Opening my inbox is like stepping cautiously across a perilous minefield. What looks at first glance like an innocent clump of grass can turn out to be something which suddenly goes BANG !
The email from Line Manager, addressed to everyone in our office, starts: "this year we've decided to do something different with our Christmas lunch arrangements".
Oooer. I've only read the first sentence and already I have a sense of foreboding.
I read on. New Boss has apparently dictated that before our Christmas lunch starts, we will be holding our quarterly office-wide meeting (attendance: mandatory). This will start at 2pm and end at approximately 3.30pm. We will then all travel to the appointed restaurant in a different part of the Borough, which means that we won't be taking up our places around the tables until about 4.15pm. The underlying assumption is that we will all be happy to enjoy the sole yearly office outing in our own time.
I read this email on Friday afternoon. On Monday morning, I send an email to Line Manager and New Boss:
"I'm so sorry, I won't be able to join you for this. I have a personal engagement that evening for which I need to leave work at 5pm. I hope you all enjoy yourselves and have a great time".
My personal engagement is real. I have undertaken to sell raffle tickets at my theatre company's Christmas show. I have to be there at 6pm and I have no intention of cancelling. I'm not exactly turning down a free lunch, because of course we are public sector employees and always have to pay for our own. And forking out £25 for an orange juice (because, given past experience, the starters won't arrive until I am due to leave) seems like a poor deal to me.
Later in the week, we have our team meeting chaired by Line Manager. I sit around a table with my 5 immediate colleagues as we all run through what we are currently working upon.
Line Manager starts talking about our forthcoming festive celebration and repeatedly refers to it as "the Christmas lunch".
I feel that I want to say something, but am horribly aware that it will not befit my Stepford Employee status. As a result I endure a severely conflicted 10 minutes, but alas Real Woman wins out.
"May I say something?", I politely interject when Line Manager once again uses this phrase. "You keep calling it the Christmas lunch. But that's not really right, is it? Because it isn't a lunch at all".
There is a silence. The kind of silence which I am getting horribly used to.
"Lunches are usually held at lunchtime, aren't they?" I offer helpfully. "This event isn't going to start until well after 4. So it isn't a lunch".
Line Manager shifts uneasily in his chair. Past form dictates that he would very much like to go scarlet in the face and start making sarcastic comments, but fortunately his behaviour is now curtailed by the fact that six months ago he received a formal reprimand for bullying conduct towards me. So upon this occasion he just mutters something about me having a point, and that the alteration in start time is something that New Boss particularly wanted.
Ex-Army Man is unable to resist demonstrating his special closeness to New Boss.
"Ah yes!" he interrupts. "I was talking to New Boss a week ago about the Christmas lunch, and I told him that what has always happened in the past is that around 4pm some members of the department either go home or go back to the office, and then the rest of us carry on for the evening. And that sometimes we stay out drinking until midnight !!!"
Ex-Army Man obviously doesn't get out much.
"So New Boss said he didn't want people breaking up the occasion. He said that if we didn't start the lunch until after 4pm, then only those who were prepared to stay for the whole thing would come to it".
I can scarcely believe what I am hearing ! Not that New Boss has taken a decision which deliberately excludes a number of members of his workforce from our only (and I mean only) annual "treat", but that Ex-Army Man is being dense enough to give the entire game away in front of me and the other members of our team !?!
Line Manager is a bully but not nearly as dense as Ex-Army Man; and so instantly understands what the latter has done. However, it is too late. The truth is out there!
But Ex-Army Man has not finished. (Ex-Army Man rarely identifies the optimum moment to stop speaking, which can often prove extremely helpful...)
"Also we thought it would be easier for our former colleagues to join us if we started late," he adds. "We're going to invite some of them to come along and they wouldn't have been able to come if we'd had a lunchtime event". (He nearly says "a lunchtime lunch", but this is patently too absurd even for his ears...)
"Sorry, I'm just trying to get this straight," I murmur. "When it came to planning our office Christmas lunch, priority was given to the needs of people who no longer work for Anonymous Council rather than current members of the department? And I think perhaps New Boss may have forgotten that we have two colleagues whose contracted hours are between 8am and 4pm because they have child-care arrangements. So they won't be able to join us at all".
It is dawning on Ex-Army Man that he may have said a weeny bit too much. He starts doing his harrumphing thing, and says "um.....maybe we should have consulted the members of the department on whether or not they supported the proposed change in arrangements."
"Mmmmm," I say.
"Maybe you should have done......?".
But they didn't !
So that's that.
Deck the hall with boughs of holly.
Fa la la la la, fa la la la.
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