You know how it is, you’re racing to finish a nice software product that you feel sure is going to be a hit. Then the phone rings

“Hi. Bruce here at PersonnelFinder International. How are you doing?”

“Oh go boil your head, Bruce!”

“No, Phil, you’re supposed to say ‘fine, thanks’, and I say ‘Good, good’. You are no respecter of protocol. Anyway, I have a job for you, in the City of London with a bank. ”

“No, I have a brilliant application I’m writing that the public will just love and…” He mentioned a sum of money.

“Not even for that much a month will I leave the creation of this masterpiece I….”

“No, Phil, a week.”

And so it was, several years ago, that I arrived outside the rather shabby, but enormous, concrete offices of the Imperial Bank, in a dingy street behind Fenchurch Street. I was uneasily pressed into the regulation charcoal suit, black shoes, white shirt and tie that looked vaguely ‘university’ but wasn’t.

I was ushered into my office. Office? Suddenly, I felt vaguely uneasy. All my work in the City of London had been in large Spartan open-plan offices where everyone wallowed together in an egalitarian soup. It was even one of the perks in these places to dabble a bit in the market from insider information screamed into phones by the traders. Here, by contrast, it was quiet, with a large window that gave a glorious view over the street. I had a large, but rather shabby, desk too, and a desultory plastic pot plant.. I soon pressed on with the application that I’d been hired to produce. This meant a great deal of liaison with senior members of the IT and banking staff. Puzzlingly, none of these guys had offices as splendid as mine, I discovered. In fact, the more senior they were, the more likely they were to be squirreled away in the concrete bowels of the building. I only rarely managed to arrange a meeting in my splendid office. Managers seemed slightly nervous to come, and occasionally gazed apprehensively out of the window as if frightened of the light, like werewolves.

I shrugged and decided that, at long last, they had recognized the value of my contributions to banking. Hmmm.. I still felt uneasy. At one point, I met the guy who used to have my splendid office. In vain I probed for an explanation as to why he now occupied a dark corner near the lift-shaft with no natural light. He just looked shifty under cross-examination.

It was a month or so later that I was told of the real reason for my elevation to prestige office. As always, the fount of revelation was the Facilities Management office. As is traditional in the City of London, the role of managing facilities is given to a stroppy cockney git, on the principle of fighting fire with fire ‘Be stirring as the time; be fire with fire; Threaten the threatener and outface the brow of bragging horror’ (Shakespeare: King John, 1597). We bonded immediately, due to our shared love of Young’s bitter and our intense contempt of the establishment.

During a pleasant evening in a dark Victorian pub opposite the bank, he became garrulous. It was the height of the IRA bombing of London, and the Imperial Bank’s prestigious headquarters had, the previous year, been the target of a ‘successful’ bomb attack. So had other banks, and it was obvious that the IRA intended to destroy London’s ability to function as a financial centre. These bombs were detonated in vans which relied mainly on blast for their effect. Anyone near a window was likely to be shredded by flying glass. Experience had shown that anyone in the concrete core of the building was safe, whereas those unfortunate people near a window were not.The phase of bombing had quietened somewhat but the area was evidently still on high alert for another outrage.

My friend, with some exaggeration, explained that the management had decided that it seemed wrong to give any offices of a major retail bank the appearance of a deserted building, so all contractors were given offices near the windows. The more dispensable you were, the nearer the light. Contractors, he added gleefully, were given particularly favored spots as the bank had no liability at all to them in the event of them being slaughtered by a terrorist action. My friend, the stroppy cockney git, laughed into his beer: Unkindly, I thought. Once I’d been told this, my splendid office somehow held less attraction for me. It was hard to concentrate on my work whenever a large unmarked van parked in the street below. I felt somehow as I imagine a pig would, that discovers that the true reason why he is looked after so assiduously by the farmer and fed so well is not the result of the respect due to his dignity.

I tried to transfer to a less distracting spot near the centre of the building, and close to the fire escape. They laughed. This was going to be tricky. One day, I’d popped in to see the Stroppy Cockney Git in his cozy place near the spine of the building and noticed a laptop lying abandoned on a side-table.

“Yours?” I asked,

“Nah, Mate, It’s the trouble and strife’s.” (trans: ‘No, dear fellow, it belongs to my wife’). “The Blahddy fink ‘s cattle-trucked”. (Trans: ‘alas, the device is broken’), ” Blahddy ear-ache I’m get’n too”.

“I’ll fix it for you.”

In those days, I was handy with a screwdriver, and had the Blahddy thing purring in a couple of hours, though, as always, there was a screw left. I never got to understand why. A sign or message from the divinity?

He was pathetically grateful when I returned the laptop, and was very amenable to the request I put in to deck out my office with the very best office furniture that he could lay his hands on. It seems I had averted a ‘domestic’.

A few days later, I held a meeting in my office to discuss the progress of the project. The bank’s management were strangely reluctant, but in view of the importance of the project, they came. The managers recoiled in shock at the new splendor of the office, almost forgetting their nervous apprehension about being too near the windows during any terrorist outrage. The shock of the office furniture had really got in amongst them. The meeting was brief and terse. There were significant looks between them: it went against all their instincts. The room was one thing, the furniture quite another.

My next request for a move to a cozy dark office home that was surrounded by concrete in the sheltering core of the building near the basement was met by an uncharacteristic willingness. It was near the fire-escape too. I felt very proud: I was moving down in the world, I felt.