End of an Era

Barry was having a difficult day. A couple of hours ago, he'd been put 'at risk of redundancy' by the company. Whilst wrapped in all kinds of contractually obliged nonsense, this basically meant he was fucked. It'd nearly happened plenty of times before and he'd got off lightly, but those days were different, when he'd had enough colleagues to stay unionised, a force to be reckoned with. No arbitration or workers' solidarity this time, not since Thatcher.

No one would want him at his age, thought Barry, not anywhere good. His experience made him not just expensive, but over qualified too, and his entire sector was downsizing or being outsourced anyway. What they'd now rebranded as Maritime Solutions was all online these days since some modernisation initiative or other, and even the administrative work for the lasses in Cycles had morphed into a privately financed initiative run from abroad. Front of house staff came and went on an almost monthly basis, generally giving customers the impression all was well, but there was nothing left upstairs. Deskilling, they'd called it. Rubbish. He hadn't lost a single one of his, just the chances to apply them.

The auditors had labelled him unviable, but it would be the performance objectives that would seal the tomb. Numbers, numbers. What place had they here? This was an old man's game, a craft, a hard slog to do things right. Just two decades ago, suggest to his lot that they should focus on throughput or volumes or leveragising maximal market synergies and you'd be lucky to walk away. The job was a job that you did until it was done, not a set of viewing figures and performance metrics for some executive's assistant to shred.

No more audience share, no more job, not after this. A for-the-records evaluation on Friday, then gather your things, help yourself to a slice of sorry pie and quietly go fuck yourself. Not even the end was handled properly. A list of root passwords and the odd stray command, a folder from finance and a ransom demand. Those are a few of my favourite things. Entertaining such notions crossed his mind, but it was echoed by the hollow question of whether anyone would even care, and thus it was dismissed.

Whatever trivial gesture he made, it wasn't going to equal the enormity of the history around him. He recollected how this used to be a job that the everyman aspired to. When his building first opened, passers-by on the street would literally gawp up at its majestic marble features, wondering what sort of success they would have to become if they were ever to claim a place in its halls. Now it was an greying oddity, an outmoded colossus amongst an orbiting mash of modernist metal and glass, barely a living soul inside.

One last unread email to deal with tonight. It explained the absolute operational importance of the handoff he'd have to start tomorrow. Not likely, he chuckled. There would be no closure gained from this, no leaving ceremony, just another week but with none more to follow it. Tomorrow he would be quite ill.

He shoved the contents of a drawer into his bag, and picking up his things, he ambled downstairs and into the foyer, pausing to switch off the lights. It was a starry night outside, a carefully engineered pattern he knew well. He paused to take in its impressive vastness, then solemnly strolled away home across the battered excuse of a car park, without even giving the clichéd glance back it demanded. He wouldn't grant them such significance.

In the darkness at his newly vacated desk, his telephone rang out, and discovering no one left to do its bidding, the computer drew a beautiful spiral.