DOCUMENTATION PRINCIPLES

All other days bar Tuesday. Those are the days in the office that Lars can attribute something good to. On Mondays, there’s the memory of the weekend just gone. Lars usually spends his Mondays, between his morning and lunch time breaks, reflecting on the time that he spent outdoors with his fiancée, Ola, over that same weekend; or the Formula One race he allowed play out in the background while he read or scrolled on his tablet while lying horizontally on the couch.

On Wednesdays, Lars embraces the ‘hump-day’ aspect of the week and prides himself on the workload he can handle. He would admit, if he weren’t such a reserved person, that about thirty-five to forty percent of his weekly work is completed on a busy Wednesday. That’s two days into one, when he reflects on it. All because of the ‘hump-day’ psychology.

Then, Friday brings hope of an imminent weekend break. Thursdays, even, give such hope just because of their proximity to Fridays. “Have you any plans?” is whispered around the office from as early as Thursday morning, rising into a crescendo of uninhibited excitement come Friday afternoons.

“Yeah, I’m looking forward to this and that,” becomes the mantra of the final few hours of the week spent in the bullpen. Little focus remains on the outstanding workload. That much is usually left to wait until Monday comes around once again.

But Tuesdays – well, those have never been any good. No midweek energy or weekend gold dust. Just eight to ten hours of being there. Seeming alert. Acting interested. All the worst attributes of the job that one might read in a job description list, or another equally vanilla official document, become the centre of the day’s focus.

Lars, though, has a secret fix. A special Tuesday workaround. It’s not secret in a similar sense to Ola’s favourite TV show, Madmen, in which the Executives would simply drink, sleep, or hump their way through the boredom.

No – there is no romancing of Lars’ nearest female co-worker, Amy, with her championed overnight oats recipe and always two-thirds-empty gym-branded water bottle. Not that he would even want such an outcome. He loves Ola too purely for any Madmening of his office week. Nor does he want to engineer a second, more frazzled, act of to life like many of the characters in that show.

His secret exists in the purest of senses, i.e. nobody else knows about it. He considers himself to be the master craftsman of what he terms the ‘Tuesday plot.’ See, on Tuesdays, just after half-past-two, Lars tidies up his desk. It’s a routine that consists of re-purposing his empty coffee cup as a makeshift rubbish bin in which he places a gaggle of crumpled-up post it notes and the remnants of half-hidden chewing gum wrappers.

He continues his ‘Tuesday plot’ by clawing at his laptop bag which is positioned under his desk and pulling it toward him as if it were fashioned by drawstrings. He then hauls himself upright and neatly arranges his seat under the desk. When the desk looks presentable to the passing eye, as if he were never there (that part is of utmost importance to Lars), only then does he consider his plan ready to execute.

Lars takes a few steps forward, with an air of confidence in his movements. He nods politely to any co-workers in the bullpen who are concerned enough to look in his direction. “You must bring me in that new oat recipe, Amy!” or “Can you believe McLaren are going so strongly in the championship?” are examples of phrases he might utter to any of his seven or eight closely seated colleagues on his way out the door.

Some days, all it takes is a slight arch of the brow and flick of the finger and away he goes. He walks out of his building and toward his weekly documentation meeting, or Documentation Principles as it is listed on his company calendar.

14:45 – 16:15. The meeting is perfectly tucked between the after-lunch lull (circa 14:00) and the going home excitement (circa 16:40). It is placed on the calendar so perfectly, in fact, that one might suspect it was designed to pass the remaining time of the afternoon so that the attendees have next-to-no work to perform after lunch time on Tuesdays.

See, the weekly Documentation Principles meeting is a meeting like no other. Not in the sense that it happens every Tuesday, but in the sense that it doesn’t! It simply never has. And that ruse, for the past year-and-a-half, is what Lars terms his ‘Tuesday plot’ that only he (not even Ola) knows about.

The plot started right before the latest changeover in middle management in Lars’ area of reporting. Back then, Lars discovered that the new incoming manager responsible for his performance was to be a guy called Per.

Per was a middle aged guy born in the Netherlands and a serial migrator in pursuit of a job promotion, according to his LinkedIn profile. When he arrived in the position, as Lars suspected, Per was not as outwardly focused on the team’s time reports as he was the team’s metrics or scorecard.

The scorecard tracks the weekly and monthly metrics that are reportable to Per’s bosses and are the numbers that underpin his usefulness to them, and the organisation, as a manager in Lars’ area. This fact, of course, dictates any future promotion chances that Per may or may not be presented with in the industry. So to put it bluntly: metrics over people was Per’s inward motto. At least in Lars’ mind.

Lars recognised this situation – that  Per’s transience and limited understanding of the new company’s ways of working would result in him being far more concerned with numbers than methods. That his concern would loiter on report scores over timesheets. That he would prioritise monthly metrics over calendar entries.

As such, Lars conceived of the weekly Documentation Principles meeting as a perfect twofold solution. Part one, was to improve his own worth to the corporate overlords who dealt with numbers and wanted little to do with the responsibility for the smaller, day-to-day details that Lars was effectively assuming. In other words, those details that were most likely to be examined in an audit.

Part two, was a much more dastardly angle and the primary reason for Lars’ idea: the chance to simply skip Tuesday afternoons in work. To not have to sit around the bullpen and listen to guys speaking about Internal Audit briefings or the latest industry standards to be implemented before an ever-approaching point in time. ‘The D-day effect of the workspace,’ as Lars internally understood it.

See, the whole concept of ‘documentation’ is one which is assigned ‘bogeyman’ status in that area of work. The documents used at any given minute are like the atoms that underpin the corporate world of figures and balance sheets.

The thing with atoms though, that Lars has recognised, is that they are so numerous that people become afraid of touching those finer details for fear of them multiplying and becoming a mountain rather than the molehill.

The work is slow, often repetitive, and altogether unsexy. Lars always found it strange how it was depicted as such, considering that we work with paper from the age of four or five during our infant years at school.

At that age, we create drawings for mom’s kitchen presses or we jot down our best attempts to impress our parents and teachers during our weekly spelling tests. The use of paper, then, is a constant all the way through our middle, elementary, and senior years of education. This is true even for our college years, when the use of paper often feels out of place, though it is mostly paper that we use to read and write our exams.

A considerable amount of us will then progress to workplaces with high-operating machines and computer systems governed by a catalogue of three and four letter abbreviations that would make one’s head spin. BUT! What is it that those machines most often require? Paper printouts and data sheet verifications to provide assurances in the event of an audit or customer complaint. The page is simply inescapable.

Given that documentation is this entire glacier that underpins the summit, it is no wonder that the concept of the widened base scares the shit out of bosses like Per who simply wish to feel the breeze at the peak of the glacial summit and move on swiftly to higher peaks where the air is assumed to taste better.

And, by the way, it is exactly those guys who could never afford an avalanche if they wished for the trajectory of their nomadic, promotion-driven existences to continue. The title inheritances. The sign-on bonuses. The yearly incentives. The gold-studded whips and chains to shackle the employees…

So it was, that Lars in one of his more opportune moments appointed himself the ‘Documentation Responsible’ for the department right before Per’s arrival. He used the most corporate sounding term he could conjure and, like he envisioned, it worked without any questions asked of him or his imagined promotion.

To understand this move made by Lars, one must take it in context of his early working days. Back then, he would have happily assumed this type of responsibility for the sake of the responsibility alone. ‘Documentation Responsible,’ was the type of role that ‘would look good on the paper,’ as his father advised him during his younger years.

The paper, in this respect, referred to those responsibilities and skills that he could record on a resume and market to large corporations like the one he now hoodwinks on a weekly basis. His father always encouraged him to look for the bigger fish and to ‘find the pond that they swim in,’ meaning that Lars rarely stayed still during his early working years.

Then, right around the time he emigrated to Dublin to join the expansion of the workforce where he currently works, Lars would have welcomed any added responsibilities to make himself appear more important.

He had a feeling when he became somewhat settled in Dublin that half the reason he was hired was to add a more authentically Scandinavian presence to an office group that was just taken over by as Scandinavian parent company. Corporate politics at their finest.

He wished to align his workload with the level of authority that his Scandinavian passport, alone, appeared to command in his new surrounds but his boss who was also a new hire, had little idea of what work to assign to him aside from the callous monthly metrics that his role must conform to.

No training.

No discernible areas to improve to earn an advancement opportunity. Simply a desk and a target and a diluted version of ‘Best of luck, Lars!’

Then, about six years later by the time Per’s appointment was announced, Lars had realised that these corporate decisions were made blindly. None of his four bosses here had stayed long enough to understand the process well.

None of them wished to help Lars advance in his working life. Three of the four, in fact, were the most self-servicing individuals he had the displeasure of ever knowing.

Edward, his boss right before Per, fostered a deep sense of dissatisfaction in Lars’ work life. Late nights became chores rather than opportunities; requests to train new staff for no added monetary compensation became tedious rather than a chance to learn a new skill; directives to attend conferences abroad and represent the company at dinners and social forums became mandatory rather than reward-based.

The sum of all that resulted in increased time away from his beloved Ola. A little on Ola’s background: as a Brazilian student-come-hotel-worker who amasses some sixty-hours of study and labour a week on her student visa, their shared time is of great importance to Lars.

Ola’s visa situation is tricky. Though she has more than passable English, and is constantly practicing her proficiency with Lars at home, she is forced to enroll as a student and pay the college fees that allow her to apply for a student visa in Ireland. On such a visa, she is entitled to work forty-hours per week.

Though, if she were to drop her status as a student, she wouldn’t only find the visa harder to come by, but she would also only be entitled to work half those hours. Yes – a mere twenty hours. Do the maths on that one, Lars figured.

The Documentation Principles meeting, then, became Lars’ way of rebelling against all this corporate blinkeredness. The meeting has never happened, nor will it ever happen. And his ruse is insurance-protected to an ATOL standard, as Lars likes to think!

This is because of the high-level of turnover in his own company and the parent company, in addition to the various contractors that are employed on short-term contracts at any given time. See, Lars simply has a few crassly sounding Scandinavian sounding names ready to offer, should one of his higher-ups ever question his story. Bjorn Kjeldsen. Henrick Poulson.

And, his favourite, which he eavesdropped to partly setup the pretense for the weekly meeting and partly to muse himself just before Edward departed, the fictitious Niels Neilson. "A good fellow, yes," according to Edward who blindly grabbed at the cheese in Lars’ mousetrap.

Back in those first few weeks of his ‘Tuesday plot,’ Lars had reasoned that he would use that time to sit in his car and take a breath away from the bullpen. He even spent a good chunk of the time researching the incoming boss from his previous companies to lectures he had given in various business forums.

Lars figured that staying in his car would mean that he was onsite, should any work-related emergency arise. Not that it ever did. And he further fool-proofed his plan by always keeping track of the latest employees to leave the company who were even semi-aligned to that kind of work.

His list reads as follows: Jonas Berg (departed May 2008); Steven Guppy (departed March 2008); Melissa Omega (departed November 2007); Petr Krankov (departed February 2007); and the original fall guy, Neils Neilson who he would never again name unless he required an extraordinary comedic injection to his day.

Fifty CCs of Nielson, if the need ever arose.

From those initial weeks of researching in the car, his use of the time changed direction. First, there was the couple months when he (unsuccessfully) looked for a change in work that would move him out from under the Pers and Edwards of the game. He couldn’t identify any roles that might offer that chance.

Then, he reasoned after the unsuccessful search, that he would spend that chunk of time listening to a new work-related podcast. The first on his list was Libelation, a podcast which explored case studies with respect to libel cases.

After that phase, he moved further away from the grounds of relativity by delving into a podcast called StartUp Successes on which he listened to accounts of newly appointed CEOs and Business Owners of Start-ups who discussed their plans with such verve and gusto that Lars couldn’t help but be inspired.

At that point in time, about nine months after Per’s appointment, Lars had his inspiration for self-employment burst by the fact that Ola’s student status was brought into disrepute and her staying in the country was soon contingent upon their being married. Basically, all facets of that crisis required him to stay put in his secure job to help Ola remain in the country.

A portion of this was with respect to their proposed mortgage application, which was derailed by Ola’s work status, and it soon became apparent that anything other than Lars’ permanently secured salary in a role that he occupied in the long term would render them untouchable in the mortgage world.

Poof, went Lars’ imagined Start-Up before it even began. No ExperienceEgg, as he termed his working idea for a Start-Up. Basically, it was to be an accompaniment to your bath bomb which gives you a complimentary set of candle, music, and reading material (and ironically bath materials) to offer the perfect relaxation moment.

That egg was cracked and pieces of shell everywhere before it even hit the pan.

Finally, this last year of Lars’ Documentation Principles meeting passed with him watching Netflix on his phone in the car. On the weeks when he remembers, Lars even brings a tablet to sit in his glove-box, to make his viewing experience even more pleasurable.

There’s the gritty crime thrillers that he watches, the ones that Ola doesn’t really like to watch together. Or, sometimes he watches Steve Carell’s performance in The Office to really engage with how laughable the corporate world can be.

Only, for Lars, that world currently constitutes the borders of his life and the laughing stops when he remembers where he is and the tablet is returned to the glove-box in the car that he sees less than an hour later when he finishes up his Tuesday workday.

At least, he reasons, that he has those ninety-minutes of grace.