Nice Day at the Office, dear?
March 9 2008

A bus station is where a bus stops. A train station is where a train stops. A work station is where... some folks sit all day.

Open a posh paper any Saturday or Sunday and the lifestyle rubbish pages might well have an article about smug middle-class tossers giving up their stressy, overpaid urban lives to become organic farmers in Devon, freelance writers in the Orkneys, or sail around the world. They are living the downsizing dream! They are taking control! Life is not a dress-rehearsal! They have photogenic brats called Toby and Jessica!

Money isn't everything, they tell you, like it's some profound truth they've discovered and you're not privy to. Even though people like this usually already have plenty of money and stand to inherit even more in due course, even if it's just their parents' modest million-pound  semi in Surrey.

Comrades, it's time for the backlash. Upsizing.

I'm freelance, and generally work from home. I maybe go to the offices of Venue* twice a week to check email, do some meetings and a bit of work. The socialising and shopping are important too. I never arrive before 10am and rarely stay after 4pm.

At the end of last year, Venue moved from its old offices in St Andrews to the Death Star Post & Press building in Temple Way. The new office in Venue's corner of the building is très swish (apparently it has a 'breakout zone' where we can 'podcast', whatever these euphemisms mean). But the wider environment - a big office block in a blighted corporate wasteland of office blocks and traffic-choked roads - is vile. A textbook example of how not to build a human-scale, sustainable place where anyone would actually want to travel to work. I mean, you know, office blocks are soooo 20^th century, right?

Given this new scheme of things, I decided to experimentally upsize for a while. Spend a week working in an office. This is what happened:

SUNDAY

I don't have an executive parking space and hate driving in Bristol anyway. So I'm going to walk. Forego usual Sunday night pub session, get an early night and set radio alarm.

MONDAY

Morning
Radio Four comes on at 7am. Roll over and go back to sleep. Woken from doze at 7.50. ‘Thought for the Day’. Aargh! Bland platitudes from a politically correct roster of people of "faith". I don't have a problem with religion, but with all this patronising smarm and lack of intellectual rigour. Spare us this nauseating, vacuous religion-lite.

In much better mood after usual leisurely breakfast with newspapers.

Leave house at 8.50. Walk.

Arrive at office exactly an hour later. OK, so the idea had been to work nine to five, but had already subconsciously decided on 9.30 to 5.30. So am only 20 minutes late. Not bad for first day at work!

I have a little electronic dog-tag on a chain to get in and out of the building. Does this mean The Man knows all my movements and what time I clocked in?

Arrive at desk. Take out framed picture of family and put on desk. Don't know whose family it is as I found it in a skip.

I have voicemail! Spend an hour dicking around on telephone setting it up.

Lunchtime
There's a good office canteen, but decide to venture out for some fresh air and to check out the other culinary delights in the area. Buy grotesquely expensive sandwich with chicken and nuts from some posh butty bar near Temple Meads.

Afternoon
Feel a bit tired by late afternoon. Having had a reasonably productive day, I'm now flagging a bit. Decide to leave office at 4.30pm. Not feeling up to the four-mile uphill trudge home so wait for bus. Wait almost an hour, even though they're supposed to be every 15 minutes. Fantasise about being king of Bristol and forcing all management of First to only travel by their own wretched buses.

TUESDAY

Morning
Alarm goes off at 7am. Get up at 8.35. Swear, run around, wash, eat. Get to bus stop at 9. Miraculously, a bus pulls up just as I arrive. Might even get to the office by 9.30!

10am. Get into office. Bus has been delayed in jams caused by road accident, or something. I have no voicemails.

11am. Decide to join office ritual and join the smokers out in the shelter in the rain. Bit of a problem as I hate cigarettes, and can't really smoke a cigar. Stand with others chewing nicotine gum and complaining about various workmates.

Afternoon
Thing comes up on computer screen telling me we have a meeting. Don’t know how to make it go away. Fifteen mins later we have a meeting! To plan stuff. Editor hands out agenda printed on spreadsheets. Managing editor says it's a blue-sky, green-light session and we should think outside the box. Meeting room is freezing cold due to rogue air-con and I can't go into usual semi-comatose energy-conserving trance. Everyone agrees it has been a very productive meeting and we'll have another one.

Leave office at 4pm due to meeting fatigue. Arrive home over TWO HOURS LATER due to fictional buses on timetable not arriving, then traffic jams. Resolve to make First management travel only on own buses, wearing nothing except underpants knitted from razor-wire.

WEDNESDAY

Alarm at 7am. Leap nimbly out of bed ready to seize the day!

Phone in sick and go to the pictures (Orange Wednesdays! The weekend of the self-employed!)

THURSDAY

Have cunningly placed radio alarm at far side of room, so when it goes off, have to leap out of bed and turn it off when annoying religious fool comes on. Wash, shave and breakfast quickly, march smartly out of house. Keep up pace all way to work, arriving at 9.40! Earliest yet!

Boss takes me to one side. Says if I was staff, he'd have to write me a letter about coming in late all the time. I say letter not necessary as he can just tell me he's not happy about it, but he says he has to write a letter in case I can't hear him.

I have no voicemails.

Have made packed lunch today. Tuna sandwich, bar of solidified hamster food, apple, tangerine and bag of plain crisps. Good balanced diet. Eat same at desk while reading the Western Daily Press. Boss tells me off for having feet on desk.

Think about important freelance job for newspaper. Can't be arsed. Decide to go home in sure knowledge it'll be done in late-night panic just before deadline as usual.

FRIDAY

Morning
En route to office, go into Starbucks and order large vanilla latte from well-spoken man with a beard (resting philosophy PhD?). He asks me for my name. I ask him why he wants my name. "It's a new thing we're doing," he says. "We have to ask people's names."

"Why?"

"We write their names on the cup. It's to make sure everyone gets what they ordered."

Confident that my name will not be entered on evil corporate database, I tell him my name, but don't do the usual phonetic Bravo Yankee Romeo November Echo spelling just in case CIA are secretly watching.

Happy my order will not be mixed up with any others, I turn to see there are no other people in shop.

Get coffee 90 seconds later. It's bigger than I expect and costs nearly £4, which would feed third world family for a week, or own cake habit for two days.

In office, find I have a voicemail! They apparently changed their minds about leaving message and it’s silent.

Notice formal written warning from boss on desk: "You're ****ing late again you useless ****, u r so fired. P.S. fancy a drink after work?"

Drink large Starbucks latte. Never normally drink coffee. Am unable to type properly for rest of morning and get bad headache.

Lunchtime
Get bespoke sandwich made by nice people in office canteen. Sit in easy chair in second-floor lobby area under inspiring big notice outlining corporate vision. Want to live the dream of making the firm even better! I want to make a difference! Yeass!!

Feel inspired and return to desk and go on internet. Access to Gmail, Popbitch, Holy Moly and Facebook are blocked by corporate censorware. Do some work instead.

5.30pm. We go to the pub!

SATURDAY

Have to explain to current Mrs Byrne why there is picture of man's bottom on cameraphone after night out in Old Market (what passes for Bristol’s gay quarter, foreign readers.). Assure her he means nothing to me. Colleague took picture as educational aid to telling difference between arse and elbow as basis for exciting managerial career in offices.

VERDICT

Yes, I'm pathetic. The last time I had a nine-to-five, Mrs Thatcher was Prime Minister (And you were bloody glad of havin' any job back in them days</Yorkshire accent>). I tried to do a 40-hour week, and actually managed about 28. It's not that I'm lazy; I often work quite hard, but if you do this stuff, you eventually evolve your own work-patterns and mine involve working a lot at night and never getting up early.

Commuting into Bristol, however you do it, sucks the big one. Bet you didn't know that! Bristol spends vast sums on roads, or boosting the profits of Worst Bus (here, have a cycle path, why don’t you?), which might be better spent on getting people working from home a day or two a week. If your job involves a phone and computer with internet connection, you can do it. The roads would be a bit clearer, our carbon emissions would drop a bit and people would be a little happier.

(This is the point at which some wonk from the depths of the Council House says they’re doing just that. Well, no-one here has ever heard of it.) The planet needs alternatives to people travelling long distances to work, and it would be brilliant if Bristol were to pioneer them. Or are we all really so stupid and unimaginative?

Then I spent the best part of forty quid on bus fares, coffee, tea, sandwiches, newspapers etc – and I only went in for four days. That's over two grand of taxed income a year. If you can't or won't walk/cycle, bring a packed lunch and drink the firm's tap water, going to work is bloody expensive. If you spend this kind of cash, or more, it's worth bearing the savings in mind when you jack it in to live the downsizing dream.

* Venue = Bristol firm I've been involved in pretty much since it started. Publishes Venue, the local what's on mag, Folio (lifestyle freeb), various local guides. Also contract publishing at highly competitive rates. Acquired by Bristol United Press in 2000, now part of Bristol News & Media, which is part of the Northcliffe Group.