Corporate Hospitality

The first of six, short and senseless stories

Corporate Hospitality

Mitch 'n' Len had no idea they worked in a place where everyone performed appallingly…

Upon the trained eye, the place was quite simply, a jolly old yarn... It was a place chock-full of amateur forces, sub-divisional claptrap and befuddling abbreviations. A place where weakness and waste - rewarded then lauded… and where mediocrity was the only yardstick. It was a place of tribe and clan… and so endured a needful belonging to impermeable mobs of gnashing workers, one matched effortlessly by the Company kingpins' own selfless sense of seclusion.

It was the sort of place thriving upon unrelenting meetings with only a singular purpose, which upon the face of it was a thorough avoidance of the Company's Key Performance Indicators - or 'KPIs', if you will. The masthead of which, was a rah-rah-rah, team-spirited and behaviourally anointed acronym, ‘B.L.I.S.S.' … quite brilliantly misconstrued by the masses as being a joyful capacity to slander and smear, and the embodiment of which were the picky, porky and prurient platitudes all were apt to pay. Key to the Company's overall game plan, however, was the refraining of fact, truth or any sort of morality whatsoever… and our two boys found themselves feeling right at home, throwing themselves happily into their roles with wholehearted tryst.

For you see, it was the responsibility of every single employee to involve themselves in a whole host of mandatory meetings… meetings for flying right in the face of B.L.I.S.S.I.N.G each other as often as possible. Yet, do not be deceived… dear Reader… It was all really a cunning ruse; for the ineffectual administration of the heaving, hullabaloo of a multi-layered, multi-corporation… and it was, quite simply, a building full of faceless sycophants clocking up solid 'meeting time' stats. Ruddy-faced and enthused squads of highly inept team leaders had their fingers on the Company pulse all right, expertly lofting the humble departmental meeting to a reconceived, highly politicised sphere. It had taken years of practise and due diligence for the creation of such lacklustre progress… and it was with some sort of crazed ethos that the more meetings they had, the more and more they seemed to need… and Mitch ‘n’ Len were delighted to be an important part of such recurrent nonsense.

With a spring in their steps, they joined moon-faced, disentranced and despairing colleagues as they filed into meeting rooms in forlorn silence, before crashing down on grey, plastics chairs with a collective wuummmpph. The only thing any of them had in common was the astonishing stoicism in their accepting no responsibility whatsoever, and their silent traipse back out again towards plain, uniform desks with barely any time to fulfil roles, long since forgotten in the annals of time… and always, just in time too. As they reformed ranks in crestfallen disarray, before trooping right back again to the next unavoidably essential, hubba-hubba, high-fiving, backslapping and whoopy-woo meeting, in their latest bid for B.L.I.S.S.

All around the marbled magnificence of the bustling building, teams, team-leaders and supervisors trooped in and out of windowless meeting rooms like greying wraiths. And at the end of each, exhausting meeting-filled day, all the players were of uniform agreement; that moving forward, touching-base was of paramount importance, whereby they all tore back to their screens to arrange more meetings so they could touch-base first thing tomorrow and begin not moving forward all over again.

Meanwhile, the only people in the entire business actually working… were the meeting room manager and a crack squad of meeting room assistants… and they functioned ceaselessly in coordinating everybody’s complete waste of time. It was a hive of humming, harried, haste. Phones rang relentlessly, emails pinged consistently… and like migratory herds, facilities coordinators funnelled back and forth, carrying desperately essential meeting memorandums. Just as Team Leaders began waiting in phone queues from phones in meeting rooms to book more meetings from their current meetings, supported by legions of meeting room assistants frantically wheeling trolleys of San Pellegrino and bite sized pastries through meeting room corridors, strewn with beaming portraits of late, great, passed and gone, legendary under-achievers. 

Elsewhere, up in the rarefied air of H.R, an East wind began to blow. As all of a sudden, uncertain words began ricocheting round the building… words like perception, diversity... and mediation, words that would soon become the bedrock of each poor soul's hopes and fears. No one uttered a word, all very well aware of the unending assortment of litigious misappropriations available; instead, employees milled aimlessly around the place in deafening silence, rudderless and drifting, all throughout the bright, sassy, open-plan office space like automaton drones carrying terrifyingly important bits of paperwork. Others hung out in colourful breakout areas, feigning effort, whilst down in D section climate control wars threatened to escalate… and over in E, a couple of young pretenders began transformations into baseless paragons of indispensability… and yet mysteriously, bang up to date with media-trending, Paddies betting power and sensationalist, on-line fripperies. They twittered their little hearts out too, where meetings permit, on wide-screen, touch-screen desk monitors, all skilfully angled away from prying eyes, whilst back up in H.R, pretty girls with halos screened the ramblings and arranged more and more meetings to discuss the value of an N.D.A.

It was a club, a cult even… but certainly nothing more than a den of iniquity… a place where everyone was a member of their own team and absolutely all on their own side. After mountains of muted meetings, the boys' roles evolved in tandem with humanities splurging neediness, as Mitch ‘n’ Len learnt that all that was really required for prosperity… was buck-passing, blame-games, nurturing the negatives, spurning the positives… and double-dealing, deviant, two-faced hypocrisy, the kind certainly necessary to survive the battlefield of Corporate Hospitality…

Boo-Rah

End of