At work: the 'clean desk' police

I started a new job three weeks ago. New job, new City, new Country.

After three weeks, the colleague who sits at the desk next to mine had clearly had enough: ‘You naw’ she said ‘hactually, we az a clin desk policy ee-urr’.

‘A what?’ I replied, eyebrows knotted.

‘A clin desk policy’.

‘Yes, yes I heard you’.

‘Zis min zat your desk, eet muss be clin before you liv ze office. You muss clin your desk evewy hiv-en-ing befaw you live’. At this point, my esteemed colleague broke off to gesticulate with an irritable twitch of her finger towards the compost heap of a desk that I have swiftly made my own.

‘Right’.

‘So zat zee cliners, zey can clin’.

‘Right’.

‘Uzzerwise, zey cannot clin’.

‘I see’, I said, before nodding at what I assumed was the appropriate moment and turning back to face le problem in hand. She wasn’t finished. I think that she was waiting for something from me. Regret, perhaps? Shame? A complete mental breakdown with a little self-harm thrown in on the side for good measure? Who knows.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t really geared up to give a shit. I contemplated, briefly, taking a dump on my desk before I left the office that evening, to see how exactly the CDP (‘Clean Desk Police’) might choose to manifest their disapproval.

My colleague waited, quite patiently, looking at me as I tried with great effort to ignore her. After a moment or so I thought ‘Maybe I should approach this more efficiently: I’ll do the shit on my desk right now, yeah, and then later I’ll have the time to give her the finger before getting the sack. I don’t think that it was the moment she had been waiting for. I should have left it, but, well, you know, she was sort of annoying me and that.

I turned to her. ‘What happens if I just leave it as it is?’

‘If you live it? What ‘appen?’

‘Yes, if I live it, what ‘appen?’

A flicker of violence passed across her face. I could see her go through all of the five stages of grief: denial, depression, anger and two others that I can’t remember and can’t be naffed to look up. She tried to clarify the situation, presumably thinking that something had been lost in translation, which, of course, it hadn’t.

Here was a socio-cultural difference of such magnitude that she could barely equate my response with reality. I did consider meeting her half-way, but then again the idea of telling her to fuck off appealed to my innate sense of justice, you see, and, quite frankly, a really couldn’t have given a pig in shit what she thought of the state of my desk.

Later on, I fired off a whining e-mail to a friend to vent- subject title Re: The Cunts. My friend explained that there were clear-cut rules about such matters as post-it note use and desk tidiness.

‘You can’t just leave post-it notes lying around the place to remember everything, they told me that in my time-management course’.

‘I’m sorry’, I said, ‘But I have relied upon post-it notes and the back of my hand to remember things for the past ten years. I have found them both unfailingly reliable, provided, of course, that with relative frequency you steal supplies of the former from work, and wash the latter compulsively after visiting the toilet because otherwise the reminder alerts don’t garner one’s attention with sufficient regularity’.

‘The man in my time-management course wants post-it notes banned’.

‘Banned? From where? From here? Or from the world in general? What exactly does he expect us to use as an alternative?’

‘He said we should write it in a cahier’.

‘Write it in a cahier’.

‘Yes. Or use Microsoft Outlook’.

‘ Microsoft Outlook? We don’t have Microsoft fucking Outlook’.

‘Yeah, I told him that. He said to use the Cahier or Outlook’

‘Which we don’t have’

‘Yeah, because a cahier is more efficient, because you can’t lose it’

‘I can lose a cahier. I can lose pretty much anything, particularly if its standing in the way of my relationship with a fucking post-it note. Who is this Barbarian who thinks that he can swan in and dictate the fashion in which I choose to remember appointments, telephone numbers and the like. What a complete and utter bastard’.

‘You could use LotusNotes Calender’.

‘LotusNotes? You’re telling me that I should use LotusNotes. A piece of software so fundamentally flawed that I couldn’t bring myself to praise it even if praising it meant delivering a cure for AIDs. Presumably if your time-management course leader, who, by the way, is clearly a committed cunt, had his way, we would remember appointments by tattooing them onto our skin like that man in ‘Memento’

‘Like the man in what?’

‘Memento! You know! Guy Pierce. He keeps forgetting everything, so he tattoos himself to remember. The timing’s all over the place. We watched it together and you said that he was the only person with a tattoo that you’d ever fancied’.

‘I dunno. Who’s Guy Pierce? Do you mean Guy Ritchie?’

‘Yes. That’s exactly who I mean. Now lets just agree that my colleague is a cunt. That the system is a cunt. That the man who invented LotusNotes is a cunt but I that I am too much of a coward, or a too much of a cunt myself to do anything about it. Then I’ll crack on with my web-tree, internal conflict unresolved’.