It’s like watching a pack of animals (wild dogs perhaps)

There is a group of people on the sales desk who have developed a habit of walking into the office in the morning with their shirt collars open and their ties loose round their necks, not yet done up. They then stand at their desks for several minutes doing up their ties and chatting to each other. It’s like watching a pack of animals (wild dogs perhaps) socialising and reinforcing group solidarity.

This morning there was a commotion on the sales desk when Scott Ryan was in the office, liaising with his assistant Adam Russell (at nineteen Adam Russell is one of the youngest people in the company. He is very impressionable and influenced by the people around him. He especially asked for a transfer so that he could be Scott’s assistant).

Scott Ryan is the Area Sales Manager for the Northern Home Counties. He has only been in the job for about a year, and in that time has been tremendously successful (previously he was in the telesales section for about six years, having joined the company from school). The senior sales managers talk approvingly about his achievements, and the money he has brought in, and try to analyse his sales success so that it can be replicated in other areas.

He is probably the most popular of all staff. His appearance is striking, with golden hair cropped very short, blue eyes, expressive eyebrows. A football player (but not for the company team, despite frequent calls for him to join them), he has a way of swaggering around the offices with a very loud cheerful voice, and a style of continuously laughing and smiling, so that you would think he was friends with everyone.

He has a dark side and comes from a family of half-brothers some people say are very violent. I once witnessed him losing his temper with one the directors, shouting abuse at him so all the office could hear (the director just stuttered and attempted to apologise and explain). Several times a year he goes off for the weekend (usually with Manish Qayyum, sometimes with some of the other sales reps) to Amsterdam to visit the city’s cafés where they can legally take soft drugs. His best friend in the company used to be Clive Ripley, another of the sales reps, but when Clive Ripley went off suddenly to live in Thailand (describing a destination similar to the film The Beach) Scott confessed to me that he felt Clive Ripley had really been his rival, and that he was always struggling to keep him from poaching his clients.

This morning he came to the marketing department (where I was on my own) and talked to me for ages about his recent holiday, with his fiancée, in Cyprus. We discussed all aspects of the island - the myth of Aphrodite, the trouble between the Cypriot Greeks and the Cypriot Turks, the military bases Britain still keeps on the island (sovereign bases, where we can do what we like). His time in Cyprus had included a day trip to Egypt to see the pyramids. So we talked about Egyptian civilisation, the Cairo Museum, the treasures of Tutankhamen. I was surprised he hadn’t heard of Akhnaten, and we talked about the eighteenth dynasty, the appearance of monotheism, the theory of Sigmund Freud. He kept returning to the subject of religion, not a subject I wanted to talk about. For over an hour he stood by my desk, propped against a filing cabinet, asking me questions.