No more WFH, guys. Shame they ditched all those door passes, eh?

Let me in or I'll get angry. You won't like me when I'm angry.

Photo © 2024 Erik Mclean | https://unsplash.com/fr/@introspectivedsgn

“Never heard of them.”

Well, could you look again?

“They’re not on the list, sir.”

Look, I set off before dawn to get here and only just got off the TGV. The coffee machine in the buffet car was hors de service and now I’m a bit hors de ma tête. But I can assure you the business I am visiting today definitely exists as they told me it’s here, literally yesterday. It’s in this building. Please let me through.

[shuffling of papers] “Did you want Amalgamated Durables? No? How about Insure and Blow? Or is it one of those tech start-ups upstairs: Tendr? Mockr? Crockr? Shittr? Wankr? Arsewypr? Coksukr?”

I have entered a circle pit of reception security hell.

The fat security man, definitely not “ph”, sitting behind his fphat desk, turns the fphat sheet around for me to see. I stand on tip-toe (I’m quite short and forgot to bring a periscope) and look through his crumpled list of businesses that currently rent offices in this overblown, half-finished, près-du-periférique palace of glass, marble and tarpaulin. Sure enough, the company that has hired me for the day is not listed.

I’m about to prosecute my entry further when a circular saw starts up and begins slicing through a paving stone just outside the stiffly revolving entry doors. As I wait for the brain-jarring scream of metal slicing against stone to end, a new thought occurs to me: oh god, maybe they’ve done a runner! Another one! This non-recession’s a bitch.

Actually, hang on, that can’t be right. It’s a PITB (Def: British English for PITA; see ‘bottoms’ and ‘English humour’) that I booked what would turn out to be the only warm and bright day of autumn to be holed up in a carpet-tiled and venetian-blinded dungeon in Issy-les-Moulineaux when I could be sunning myself on my own balcony, but I haven’t actually done any work for them yet. Usually my clients go bankrupt or get hauled before the fraud courts or vanish to a gangster poolside property in the south of Spain without paying only after I’ve completed my part of the deal.

By the time the noise outside subsides, the security man has grown tired of looking at me. I am making his desk look untidy by standing in front of it. Without another word, he hands me a generic visitor pass in a plastic lapel-clip wallet and gestures for me to head through some frosted glass doors behind him.

I step through to find myself standing in front of another reception desk, which naturally makes me wonder what the first one was for.

Perhaps this is the second of a progressive series of themed reception desks. A few more of these and I might reach the boss, and if I can defeat him, hopefully I can move up to the next level with a couple of extra lives and power-ups under my belt.

This desk is a mere breakfast-bar of a frontier between the level-boss’s kingdom of authority and my domain of wildlings, and it is staffed by an appropriately skinny young Lannister with swishy blond hair, who greets me with a serene smile and bobbing adam’s apple.

I step forward to speak: Are you the gatekeeper?

With not so much as a flicker of an eyelash, his smile undiminished, he fires back: “Are you the keymaster?”

I am obliged to provide proof. I show him my ID. I show him my emails. I swear by the Old Gods and the New. I count backwards from 20. I walk in a straight line while balancing a bottle of rouge on my head and singing the names of Macron’s prime ministers since 2017 to the tune of Tous les garçons et les filles.