In the office the talk is of forced normality but I feel the opposite, and I feel everyone else is feeling the same, too. I feel as if I am waking from a dream. Things which had become familiar are becoming unfamiliar again and their lines and positions gently startle me. There is the photocopier, and here is my desk, paintings from my children a lifetime of this stress away. There is the kettle, the finance office.
We’re waiting to be sacked. As back office function in a quango its not handwriting on the wall. Our demise is written in h1 font. We’re just waiting for the announcement from the shiney haired government lackey. Everyone talks the same in the same meetings. The phrases, again, familiar then non familiar; routers, xml, workflows, sound like incantations. Our planning sessions are a framework against chaos which will come in and render this safely sterile world dirty with words like redundancy, and then, repossession.
Every time the department manager is in a meeting I flurry. Every night I check my email at 6, in case the message should come in tandem with cowardice, adn then at 7 in case I missed it, 8, midnight, 5am. They are in a meeting now, the glass room unfamiliar from the fading of the future from certain to un. I look at the gestures, the body language, looking for the familiar signs I imagine a thousand times an hour.
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