I will show you fear in a handful of dust

One of the staff on the Sales Desk (looking after National Accounts) is Keith Williams.  Aged in his early twenties, he looks preternaturally middle-aged, and despite being a keen sportsman he is already putting on weight and his hair is thinning.  He began working for the company in the warehouse as an operative, but was promoted to the Sales Desk following a sudden vacancy (he is quite bright, and has A-levels in mathematics and science).  He likes to sing loudly when his mood is buoyant.  During the morning he was singing an O-Zone song (O-Zone are a band from eastern Europe – I think they are Croatian).  The song was very catchy in a repetitive sort of way.  Obviously Keith Williams didn’t know all the Croatian words and filled in gaps with jibberish of his own composition.  This went on almost all of the morning and I could tell it was beginning to annoy people.

At the end of the morning, in an unusual step, the Sales Director (Neil Hancock, who is my line manager and a person I have very little respect for) went round the office asking people to take their lunch-break between 1 and 2pm.  Gradually a rumour went round that an announcement of some kind was expected…

The announcement, when it came, was so understated as to be an anticlimax.  Part of the Sales Desk is to be moved to the Glasgow office, and “displaced” personnel here are to be reallocated to other departments (where I suspect they will be given such tedious and pedestrian jobs that they get bored and leave).  Probably one person at least will be moved into Marketing.  The mood this afternoon on the Sales Desk was completely deflated, and those affected gathered in little groups, their defiance alternating with a sort of depressed hopelessness.  A bland official announcement, and the resulting reorganisation, has profoundly affected their lives.

TS Eliot writes in The Waste Land:  I will show you fear in a handful of dust.  I was reminded of that line as I saw Keith Williams after the announcement, quiet and subdued and no longer singing.