Real, petty life crowds out the big picture

The world three feet from our desks is more important to us at work than larger, impersonal concerns

‘WHY IS it,” the radio presenter asked me, “that you have such a negative view of working women?”

“Um,” I said. “I don’t.”

She pointed out that I had just written a novel (In Office Hours, published by Penguin) in which the female chief economist of a large oil company spends more time agonising over the colleague she has fallen in love with than over her latest oil price forecast or over the prospects for renewable energy.

“Surely that doesn’t put working women in a good light?” she asked.

On the contrary, I said, this has nothing to do with working women and everything to do with the human condition. Wild, obsessive love is more

distracting than any oil price forecast. While it lasts (which isn’t usually long) it simply trumps everything else.

She didn’t look convinced. If I had thought about it a bit more I would have summoned Shakespeare to my defence and argued that it is no coincidence he didn’t compose a sonnet beginning: “Shall I compare this spreadsheet to a summer’s day?”

It is not just that love is compelling, it is that most of the big things we are supposed to think about during the working day aren’t terribly compelling at all.

Freud said that love and work are the two cornerstones of humanity. Which one looms larger and wakes us at 3am depends: sometimes it is love and sometimes it is work. Yet even when it is work, it isn’t the big things that count, it is the world three feet from our desks.

I work in the newspaper industry, which is dying. Have I ever lost one single second’s sleep over that? No. I am interested in its demise intellectually but emotionally am quite unmoved. This is because I am old enough for it not to matter much to me – the current model will just about see me out.

In the past three decades I have watched with relative unconcern my employer make profits followed by losses and then profits again. If those profits or losses had reflected well or badly on me, I would have minded a lot. At one point, when my job looked slightly insecure and when colleagues who I liked were leaving, then I minded a great deal. Otherwise, not.

Instead, what concerns me are pettier things: the disposition of my boss; the quality of my own latest column; and whether there are Maltesers in the vending machine. It might not be attractive, but it is perfectly natural – and I don’t think it’s a girl thing, either.

It is quite unreasonable to expect an oil economist to long for the oil price that is best for their company. Instead they long for the price that will show their latest forecast to have been right.

Equally the three men who campaigned so inhumanly hard to become the British prime minister didn’t do so just because they cared about pensioners and the size of the deficit. What they wanted above all was the notepaper with 10 Downing Street written on the top.

One of the comedies of working life is pretending to care about big things. If you are prime minister you need to play very hard at this game. If you are a corporate foot soldier you don’t have to try so hard. Indeed, you can sometimes even afford to show a little glee when things go wrong for your company. After all, bad news is usually quite exciting.

Very rarely, however, some genuine caring about big, distant things is called for. If I were a BP employee and had been looking at the pictures of the orange stuff on birds and thought about the 11 dead and that it was “my” oil lying on the sea, I think I would feel a twinge, despite knowing it had nothing to do with me. Yet even then, these big disasters don’t linger in the hearts of the corporate man and woman for very long: real, petty life crowds in soon enough.

When I interviewed Lord Browne a couple of months ago, the former head of BP said that he had never lost a night’s sleep because of work. If you were the sort of person who fretted unduly about work, he said, you shouldn’t be the chief executive of a big company.

Some might say that if Lord Browne had fretted a bit more, the company’s record on safety might look rather better than it does. But that’s a cheap shot. I’m with him: the real things that cause us anguish should be the personal things. Ironically, it was those personal things that did for him – and for the characters in my novel – in the end. – (Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010)