And there, right between the sharpened pencil and the burning flame, was I.
My workplace was in the district of Vallila. The new office block on Teollisuuskatu was completed last spring, and our company moved in while the paint was still fresh. Now, when I arrived at our open-plan office every morning, I always felt the same annoyance and disappointment, like a chunk of black ice inside me that refused to melt: I had lost my office. Instead of an office of my own, I now had a workstation.
The word ‘station’ told me everything I needed to know. My ‘station’ was nothing but a narrow, cramped slice at the end of a long desk facing the window. In front of our long desk was another, identical communal desk. Opposite me sat Miikka Lehikoinen, a junior mathematician who regularly regaled me with endless barbecuing anecdotes. On my left sat Kari Halikko, a junior risk analyst with a habit of chuckling to himself for no obvious reason. Apparently, they represented a new generation of actuarial professionals.
I didn’t like them and I didn’t like our open-plan office. It was noisy, full of distractions, interruptions, banalities. But more than anything, it was full of people. I didn’t like the things that so many others seemed to like: spontaneous conversations, the continual asking for and giving of advice, the constant cheap banter. I didn’t see what it had to do with demanding probability calculations. Before moving into our new premises, I tried to explain that our office was a risk-control department, not Disneyland, but this didn’t seem to have any impact on those making the decisions.
My productivity levels had dropped. I still never made mistakes – unlike almost everybody else. But my work was significantly hampered by the constant stream of meaningless chatter concentrated around Halikko’s workstation.
Halikko laughed at everything and seemed to spend most of his time watching videos of high-jumpers’ backsides, ridiculous singing competitions or people with strange pets. Everybody laughed, and one video led to another. Halikko sniggered and guffawed. I thought it unbecoming behaviour for a risk analyst.
The other cause of disturbance was Lehikoinen, who talked non-stop. On Mondays, he told us what had happened over the weekend, in the autumn he told us about his summer holiday, in January I learned all about his Christmas. Things seemed to happen to Lehikoinen. On top of this, he had already been married and divorced twice, which to my mind demonstrated a weak, unpromising grasp of the notion of cause and effect. A junior mathematician ought to know better.
On this particular morning, they were both sitting at their workstations before me. Halikko was scratching the short, shaven hair on his head, while Lehikoinen was pursing his lips, staring at something on the screen that made him drum his fingertips against the arm of his chair. They both looked as though they were concentrating solely on their work, which in itself was surprising. I looked at the clock on the table. It was nine o’clock exactly, the end of our flexible start time.
Since moving into the new premises, I had delayed my departure from home by approximately thirty seconds every morning in order to avoid the daily exchange of meaningless chit-chat before work, and this was the result: arriving only barely in time. This was out of character for me. I placed my briefcase next to my chair and pulled the chair out from beneath the desk. This was the first time I’d heard the sound of its hard, plastic wheels rolling against the carpet. There was something about the sound that made me shiver, like cold fingernails running along my spine.
I booted up my computer and made sure I had everything on the desk for the day’s work. I had been conducting my own research into the influence of shifts in interest frequency on pay-out optimisation in an ever-changing economical world, and I was hoping to conclude my two-week investigation today.
The silence was like water in a glass, transparent but still concrete, tangible.
I typed in my username and password to sign into the system. The boxes on the screen shuddered. A red text beneath the box told me that my username and password were invalid. I typed them again, more slowly this time, making sure the capitals were capitals, the lower-case letters were lower case, and that every letter was as it should be. Again the boxes shuddered. Beneath the box there were now two lines of red text. My username and password were invalid. Additionally – and this was written in BLOCK CAPITALS – I had only one (1) attempt left to enter them correctly. I glanced over the screen at Lehikoinen. He was still drumming the arm of his chair, gazing out of the window at the McDonald’s across the street. I stared at him as I thought through my username and password one more time. I knew them both, naturally, and I knew I’d entered them correctly on both attempts.
Lehikoinen turned his head suddenly, our eyes met. Then just as quickly he looked down at his screen again. The drumming had stopped. The office space hummed. I knew it was the air conditioning and that I could hear it because nobody was talking, but suddenly there was something about the hum that got inside my head. Maybe it was this that stopped me turning around and asking Halikko if he’d had trouble signing into the system this morning.
If there had been problems earlier on, they were long gone: Halikko was tapping his mouse as though he were giving it a thousand tiny fillips one after the other. I placed my hands on the keyboard, and the cold fingernails started scratching my back again. I moved my fingers carefully, concentrating on every key I pressed. Finally, I pressed ‘Enter’, making sure I only pressed it once and that I pressed it with an appropriate dose of briskness and determination.
I didn’t even blink, let alone close my eyes. But the pressing of that button felt significant, as though one moment I was looking at one kind of day, and the next moment I had fallen asleep or otherwise lost consciousness, and when I woke up the landscape in front of me had changed beyond recognition. The day had lost its brightness and colour, the fulcrum of the entire world had shifted. The box in the middle of the screen shuddered a third time. A blink of an eye later, it disappeared altogether.
I heard a familiar voice.
‘Koskinen, my office for a moment?’
2
‘Let’s have a little chat,’ my department manager, Tuomo Perttilä, said. ‘Bounce some ideas around.’
We were sitting in Perttilä’s office, a glass-walled cube whose unpleasant attributes included, alongside the lack of privacy, the fact that there was no table between the people sitting there. To me this was unnatural. We sat opposite each other as though we were in a doctor’s reception – I didn’t want to think which of us would be considered the patient and which the healer. The chairs had hard, uncomfortable metal frames with nowhere for me to put my hands. I placed them in my lap.
‘I want to listen,’ said Perttilä. ‘I want to hear you.’
Physical discomfort was one thing, but I found Perttilä’s new role far more difficult to swallow. I had applied for the position of department manager. I was the more suitable and experienced candidate. I didn’t know how or with what Perttilä – a former sales chief – had convinced the board of directors.
‘This way, I think we’ll understand each other better,’ he continued. ‘I believe if we open up to each other, we’ll find something we share, reach a decision. And a shared decision is the right decision. It’ll only happen once we realise that we’re just two people having a discussion, two people stripped of all excess, with no hierarchy, no forced agenda. Two people sitting round a campfire, coming together, opening up, on an emotional level, moving forward.’