BUSINESS LIFE:A RIFLE through my colleague's drawers was long overdue, writes LUCY KELLAWAY
By last week I was wearing a pair of shoes that were savagely slicing into one of my toes and I asked around the office to see if anyone had a plaster. A colleague opened her desk drawer and started to sift through a jumble of pens, pills, sachets of ketchup, a tennis ball, some batteries, a mug and an extraordinarily large number of plastic forks and spoons before she alighted on a slightly crumpled plaster with a leopard skin design and gave it to me.
I have been writing about office life for almost two decades, but have never given much thought to the tangle of history, habit and happenstance that occurs in a desk drawer.
This, I now see, is a serious oversight: if a rummage through someone’s bathroom cabinet can be revealing, a rummage through their office drawers is far more so.
Take one of my colleagues. I’ve studied him for many years and have observed that he’s great on detail, dispatches work promptly and has a generous way of taking tiresome tasks on himself rather than shunting them on to others.
Had I only looked in his drawers I could have short-circuited this discovery process. There I would have found, alongside regimented pens and paper knives, a neat sewing kit: whenever a button goes missing, he swings into action himself and fixes it at once.
A little further away sits someone who keeps a set of ear defenders designed for a rifle range, which he uses to drown out the noise of other people. The message (which I’ve already picked up from working with him these past 25 years): he’s bloody-minded and proud of it.
It’s not just the objects that are telling. It’s the juxtaposition. So the drawer containing some leftover antibiotics, a painted Serraglio fan, some wasabi and a speeding ticket from the Comune di Firenze, tells a different story to another that houses 57 assorted pens most of which no longer work and a 1972 Rolodex and a Powerball Gyroscope.
More revealing still is whether the drawers are locked. As a non-locker I rather look down on people who are always fiddling with keys. Do they trust colleagues so little they think they are going to steal their staples and dried-up Pritt sticks?
To further my inquiries, and to save me from the dishonourable business of rifling through other people’s drawers, I sent out an email to everyone at the FT inviting them to go through their own, and report back on the oddest thing there.
What they owned up to was quite surprising. A rubber duck. A peach feather boa. Some aquarium sealant. A 300tn Zimbabwe dollar note. A mouse (of the animal variety).
A copy of Poetry of the Taliban. A yellowing copy of a grandmother’s PhD thesis on English naval policy 1880-1895. A sticky and slightly smelly lump of tar sand. And a cute little survival kit issued by JPMorgan after 9/11 containing a heroically useless whistle and a paper mask.
There were also some more controversial items. One male colleague admitted to five pairs of women’s shoes in his drawer. Another to having a whip, a third to a flick book showing a gyrating Agent Provocateur underwear model. Most worryingly of all, one man had a section of rusty metal bar in a zip-up bag. However, all four swore blue murder that they had no idea how such items came to be in their desks, and I believe them. Sort of.
You might notice that I’ve skilfully avoided revealing what is in my own desk drawers. I’ve had a quick look and the main thing that’s in there seems to be alcohol. People keep giving it to me, and as you can no longer drink at work it’s been mounting up.
There are also three chargers from phones I no longer own, and the box that my long-defunct, first ever BlackBerry came in. There are many obsolete tape recorders. A lot of business cards of people I have no memory of ever having met. And hundreds of newspaper cuttings from before the internet made such yellowing scraps quite unnecessary.
The only things of any possible value in my drawers are letters of compliment and complaint that I’ve preserved from the days when people still wrote them. My favourite, from the ex-boss of MS, Sir Richard Greenbury, goes like this: “I found your comments unreasonably sarcastic, even for you.”
Otherwise there is nothing that serves any purpose, yet I don’t want to get rid of any of it. At home I am a draconian chucker-outer, but at work, where change is so fast and so dehumanising, I am clinging on. The contents of my drawers might be duff, but they’re not going anywhere.
