Julia's Outburst : Part 2 : Clash

Julia craved for freedom from this slavery. Her artistic and literary talents were completely ignored and she existed in a routine of incredible boredom. She desired intensely to turn her head to things far more edifying and civilised than the empty numbers and computer chips which the working world placed so much emphasis on.

Relgol was new here, having arrived only four months before. In the first few days of her new post she was invited to read files, observe the House workers at work, and to think about how the systems might be improved. Julia might have thought this was a senseless task. If the workers who had been there a long time and the managers who had studied these things in the past could not find further improvements to make, she hardly thought that a newcomer could in her first few weeks find ways which would improve their work.

And what was “improvement” anyway? To an employer or a top manager it meant squeezing more work out of the same number or even less employees. To an employee “improvement” almost always meant quite the opposite. Why should it be celebrated as a progress? In truth Relgol was a “hatchet man”. She was an officer hired, who had no ties to the workforce and was therefore psychologically unattached and independent, who could be used to pressurise the workforce into working harder and freeing more profits for the House beneficiaries. Relgol was effectively a mercenary brought into a position of responsibility.

‘This is a form which we must all fill in from now on,’ said Relgol sweetly.

‘Oh yes, that looks interesting,’ Julia felt like saying, but held back. She had seen forms before. Yes, she knew it was a form. She had seen something much like it before, indeed many times over until she had almost drowned in the things.

‘What do we need it for?’ said someone.

‘Another one?’ said another. Julia smiled. She had not needed to speak her thoughts. It was being done for her.

‘This is being introduced so that we can measure the time we spend on different tasks, so that we may compare the times it takes one of us to do a task with the times it takes someone else. If there are any problems we will be able to see them by the comparison of timings.’ Julia felt the shivers start to run down her spine. It was happening again. The attempts to squeeze the last drops from all of them. Soon they would be jumping at the approach of the managers, afraid to talk or relax. The work would become continuous and moral pressures would be brought to bear on them, to shape up, and to become like everyone else. Was this the way nature intended her life to be lived, under constant scrutiny and petty pressure?

After four months Relgol’s methods had not changed markedly. Julia might have thought that the new manager would have been content in having proved herself to higher management, that her enthusiasm for analysing systems and trying to think of ways to improve them would have diminished after a time. Once the new manager was established surely she would relax. But Julia and it seemed some of the other staff, who were willing to venture an opinion, began to appreciate that she was just beginning to get into her stride. Having been friendly and talkative at times to begin with and willing to talk about non work matters as well as the technical subjects of work which seemed to interest her the most, she had not seemed too distant. However as the targets of higher management came down to her and she considered ways of achieving them she seemed to have recognised that if she was to satisfy the targets she would have to seriously implement improvements in the output of her “team”. She attempted to do this by small “consultations” with the individuals of her staff, informing and instructing them not only in the use of the “new” methods which would make them become more efficient but also burdening them with “quality improvements” which would improve the detail, the information provided to customers and file readers, and the better presentation of documents and files. Many of her ideas were perfectly sensible, some were a touch “idealistic” or timewasting, and others were pointlessly unnecessary.

Julia could see that it would probably take her longer to complete many of the jobs she had to do now, but she soon realised that it was not worthwhile to point this out to Relgol. Julia imagined Relgol as a kind of robot programmed to carry out all tasks management suggested to her without complaint or question. If targets were doubled Julia was sure she would not have complained. The current targets were obviously unrealistic for most of the staff but Julia and the other staff said nothing. There was no point in questioning or complaining, it would only look bad in the eyes of managers, and might even bring them trouble.

Relgol was not open to criticism, Julia suspected, and nobody tested this because they did not wish to find out whether she actually was, but when Julia answered Relgol’s constructive criticisms of her work performance with honest, and what seemed to Julia to be sensible answers, Relgol would listen briefly and then reiterate and insist on her own methods. Julia concluded that Relgol was not particularly open minded although she appeared intelligent.

Relgol was however a very formidable manager for the main reason that she was quite capable of leading by example. Because she took her work so seriously and had a quick logical mind she was herself very efficient. Aside from managing she also performed the work which Julia herself and many of the team performed. Relgol’s personal performance outstripped all of them and certainly was well in advance of Julia’s. It seemed that Relgol had powers of concentration in excess of everyone else. There were other team members who were very much more efficient than Julia but none in this section of the House could match Relgol. This made it very difficult to criticise her or to complain to higher management. Her performance could not be faulted except for the feelings of resentment which gradually increased in Julia, and probably some of the other staff as well.

One day after Relgol had been managing in the House for five months and there was a high pressure of workload on the whole team, she came over to Julia in the evening at seven o’clock, the time when Julia would always leave work if she could. ‘Can I just have a little chat, Julia?’ she said sweetly in the artificially friendly way she often used when she wanted to find out more about a member of staff’s work psychology. More often than not she had something to say which would improve the employee’s methods, and enable them to become more productive or to improve the quallity of their work.

Julia recognised the signs. ‘Oh no,’ she thought. ‘Not again. Why does she have to choose the end of a day at work, when I am tired and fed up, to come at me with her textbook prescriptive solutions?’

Relgol was rarely really interested in listening to the employees’ own suggestions. She would have her own ideas worked out in her own mind and nothing would deflect her from pushing her methods onto the staff, even though many of them might have been there a lot longer than Relgol and have perfectly good reasons for not wanting to follow Relgol’s new methods. Relgol’s methods were very much designed for a worker of Relgol’s ability and concentration. Julia found they were not always so appropriate for a person such as herself who had her own ways of thinking and remembering and recording and needed to keep notes to remember what she had done. In Relgol’s view notes should be kept to a minimum and consist of concise words which should immediately, she thought, alert the reader to the exact purpose of the note. Julia privately felt that if she had completely followed Relgol’s “suggestions”, which she couldn’t and didn’t, except to a degree in compromise, she would have wasted far more time in having to look further into other parts of files and records to restore the information which she would have had in her own notes. Relgol’s ideas were fine for Relgol but she actually made more work for Julia whose memory, she found, was not sharp when it came to the dull, lifeless information which work demanded.

‘Yes of course,’ said Julia, hoping that this would only be a short chat and that she would be able to get away.

‘The job you’re working on at the moment: how is it going?’

‘Fine. It is progressing really well, but there is quite a lot more to be done on it,’ replied Julia, knowing where this was leading. She thought she was doing quite well in getting through this job, but “quite well” were not words Relgol seemed to understand. She seemed to expect that everyone else was capable of the clockwork precision which she exuded.

‘You were allotted three jobs this month,’ said Relgol. ‘But it looks like you haven’t finished one yet.’

‘Well I’m doing my best. I did have to work on an adjustment to last month’s jobs and there have been a number of letters to write. I think I am proceeding quite well with this job, considering that I am also using some of the new methods.’ That was it, Julia had to state her case, which surely Relgol already should know, but she took care not to criticise the ridiculous targets she had been set, which she had known were impossible for her to achieve as soon as she had been given them. There was no purpose in arguing against the targets when they were allotted. That would just have made her managers think she wasn’t keen or willing. ‘I will do my best’ was always her approach. She could do no more. Of course her best would be a best which she thought was reasonable, not the one her managers had hoped for, which she viewed as humanly unreasonable anyway. She would do what she thought she owed and what extra they coaxed out of her, which she had no choice about, but no more. She was not a robot.

There was no point in saying what she truly felt about the ridiculous targets, set by higher management, than Relgol. Relgol would do her best to try to convert ordinary human beings into robots capable of meeting the targets. She too would not question them. Julia was in amazement that Relgol, who surely knew the capabilities of the staff, seemed to regard them as reasonable targets. But Relgol, of course, was quite capable of meeting her own targets, because she herself undertook more than her own share of the day to day work.

‘When do you think you will finish this one,’ asked Relgol, no trace of friendliness now, even if it was only artificial. This was a modern manager’s voice, crisp and efficient, wanting straightforward, reliable answers to a question which Julia always felt could never be answered certainly. How could she know when a job would be finished? There were always adjustments, who could predict how many, and a manager like Relgol, in particular, would be very likely to introduce amendments, and suggestions to look into other often unnecessary, in Julia’s view, areas. This extra work could take many days in Julia’s experience.

Julia almost snapped with the anger she felt inside, but as ever she held back. She did not want to come into disfavour. Anger would only make life more difficult for herself an spoil the atmosphere of her relationship with Relgol. After the anger she would still have to work with Relgol. Although Julia knew Relgol might be upset by anger she knew that Relgol’s prime purpose at work, which was most of her life, was to meet the targets set by higher management and that her sudden coldness was not to be taken personally but dictated in Relgol’s mind by the need to get the job done.

‘I can’t be sure when I will have the job finished. I think within the week should be possible, but I expect there may be the need for the usual adjustments, which can take a long time.,’ Julia replied meekly; what could she say?

‘Julia, you have done enough of these jobs. You ought to be able to calculate when you’ll finish them by now. We have jobs queuing up to be done, and you’re well down on target. I am having to cover for some of your jobs, and Daphine and Malwin. We can’t keep on doing that forever. You have had enough time to learn these jobs.’

Julia was shocked and truly upset by now. She had had some of these discussions with Relgol before. Relgol had led her to realise that she was not as efficient at her job as some of the others. Indeed, she was apparently well below the average in this kind of work. Relgol had even said she was replaceable on one previous occasion in order to elicit a promise that she would try harder to speed up her performance of the work. But Julia had always taken these comments in her stride, feeling that although there must be truth in them, her “inefficiency” was merely a mark of her own disinterest in the relatively dull tasks she had to perform. It was perfectly natural for her to find an ordinary job which she was forced to work excessive hours on to be dull. She was surely not alone in that. Only people like Relgol, and there were doubtless quite a few of those in this brainwashed world, although Julia thought her to be an extreme case, would find the slavery of long hours to be excessive. Julia felt that given the conditions of employment, she did a quite reasonable job.

‘You might start to think a bit about working over your lunch to make up time until you’ve finished this job,’ suggested Relgol – it was only what Relgol did herself often enough. The manager thought it reasonable that in the circumstances Julia might follow her leader’s example.

Julia’s anger became intense. A fuse had been lit and so now as Relgol attacked her again her hurt soul reacted with some of the fury she felt inside. She was only allowed half an hour for lunch anyway and she really needed that break in the day to get her through the day.

‘I need my lunch break,’ cried Julia angrily. ‘If I don’t have that I don’t know how I would get through the day. Don’t you realise it helps me to keep working? Preventing me from having a break cannot improve my performance. It will only damage my performance by making me harassed and irritable.’

‘I haven’t had a lunch break for a couple of weeks,’ said Relgol reasonably. ‘There is a lot of work in at the moment. But I achieve my targets and I even finish some of yours when you don’t complete them. I and some of the others are carrying some of your workload. You must learn to speed up or you will be obliged to spend more time at work.’

These were words which Relgol might have thought were perfectly reasonable, designed to spur the slower workers to try harder, but she did not quite appreciate the nerve which she had pricked. Submerged arguments which Julia always kept to herself at work surfaced. These resentments swam around her head every day but now they poured out to defend her from Relgol’s unsuspecting criticism.

‘Look, I am not happy. I am not the same as you or her, or him. We’re all different. It takes me longer to do that task than the rest of you, obviously, because I’m different to you. I don’t have the same inclinations and motivations as you. You may like fiddling about with figures from morning till night and feel proud of yourself if you can do it faster each time. But I am not focused on that alone. I want some kind of balance in my life. To me it is unimportant that I could do it five minutes faster than you. This isn’t a race to me. This is just life. I have to come here and live here every day and I get bored because I am here all the time. I, who like to do different and varied things am obliged to spend the best waking hours of my day here doing these same tasks, designed by people of dull imagination like you to keep us all occupied.

‘You want me only for the output I produce. You’re not interested in me or in these other people. We’re only human robots to you, only good for what we produce. You don’t really want us to feel happy or fulfilled. We are supposed only to be as happy and contented and stable as you need us to be to complete the work you have in store. If we were to become severely depressed and unable to perform our duties then you might consider doing something to get us back to work. You might put us on leave or even tell us to go away on a holiday. Or you might consider that there was someone else capable of working harder under pressure and we would be replaced by a better robot. That’s what business is about. Get the best robots you can and get as much money as you can out of them.’

There, she had said it. Probably she had said far too much and Relgol would punish her in one or more of a myriad of ways. It did not do to speak honestly and openly in the workplace. A person could lose her position, and even her job, the respect of colleagues and the acceptance of managers. She was entering dangerous territory, but it was not Julia who had begun it. Relgol pushed her too far with her unreasonable expectations and her denial of any balance at all in daily life. Julia had no choice but to fight back for what dignity she still had left. In making some sort of stand, however futile it might be, she was at least making the attempt to resist. Too few workers ever resisted. That was why they were in such a mess today. The progressive slavery had crept up on them over many decades and workers had forgotten how to fight, and lost their belief that they could have any effect on the world they lived and worked in.

She waited now for the reaction, but Relgol only shrugged her shoulders and walked out, displaying only irritation at the outburst, on this occasion content to leave the argument hanging in the air so that it would dissipate by the following morning. She was not a woman to allow dissension to damage her devotion to work performance. In the interests of work she would not be so unprofessional as to have a “real” argument with one of her team. She surely cared about the criticism from Julia, because she was a sensitive woman, but she controlled her emotions far more than most. Julia was therefore unable to gauge Relgol’s reaction to her outburst. Relieved to have this argument ended for the moment, Julia collected her things and left the building, not looking forward to the next day when she would have to face the unknown consequences of the things she had said.