To Cut a Long Story Short

‘Good morning, Mr Tudor-Jones,’ said Haskins, as he passed a copy of the Telegraph to the bank’s Chief Administrator. He didn’t speak again until the lift doors had closed.

‘Important time for Mr Tudor-Jones,’ Haskins informed his son. ‘If he doesn’t get promoted to the board this year, my bet is he’ll be marking time until he retires. I sometimes look at these jokers and think I could do their jobs. After all, it wasn’t my fault my old man was a brickie, and I didn’t get the chance to go to the local grammar school. Otherwise I might have ended up on the sixth or seventh floor, with a desk of my own and a secretary.

‘Good morning, Mr Alexander,’ said Haskins as the bank’s Chief Executive walked past him without acknowledging his salutation.

‘Don’t have to hand him a paper. Miss Franklyn, his secretary, picks the lot up for him long before he arrives. Now he wants to be Chairman. If he gets the job, there’ll be a lot of changes round here, that’s for sure.’ He looked across at his son. ‘You been booking in all those names, the way I taught you?’

‘Sure have, Dad. Mr Parnell, 7.47; Mr Parker, 8.09; Mr Tudor-Jones, 8.11; Mr Alexander, 8.23.’

‘Well done, son. You’re learning fast.’ He poured himself another cup of tea, and took a sip. Too hot, so he went on talking. ‘Our next job is to deal with the mail - which, like Mr Parnell, is late. So, I suggest …’ Haskins quickly hid his cup of tea below the counter and ran across the foyer. He jabbed the ‘up’ button, and prayed that one of the lifts would return to the ground floor before the Chairman entered the building. The doors slid open with seconds to spare.

‘Good morning, Sir William. I hope you had a pleasant weekend.’

‘Yes, thank you, Haskins,’ said the Chairman, as the doors closed. Haskins blocked the way so that no one could join Sir William in the lift, and he would have an uninterrupted journey to the fourteenth floor.

Haskins ambled back to the reception desk to find his son sorting out the morning mail. ‘The Chairman once told me that the lift takes thirty-eight seconds to reach the top floor, and he’d worked out that he’d spend a week of his life in there, so he always read the Times leader on the way up and the notes for his next meeting on the way down. If he spends a week trapped in there, I reckon I must spend half my life,’ he added, as he picked up his tea and took a sip. It was cold. ‘Once you’ve sorted out the post, you can take it up to Mr Parnell. It’s his job to distribute it, not mine. He’s got a cushy enough number as it is, so there’s no reason why I should do his work for him.’

Ronnie picked up the basket full of mail and headed for the lift. He stepped out on the second floor, walked over to Mr Parnell’s desk and placed the basket in front of him.

Chris Parnell looked up, and watched as the lad disappeared back out of the door. He stared at the pile of letters. As always, no attempt had been made to sort them out. He must have a word with Haskins. It wasn’t as if the man was run off his feet, and now he wanted his boy to take his place. Not if he had anything to do with it.

Didn’t Haskins unders

tand that his job carried real responsibility? He had to make sure the office ticked like a Swiss clock. Letters on the correct desks before nine, check for any absentees by ten, deal with any machinery breakdowns within moments of being notified of them, arrange and organise all staff meetings, by which time the second post would have arrived. Frankly, the whole place would come to a halt if he ever took a day off. You only had to look at the mess he always came back to whenever he returned from his summer holiday.

He stared at the letter on the top of the pile. It was addressed to ‘Mr Roger Parker’. ‘Rog’, to him. He should have been given Rog’s job as Head of Personnel years ago - he could have done it in his sleep, as his wife Janice never stopped reminding him: ‘He’s no more than a jumped-up office clerk. Just because he was at the same school as the Chief Cashier.’ It wasn’t fair.

Janice had wanted to invite Roger and his wife round to dinner, but Chris had been against the idea from the start.

‘Why not?’ she had demanded. ‘After all, you both support Chelsea. Is it because you’re afraid he’ll turn you down, the stuck-up snob?’

To be fair to Janice, it had crossed Chris’s mind to invite Roger out for a drink, but not to dinner at their home in Romford. He couldn’t explain to her that when Roger went to Stamford Bridge he didn’t sit at the Shed end with the lads, but in the members’ seats.

Once the letters had been sorted out, Chris placed them in different trays according to their departments. His two assistants could cover the first ten floors, but he would never allow them anywhere near the top four. Only he got into the Chairman and Chief Executive’s offices.

Janice never stopped reminding him to keep his eyes open whenever he was on the executive floors. ‘You can never tell what opportunities might arise, what openings could present themselves.’ He laughed to himself, thinking about Gloria in Filing, and the openings she offered. The things that girl could do behind a filing cabinet. That was one thing he didn’t need his wife to find out about.

He picked up the trays for the top four floors, and headed towards the lift. When he reached the eleventh floor, he gave a gentle knock on the door before entering Roger’s office. The Head of Personnel glanced up from a letter he’d been reading, a preoccupied look on his face.

‘Good result for Chelsea on Saturday, Rog, even if it was only against West Ham,’ Chris said as he placed a pile of letters in his superior’s in-tray. He didn’t get any response, so he left hurriedly.

Roger looked up as Chris scurried away. He felt guilty that he hadn’t chatted to him about the Chelsea match, but he didn’t want to explain why he had missed a home game for the first time that season. He should be so lucky as only to have Chelsea on his mind.

He turned his attention back to the letter he had been reading. It was a bill for PS1,600, the first month’s fee for his mother’s nursing home.

Roger had reluctantly accepted that she was no longer well enough to remain with them in Croydon, but he hadn’t been expecting a bill that would work out at almost PS20,000 a year. Of course he hoped she’d be around for another twenty years, but with Adam and Sarah still at school, and Hazel not wanting to go back to work, he needed a further rise in salary, at a time when all the talk was of cutbacks and redundancies.

It had been a disastrous weekend. On Saturday he had begun to read the McKinsey report, outlining what the bank would have to do if it was to continue as a leading financial institution into the twenty-first century.

The report had suggested that at least seventy employees would have to participate in a downsizing programme - a euphemism for ‘You’re sacked.’ And who would be given the unenviable task of explaining to those seventy individuals the precise meaning of the word ‘downsizing’? The last time Roger had had to sack someone, he hadn’t slept for days. He had felt so depressed by the time he put the report down that he just couldn’t face the Chelsea match.

He realised he would have to make an appointment to see Godfrey Tudor-Jones, the bank’s Chief Administrator, although he knew that Tudor-Jones would brush him off with, ‘Not my department, old boy, people problems. And you’re the Head of Personnel, Roger, so I guess it’s up to you.’ It wasn’t as if he’d been able to strike up a personal relationship with the man, which he could now fall back on. He had tried hard enough over the years, but the Chief Administrator had made it all too clear that he didn’t mix business with pleasure - unless, of course, you were a board member.

‘Why don’t you invite him to a home game at Chelsea?’ suggested Hazel. ‘After all, you paid enough for those two season tickets.’

‘I don’t think he’s into football,’ Roger had told her. ‘More a rugby man, would be my guess.’

‘Then invite him to your club for dinner.’