” Key words are often left to the end of the sentence: “it used to be a right refined place did Morecambe.” And any opportunity to demonstrate social oneupmanship, however modest, is always to be seized with both claws. “I’ve got half a dozen people who’re always begging me to pop round,” Miss Prothero confides, “one off them a retired chiropodist.”

To fill out the programme, and in keeping with the mood of the evening’s entertainment, we were also asked to supply a few snapshots and anecdotes of office life garnered from God knows where. Maybe personal reminiscence, or some dilatory research in humorous compilations or books of quotations. I myself no doubt dipped into Stephen Pile’s 1979 classic megahit The Book of Heroic Failures, which by this point I almost knew off by heart:

In June 1978 Mr Stanley Hird of Bradford settled down to work through his lunch hour. Ten minutes later a cow named Rosie fell through the glass ceiling of his carpet factory having clambered into the roof from an adjoining field. Neither was hurt but it took several firemen and a pulley to haul the beast out again.

An ambitious young executive met with his boss who told him: “This new position calls for someone with vision, drive, enthusiasm and charisma. I want you to start interviewing possible candidates immediately.”

An employer was trying to let down an over-qualified job applicant as gently as she could. “I’m sorry I couldn’t take you on, but there just isn’t enough work to keep you busy.” Came the hopeful reply, “It doesn’t take that much, honest.”

The boss accosted a filing clerk: “Why is it everyone else is carrying two of everything and you’re only carrying one?” The clerk replied, “Maybe they’re too lazy to make two trips like I do.”

An eager junior applying for promotion was asked to correct the following statement: “It was me what done it.” After some careful consideration, she wrote: “It was not me what done it.”

Though maybe it was Jerome K Jerome who summed it up best: “I like work. It fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.”

(An account of my appearance on Mastermind where I took the television plays of Alan Bennett as my specialist subject can be found here.)