One thing deeply

I can’t remember the last time I deliberately made a colleague cry, in fact I don’t believe I ever have or ever would, but Nathan, our new guru, took this as hard evidence I was TOO NICE, and vowed that he and I working together would unleash the nasty within me, whatever it took. It would be a challenge, especially when he discovered that even after picturing the fat, loud head-of-marketing twunt, or one of the twitchy, scuttling research wonks, or a human resource tickboxer, or an cartoon-socked IT tech, I still couldn’t think of anything nasty to say.

‘What do you see inside your self, Dave?’

I am a Catholic, and inside me floats a wisp of white mist - my soul. Each time I commit a wrong deed, a black mark appears, which is fully wipable for venial sins, but in the case of mortal sin, removable only by Catholic confession. I explained all this to Nathan.

‘Good, good. Dave. I like that. What’s in the middle of this clump of mist?’

I focussed hard and told him I could see a black blob with a red switch on the side.

‘Good, very good. That’s the nasty. That’s your nasty. Together we will switch that nasty on.’

We sat together and concentrated, eyes tightly shut, and slowly, inside the clump of mist, a hand came into view, and, on Jonathan’s command, it flipped the switch; a long dying gasp, something heavy plummeting down a deep shaft within me.

‘I want to hear about people storming out of rooms, screaming, hitting you, and smashing things.’ Jonathan said. ‘After that, we will move onto dealing with your time management issues.’

But despite flipping on the nasty switch, it wasn’t easy. I told Sue in communications that Cliff Richard was dead, but she told me not to be a twat; I told Ray Pontefract he had Britpop hair; I asked Grianne if she knew she looked like fat comic Jo Brand, but all they did was smile; understanding, pitying. What was wrong? Evil should be pumping out like black milk.

I gave up and sat next to Ben who was struggling with his script for the hundred best motorcycle and side car comedy moments, a programme inspired by a scene in The Office when Gareth gets in the sidecar belonging to a couple of swinging couple. Yet comedy motorcycle and side-car moments like this had not recurred as often in the history of television and film comedy as our producer expected, and Ben was struggling to find the other ninety-nine clips. The clips he had found were all obscure: Jerry Lewis, Laurel and Hardy, On The Buses, a seventies sitcom called Lucky Fellah (a bubble car, not a motorbike and sidecar) and several war films. Ben was watching a scene from Wallace and Gromit when I told him my feelings about sidecars. A sidecar upsets the balance of a motorbike, destroying its grace as it tilts round a bend, dragging it back when it vrooms away from a junction, sucking out its sex, its danger, its dark, seductive beauty. Attaching a sidecar to a bike was like bolting a lead coffin to a butterfly.

Ben didn’t look at me or say anything. I could hear him breathing, very deeply, very slowly. He was looking at a frozen image from Wallace and Gromit, and mouthing to himself the text that ran above it the top one hundred motorcycle and sidecar comedy moments: number seven. Abruptly, he pushed the computer’s off switch - without saving his work, closing the programme or logging off - and picked up his bag. While buttoning his coat he looked at me in an intense way I’d never seen before, as if he could see a universe in my face, a world of opportunities almost lost but still within reach.

After Ben left, I went round the whole office giving everyone else my view on his or her project, and each of them did the same thing. Soon the office was empty but for me. I looked out of the window to the street below at the line of staff streaming out of the front door.

I returned to Nathan’s office, but he’d also gone, and I sat alone in the consulting room staring at his filing cabinet. I took down one of his management text books - Find Your Emotional Animal – and turned a few pages. I was a hedgehog. A fox knows many things; a hedgehog knows one thing deeply. The book recommended I should keep a picture of my emotional animal on my wall for inspiration so I ripped out the picture of a hedgehog and took it over to my workstation. Until today the personalisation of desks had not been allowed.