LXVI
And now, a voice having been lent me, I mean to use it. Let me describe the place, as one who has stood in it, after the manner of a man who once described a sick berth and was called a complainer for the remainder of his life and was right.
Here I saw some two hundred practitioners of an ancient discipline, arrayed in rows at benches of a uniform width, allotted no partition, no door and no silence, beneath a light that does not vary between December and June; interrupted at a mean interval of eleven minutes by a coloured rectangle in the corner of the eye; summoned each morning to stand in a circle and account for themselves in ninety seconds before a person who cannot evaluate the account; their labour measured in a unit invented at a hotel conference by men who had themselves long ceased to practise; their attention, which is the entire instrument they possess and the sole faculty for which they were engaged, divided, subdivided and sold off in fragments to four concurrent initiatives, not one of which will conclude, two of which will be cancelled by a person they will never meet in a meeting whose minutes they will not be shown; and required, at the close of a day so constituted, to record in a system of the company's choosing that the day was productive.
And of the rotation I shall say this.
A man is given a telephone that he may not turn off. He is paid for the hours in which he is awake and typing and not for the hours in which he is unable to sleep, this being a distinction contrived by an office he cannot name. He is woken at three, and at four, and at ten past four, by an alarm configured by somebody who left the company in April, against a threshold nobody now remembers choosing, inside a system no living person has read entire; and he must stand in the circle at nine, and he must be cheerful in it, the circle being a ceremony of morale, and low morale being a performance concern.
I have watched a capable man of thirty-four acquire a tremor in the left hand which presents only between two and five in the morning and only in the week that he carries the telephone.
There is no form upon which to report this. There is a form upon which to report a defect in the software.