I used to find my work interesting. It was about making things with computers and other complex machinery. It was specialised, unusual, technical – came out of research we did around the millennium, employing the computers of the day to the very hilt of their abilities. That got easier of course as the machines evolved, became faster, smarter. Meanwhile, outside of the little back-room where I worked, the company evolved too, over the years – became more corporate. It expanded, shrank, expanded, shrank again. Departments disappeared, new ones were invented, reorganisations swept the ranks like stormy squalls. But, unlike the computers, and for all of its self important re-shuffling, it didn’t seem to grow in capability – indeed quite the opposite. On the surface, what I saw was a drift towards offices that were vast open spaces, everyone sitting at an identical machine, typing emails, filling spreadsheets, time-sheets, booking meetings. But what they were actually doing – I mean delivering – grew more and more opaque.

I’ve always wondered about that, I mean the way the corporate machine eventually seemed to hold us all captive, immersed in this bullshit. Me? I’d started to feel – somewhat arrogantly – like I was the only one doing anything real – something that went into a box and got put on a wagon and shipped out at the end of the day. But otherwise, that back-room suited me – the isolation, I mean. I’ve always been comfortable in my own company. It’s not a path I’ve consciously chosen, more one that seems to have chosen me. As others submitted meekly to capture, to immersion, suffocation, I allowed myself to gravitate to that little basement back-room, wedged between other forgotten functions like the janitors, and the maintenance men. And there, I felt I could still breathe.

In theory I had a line manager, but I was just a name on his spreadsheet and so long as my head didn’t pop up on his radar, I never heard from him. The radar swept for employees who had insufficient funding to cover their time. I always had plenty of funds. Although what I did was unusual, my services, my little widgets, seemed to be in quiet demand. At any rate, I alwasy seemed to muddle through. Requests came in by email. I’d do my thing, and deliver the goods. I could go weeks and not see anyone at all – just clock in, tend my machines, then go home again.

But then this one time I came into the back-room of a morning, coat still dripping wet from the rain outside, to find a couple of guys logged on and huddled over my machines. Like I said, my set-up was special, unusual. I’d adapted those machines to serve a unique purpose, though they’d still do the more mundane corporate functions, and that appeared to be what these guys were up to.

I didn’t recognise them. They were from another office, another part of the country, visiting. There was a hot-desk policy in play by that time, which was working out a bit like musical chairs. I was usually okay of course, my machines being special purpose. Things must have been particularly tight up in the offices for these guys to wind up poking about in the basement for seats.

I explained to them I couldn’t work until they’d finished, and they replied that they’d likely be all day, and since hot-desk was first come first served, and what they were doing was important too, or so they said, I was out of luck. They came off as a bit arrogant, even a bit offensive. So I laid it on and told them I hoped they’d logged me off properly, otherwise they’d probably lost the company a month’s work. This wasn’t true of course, and anyway, they weren’t having any of it, said if that was the case, it was my fault for not logging myself off like I was supposed to.

So I put my coat back on and prepared to leave them to it – go have a coffee in the canteen or something – when one of them started rooting in my desk drawers. I don’t know what he was after, but I explained I had personal stuff in there, and I’d appreciate it if he didn’t go rooting, but he came back with the corporate line that we weren’t supposed to have items of a personal nature on site – I mean even the kids weren’t allowed Smurfs on their desks any more.

The only remaining salvo at my disposal was a little black book which I took from my pocket. I asked both their names and wrote them down. I didn’t make a fuss about it, or tell them why – that I was going to report them up the line or something – because I wasn’t. I could see it unsettled them. Funny that. Even in this age of hyper-surveillance you get blase about the spy in the machine, but no one likes to think of their names hand-written, in a little black book in someone’s pocket.

Naturally, I was puzzled by the intrusion. I mean, contrary to what they claimed, they weren’t doing anything of any importance. Most likely they were costing the company money – travel and hotels and such – and here they were holding me up, so I couldn’t deliver anything either. But I was fine, I had a funding code to cover diversionary activities. So, I could just go sit in a corner of the canteen, drink coffee and pretend to shuffle papers, while actually writing poetry. You couldn’t get more diversionary than that could you?

Poetry was my hobby – though hobby’s perhaps too small a word for it. Naturally, it wasn’t permitted on company time, but better than staring into space, and easy enough to pretend I was doing something legit. Protocol perhaps demanded I’d better pass word up the line that some random bods were hogging my machine, but then I needed a machine to do that, and all were taken. We were at a Kafkaesque impasse, then. So, yes, I wrote poetry.

Were I a different kind of guy, my ego in hock to the corporate libido, I would have been obliged to get angry at the disruption. But I viewed these itinerant hot-deskers more as a kind of virus infecting a system by now so sick, it couldn’t see that most of its functions had been taken over by performative box-ticking. So few of us actually made anything any more, I mean seriously added value, and we had to carry these jokers as well. But the real mystery? None of it seemed to matter. The company didn’t collapse under the weight of its own absurdities. And then you look around and the same might be said for much of what was going on in the wider world of work, too. Nobody was making anything. We were all just staring at screens, pushing digits.

So there I sat. The canteen was quiet at that time of a morning – just the chef and kitchen people, back of counter, preparing lunch. These were still your “doing” sort of people, and I felt a kinship with them. At the end of the day they could point to what they’d done – so many meals served, so many plates washed. Others would drift in for coffee refills, nod their vague acquaintanceship, then drift back up to the offices, a kind of zombified look about them. And I wrote my poem.

It was blank verse thing. At the back of my mind there was still that old school insistence poetry should rhyme – no fair tennis without a net and all that – but blank verse lets you get your thoughts down quickly – sense impressions, visitations from the imagination. That always felt more important to me, and you could tidy it up later, look for rhythm, even rhyme if you still wanted it.

The thing with a poem is, it’s like an inner part of us wants to see itself expressed in words. And that was odd because it’s such a literal thing, while much of the pointlessness I saw in the day to day lay precisely in the way we took everything so literally: why the spreadsheet had become more important than the data it recorded, that the data had become more important than the values it expressed. Value, real value, lay somewhere else. It wasn’t literal, yet still sought expression, risked corruption at the hands of the profane. It was for the poet to realise that, and protect it.

I took lunch in the canteen when everyone else piled in, then took a walk down to my back-room to find the hot-deskers still hard at it, doing nothing. I asked if they’d be all day, and was met with the snippy reply that they’d take as long as was necessary. Sure, when a company reaches that point where it’s no longer making anything, it becomes a haven for arseholes. Arseholes don’t last long when the key performance indicator is: did you deliver that box out the door?

My wife thought I was joking when she asked me, over dinner, if I’d had a good day, and I’d replied yes, that I got a decent poem out of it. But then she realised I was serious and asked me if I was happy turning up every day like that, trying to maintain the light in my eyes, while the lights were going out everywhere else. I told her it was just the nature of things, and anyway, thinking about it in the quirky way I had always gave me something to write about. But she had a point.

Then, that night, I had a dream – well, it was half dream, half total recall. I was back at primary school – so I could only have been about nine or ten, and I was about to join the football team on the mini-bus to go play another school. I wasn’t that great at football, and I was only picked to play that day because the number one striker – we’ll call him Bruiser – had bunked off school, so they were a man down. Then, as we were boarding the bus, he turned up, albeit without his boots.

I could see the way the teacher was thinking – he was a competitive man, so even a kids’ inter-school football league was life or death to him. Some people are just like that, aren’t they? He knew, and I knew, if I played they had a less than even chance of winning. If Bruiser played, they were going to win for sure because Bruiser took no prisoners.

Now I didn’t care if I played or not, but it seemed pretty obvious to me the way everyone else was thinking – the teacher and my so called team-mates – and it puzzled me they couldn’t see how easily I saw through their hemming and hawing. They got around to it eventually of course, which just left the question of Bruiser’s boots, which is when I saw the teacher looking at my feet.

Sure enough, Bruiser fitted neatly into my boots, and off they all went. Did they win the game? Don’t know – never asked. I got to go home on time, but without my boots. When I got them back, they were scuffed to blazes, and my dad went and played hell with the teacher. I was sorry about the boots because my dad wasn’t made of money. But other than that, I didn’t mind and had quite enjoyed playing in the garden instead of standing there freezing my nadgers off on a muddy pitch.

So anyway, still feeing a bit weird after that dream I turned up bright and early next day, and there they still were, my pair of hot-deskers, camping out in my little back room. And they had a look on their faces as if to say you’ll have to get up much earlier than that to catch us out. So I spent another day in the canteen, and got another poem out of it, this one about the value of touching grass, a kind of echo of the dream. You can’t put that into a spreadsheet, can you? What it’s like to touch grass.

In the end I gave it a week, to see if anyone would come and fish me out of that canteen, ask me what the hell I thought I was doing. But they didn’t. Come Monday my hot-deskers had finally moved on. I wiped their fingerprints off my screens, and settled back, ready to catch up. But I could still feel their sickly presence in the air. Something had changed. Even the little bit of work I did, and which I’d drawn some satisfaction from over the years, just didn’t seem important any more. So I went home.

That was years ago. And, so far as I know, no one’s noticed I’m missing

Touching Grass – a meditation

I used to make things.
Now, I walk the meadows,
touching grass.
Both real and imagined.

Palms down, fingers splayed,
I snag the waist-high drooping heads –
the texture of rabbit’s tails, and crow’s foot.

Such vast landscapes these,
places of presence, and past.
Imagination too, of course,
like the sheep cropped fields,
dewy-sweet, that lick my boots, now,
to a varnished glaze.

And those fresh mown swards,
scented of all the homes I’ve ever known,
where, eyes gently closed,
I am returned to other versions of myself –
boy and man,
callow youth and would-be sage.

Yet it was once the all of me,
to fashion, to shape and change,
to alter this world in my own image.
But it’s only here lies
the more authentic reality,
and a nameless soul-meaning,
in the feel, imagined and otherwise…

Of the touch of grass

Copyright © Michael Graeme 2025

Header image by Nightcafe Studio, additional PP in GIMP. This story was not written by AI.