Tel

  Chapter 2

  One positive of living in Marston Wood was its fairly close proximity to work which was a good thing because I wouldn’t have thanked you for having to travel more than half an hour to that grim place. I didn’t love my job in all honesty. I didn’t hate it either but I never grew up dreaming of days full of administrational wonders, visits to the photo copier and personal development meetings that developed very little than a sore head.

  I can’t imagine too many teenagers eagerly meeting their school careers advisor with the hopes and dreams of working in administration. When I’d had my meeting with Mrs Shelby, a scarily skinny spinster with a lisp, I informed her of my intention to be a Green Keeper, where I could motor along on a lawn mower, carefully cutting the pristine fairways without a care in the world and occasionally getting a free round of golf into the bargain but somewhere along the line my plans had gone drastically wrong. I had taken the first job I could after University as a stop gap before something better crossed my path but then one thing led to another, nothing better did cross my path and I was still an Administrator for Clays Bank.

  Officially, I wasn’t called an Administrator rather I was an Executive, which was pretty much the same thing but with a fancier title. It’s meant to sound like a position of responsibility, almost powerful, but realistically it just meant I got more crap than the tea boy and for barely anymore pay. In some cases I got less. Gillian Smith, in the post room, was on more money than me and she could barely read or write but had a penis enlarging short skirt and a dirty mouth and I had neither, so I kind of understood.

  Regardless of her pay, I’m sure Gillian Smith was like me in finding the Monday morning rise to work a painful thing to accomplish. I often felt like lifting the phone and putting on my best dying voice, blaming a mysterious stomach bug which had all but ripped out my intestines, not to mention my backside, but I always did the honourable thing; rose at seven and showered for ten minutes, dressed myself without much care before catching the commuter train into Bristol town centre, ready to take the soulless lift to the dreaded fourth floor before battling with the daily batch of office politics.

  Lifts have always been a bit of an enigma to me. Rarely a word is said between the lift riders. People fear casually chatting about what they did at the weekend or the turkey stroganoff they had for dinner the previous night because they worry their all-important conversation will be listened to by the nosey parkers within earshot. I found it quite alarming that I worked with hundreds of people, all whose names and faces I almost knew, yet not a single word was spoken between the large majority of us unless it was by way of a nod or mere grunt before we returned to look squarely at our scuffed shoes. Maybe it was good old fashioned British politeness, maybe a lack of confidence or even arrogance, but I put it down to all three.

  Still, it’s an unwritten rule that seems to work, everyone knows their place, very few break the silence and we all ride skywards safe in the knowledge that we don’t need to speak to each other. But, there is the odd occasion when the rule is broken, when a motor-mouth gets in and decides that it’s okay to share their intellectual property, that it’s perfectly fine to tell the entire lift what they had for dinner the night before but you should see the look on people’s faces when they do. Astonishment is not the word. Disgust is putting it politely. How dare they break the silence? Who are they to ignore The Rules of the Lift? There seems to be a communal understanding that this person will get lift lynched unless they have something outrageously interesting to say to the rest of us. Teeth begin to grind and fists clench tighter as the lift riders visualise their attack.

  Unfortunately, one Monday morning, such a rule breaker directed their transgression towards me.

  “Morning Terence,” said my immediate manager Katrina Wilcox, one in a line of what felt like a hundred middle managers, as she tucked into a croissant, pastry sitting helplessly on her chin. I sheepishly smiled back, mostly at the other people in the lift, as way of expressing my sincerest apologies for such a violation of conduct.

  “I’m looking forward to today; we have a special presentation on process improvements and blue sky thinking,” she announced in this god awful Scottish accent, as if she was summoning phlegm from the depths of her gut. I did wonder what blue sky thinking actually meant but I wasn’t about to ask although my silence seemed enough for her to justify a definition.

  “Well, you know Terence, it’s not PC to say brainstorming anymore, so we say blue sky thinking. It’s a very good way of sourcing the gold from employees’ heads,” she told me before tapping my cranium, just to confirm her point, and make me want to strangle her even more.

  I could tell she was close to a sadistic bludgeoning before her body parts were jettisoned down the shaft. Not only had she broken the golden rule of the lift but she had also caused what seemed like communal dry vomiting as the lift riders collectively stared at the puffs of pastry positioned around her body. I presumed she was a gonna, especially when I caught a glimpse of the twenty stone bearded man in the corner turning his tie into a noose but, unfortunately, we quickly arrived at our fourth floor destination and she disembarked unaware of the psychological damage she had caused to half a dozen people.

  Katrina would get her comeuppance though. You see, I had decided to air a few home truths about Katrina Wilcox and her fellow managers. For quite a while I knew they had been breaking all manner of laws in the process of their job, fudging documents where necessary and shredding others when they thought no one noticed. I presumed it was because they didn’t have the knowledge to do their jobs properly so tried to cover up by cheating the system but there was the realistic possibility that it went higher than them; after all scum bags are only hired by other scum bags.

  People knew, of course they did, it didn’t take a genius to work it out but heads were buried. Nobody wants to lose their job, especially in a recession, so it eventually became the norm, almost a running joke between staff but slowly my ignorance turned into a conscience which transformed into anger and so, after time, I knew something had to be done to stop it and put an end to the lying and the cheating. I had been brought up to do an honest job, do it right and most importantly, tell the truth, so it was ingrained in me to be a whistleblower.

  I’d read the rules. I could be an external whistleblower or an internal one but the latter was my preference, simply because I didn’t want to take the whole company on by myself, I wanted someone on the inside with me, fighting my corner and agreeing with my principles. The guidance offered by the Financial Conduct Authority suggested that that person should come from the Compliance department as they were duty bound to follow the same moral code as myself and set the wheels in motion to put the record straight within the company and the wider financial community. A fine from the FCA would follow, there would be no question, people might lose their jobs on the back of it but I believed the right people would go, the very same who had been cheating the system all along. That’s the way the world works right? You do something wrong and you are punished. That’s how I saw it anyway. Surely, everyone else saw it in the same light? Well, it didn’t take too long for me to find out but not until the dilemmas in my professional life were overshadowed by those in my personal one.