On arriving at the office, she clicked In on the first popup to clock in, and the light changed from red to green. At lunch, she clicked the Lunch button and the light changed from green to amber. After lunch she clicked Lunch again, and the light changed back to green. And then at the end of the day she clicked Out to clock out, and went home, and the icon had no colour.
When she first arrived at the company she remembered thinking how counter-intuitive this was. She made a joke about it to the man sitting next to her – how at lunchtime nobody quite knew if they were coming or going, or something like that – which wasn’t funny and which he didn’t understand, having never driven himself anywhere, and being somewhat dull besides. He also didn’t understand how she could ever have been so confused as a child by a favourite teacher who set their class a riddle: could they name the order in which a classic set of British tricolour traffic lights would typically light up? Red Yellow Green was what they all said, because that was how it seemed to them, understanding only the binary of stop and go, when in fact the truth was more nuanced – Red, Red And Amber, Green, Amber, Red – all of which signified different things in themselves, though most of the children would never have cause or inclination to think about this more than was healthy.
In the time in between her clicks the icon sat in the background, the (green) light minimised to the bottom-right corner of the taskbar. It could not be moved or hid, but she was content to see it there whenever her eyes wandered towards the clock that sat alongside. She remembered how the first computer she ever owned had a similar icon – it was an old IBM laptop, the kind with a CD drive accessed by lifting up the keyboard – and on that machine the lights were for some sort of Utilities program which, when clicked, would display a little table of graphs and charts and numbers and things. Except that on booting up, without clicking anything, the light would always change from green straight to red. The utilities were never satisfied – there was never enough disk space, or memory, or the disk needed defragging. Not that any of these things ever actually caused any problems that she could tell, but the red light was always there, and it was there for so long that eventually it stopped meaning anything at all except its own redness.
At the company, she almost never saw the red light because when she was at her desk she was always clocked in. Often other details of the system seemed more significant – she could always tell when her telephone headset was about to ring because her programs would hang for perhaps half a second before the networked Phone Tracker program popped up on top of everything else to tell her who was calling and what they wanted. It was a sort of mysticism that she had come to associate with computers of all kinds – the way in which the individuality of any machine is experienced through its myriad flaws – but the green light never quite escaped her attention. It was a reminder that she was always being counted.
She was never quite sure whether her affection for the clock light made her a more diligent employee, or simply over-keen to distinguish her work-self from her outdoor-self. Was it unprofessional to charge her every moment present in the office to the company account? She got the impression that others didn’t care much either way – they would laugh it off if they forgot to clock back in after lunch or neglected to clock out before leaving, while she would be quietly mortified by the irresponsibility if either of those happened to her. She hated making approximations at departure times, would round down her guesses to odd numbers to give an impression of honesty. She sometimes wondered if her line manager despaired at the flurry of apologetic emails that invariably followed any of her missed timesheet entries. What pleased her most was to arrive a few minutes before nine o’clock in the morning in order that she might click the In button exactly on the stroke of 9:00.00am.
Hovering her cursor over the green light would bring up a little floating window that displayed her name, job title, the time she had clocked in that morning, and a number. This number was calculated via an arcane algorithm which combined a punctuality rating with any hours worked over the employee’s contracted period, and subtracted unplanned absences (number of days squared and multiplied by the number of spells of absence in a year) to produce a score which, when high enough, was redeemable towards certain benefits: a free lunch, at-desk massage or (eventually) time off in lieu. When low enough, it was grounds for anything from a quiet chat in an unused meeting room to disciplinary action and potential dismissal.
She was fond of a photograph in the kitchen designed to illustrate the principle of the number, which was what they called the EMF, or Extra Mile Factor. It was a photo of a group of athletes caught in mid-stride as they ran towards a camera. The winner was a very tall woman with her arms stretched out either side of her as she threw herself forward to meet the tape – her eyes were huge and white, and there were tears streaming down her face, and her mouth was open and you could see all of her teeth, all except the canine on her upper left side which she’d lost when she had not been breaking tape and winning races – but the thing which always attracted her attention to the poster was the blurred expression on the face of the woman next to the winner. She was out of focus – her mouth was a flesh-shaped smear of anguish across the page, partly obscured by the F in Factor.
The caption read:
HOW DO YOU WIN EVERY RACE?
RUN AN EXTRA MILE.
Her EMF was 526. This was quite high, though not by any means the highest. In theory, only HR had complete access to the scores of all employees, but in practice everyone knew where they stood in relation to their colleagues. They knew who worked and who did not. So she worked hard, and it was a pleasure to see the numbers tick over through the late hours of the day. She thought that the man who sat next to her did not work so hard. Sometimes she would make a mental tally of his hours, and she was sure that they couldn’t possibly add up to his contracted time. But of course she would never say anything to anyone about it.
The most revealing conversation she had ever had with him had followed an afternoon’s Customer Service training in which the whole of their pay grade had filed into the largest meeting room and been sorted into small round tables where they sat alongside people they wouldn’t normally meet. They were told how to talk to people on the telephone and how to address them in emails; they were taught to sandwich bad news in between positive remarks; they were taught when and how to pass calls from one member of staff to another and when to ‘take ownership’ of queries; how to thank callers for rude and aggressive behaviour, and how to conceal their inability to act behind a screen of courtesy and compliment; in short, how to banish negativity, to embrace criticism and to nullify and placate the most argumentative of customers.
Because it was not only the actual customers who were their customers – they were all, it was explained, customers of one another as well. Their managers were their customers. Their colleagues were their customers. They were themselves their own customers, and so in working for customers, they were also working for themselves. They were the company, which stood or fell by their actions alone; they were the authors of their own destiny, and thus had nobody to blame or praise but themselves.
He was very angry about all this. Throughout the class he expressed his dissatisfaction through silence, non-interaction with group activities, and manic doodling. It was not until the coffee break that he leant over his biscuit and told her what a charade it all was. He told her how many times he’d sat through similar exercises in pointlessness (there were many times). He explained how though they might say that we are all each other’s customers, it was never left in any doubt who paid who. What was good customer service? he asked, before telling her: it was doing your job well. That was all there was to it! That was all people expected of staff where the service really mattered – waiters, cab drivers, delivery persons – all you want is for them to do a good job with the absolute minimum of human interaction. Good service is not memorable, he said. It is just good service.
But now we had this American model, he explained, and it had its intentions. At heart it was an attempt to exploit excess productive capacity in order to maximise profit. This excess capacity – the result of extra work on our part, he stressed – would generate increased returns for the shareholders, while producing no real benefits for the staff who worked it into existence. The surplus would then be framed as the product of the management’s own efforts, with the consultants being paid a generous premium for their time (which was proportionately more precious than that of their own pay grade by what he called a truly eye-popping multiplier). They said we would feel better, he said, and our customers would feel better. But do we? he said. I mean, do you? Do you feel better? Or do you just feel tired?
After that she could not take the meeting seriously. She thought about him and what he said. It was not that she agreed with him – she felt he must be wrong, but she could not explain why. She certainly did not feel like she was being exploited. They did not speak for the rest of the day. He went home early, complaining of an upset stomach. She stayed at her desk. She did not care about what he thought of her. She knew for a fact that her score was higher than his.
Sometimes she did feel tired. Other times she felt she didn’t work hard enough. But there came a point in every day where it seemed like staying at her desk was easier than going home. Going home meant a long train ride home through the dark, an hour or two of fighting sleep over her book in the crowded carriage, dinner, then another hour or two of fighting sleep in front of the television or the computer. The office had everything she had at home, and the office had the green light.
She knew that her efforts would be recognised. One night, soon, someone senior enough to be significant but not familiar enough to be a friend would lay a hand on her shoulder after everybody else had gone home and tell her just how much it meant to them all at the company that she put in such effort day after day without any expectation as to her own reward. She was, they would say, the very definition of the Extra Mile.
