Someone said something to me this week which surprised me. As many of you will be away via the magic of these irregular missives, there are an awful lot of people at The New Place (i.e. my current job) who used to work at The Old Place (the vile and satanic mill which threw us all out in a move which benefited us and their short term accounts but which royally screwed their remaining staff and their customers). The New Place was in desperate need of staff as a merger had led to huge numbers of experienced staff being seconded up to Edinburgh on an almost indefinite basis. So keen were they to get us that they sent people to The Old Place to hold mass interviews. Only those asking too much money were turned down.

Anyway, enough background colour, back to the point at hand. The above relationship between Old and New means that people know each other. So imagine the scene. Colleague from the New Place (who was at the Old Place until three years ago when a previous inept reorganisation made her redundant) is chatting at a printer or in the subsidised restaurant with someone I worked with at the Old Place. I enter the conversation in passing at colleague from the Old Place (let’s call her Andrea because it is both her name and quicker for me to type) says I look happier at the New Place than I ever did at The Old Place. This was relayed to me some time later as the colleague from the New Place (for the above reasons henceforth known as Diane) has by way of taken me under her wing.

What surprised me about it, and more importantly the timing of it, was that I’ve just had my medication doubled by the doctor. The pills which seemed to do some good had gradually stopped working so the dose was increased rather than risk a new drug with its inherent crapness (see earlier piece about antidepressants to see my low success rate). These two events taking place at more or less the same time made me think about things. Can both facts be correct? Can I be both happier and in need of stronger medication? It seems unlikely. So, as people with no other recourse tend to do, I thought I’d look at it logically.

The Old Place, for all its faults, had some good things about it. Firstly it was very convenient to get to. It was in the middle of a functional village which had a Tesco Metro, four newsagents (enough to get me all four Dr Who Radio Times covers separately as long time readers will remember), a chemists which had a fab range of aromatherapy oils, a sandwich shop which did excellent toasted cheese rolls, a post office to which I could take my regular Amazon sales at lunchtime and a Blockbuster Video that could occasionally be relied upon to have a half decent DVD sale. It also had a desk layout which meant I could write the kind of drivel you see on this very site whenever I got bored. Which was often to be honest. I think my record was eight thousand words of the fifth Gerald Benson novel one summer’s day when there weren’t many people in the office. And it had the most surreal set of employees this side of a sit com that no one believes.

In time I will come to coat the Old Place in a varnish of nostalgia and remember it as a fun place where I could do what I wanted and be well fed at lunchtime. I’ll forget about the truly vile culture of backstabbing, spying and self important secrecy which made it such an uncomfortable place to work. The New Place seems to lack that unpleasantness. With any luck it’s absent rather than me being too new to see it yet. An example is the weekly supervisors meeting. At the Old Place this was conducted behind closed doors and everything discussed was treated as a state secret. At the New Place the minutes of the meeting, which takes place in open sight, are available for all to read. That’s not to say we know everything that goes on but there is a common sense approach to secrecy. It’s a relatively minor thing but it helps avoid the Them and Us structure which ruined the Old Place.

They also let non-supervisors go to the meetings if that team’s leader is away. That never never never happened at the Old Place. If you were not part of the club, you never got in. And opportunities for promotion exist. They have an actual structure whereby you can rise through the ranks. If I ever get my head round the fact that I’m stuck there for the foreseeable future I might apply myself to the greasy pole. There's a first time for everything. Some of the supervisors they have are of a similar age to me. One of them is quite impossibly good looking. She has a rather flat voice but no one is perfect.

I think the main difference between the New and the Old is that there were some things I loved and some things I hated about the Old Place. I feel curiously neutral about the New one. Whether that makes me happier or not is hard to say. I’m not sure I really know what happy means. Does the lack of reasons to be unhappy make one happy or do you need some active element to instil happiness? Is light the absence of darkness or is darkness the absence of light?

Overall I would say she made a reasonable point. I’m certainly more relaxed at the New Place. People aren’t talking and plotting behind my back. People aren’t going through my desk when I’m away. People don’t treat me as the idiot trainee whose mistakes should be recorded in a log rather than be corrected through explanation and further training. I just go in, do a few letters, listen to my iPod for an hour at lunchtime, write a few more letters and go home.

It’s probably more accurate to say I’m less unhappy here than I was there and since I seem hell bent on wasting my life, I might as well minimise the unhappiness while I’m doing it.

3rd April 2004