[2003] LOSS & PORPHYRY the novels  

0036 – Part 15 - Sales in the Office

My office, or at least my desk in a very open plan office, was in Richmond. But I did at least have a desk, backed by all the usual services, to work from. This was a luxury not available to salesmen working for most other companies; whose own dining table was too often their nearest equivalent.

Over the ten years I had been at the branch, I had managed to insinuate myself progressively nearer to the window; until I then actually held one of the favoured positions, next to the glass. For all my pains, the view was just over the rooftops; but I had plenty of natural light for my work. In addition, at this end of the general office, I had some degree of privacy, for the groups of identical desks were separated by shoulder height screens; which the denizens of this modern jungle had thickly decorated with the trivia that accompany business life.

I sat and stared at my own collection of formalised graffiti; important telephone numbers, most of which were now out of date, a computer print-out of a diary of my movements, for several months before when I had last resolved to keep my paperwork up to date.

I clutched the handful of messages that Anne, my secretary - whose services I shared with a dozen other salesmen - had somehow managed to note down. Secretary was a strictly honorary title since, with so many salesmen to support, she spent all her time answering the telephone; trying to help the many customers who were desperate for their salesman's personal attention. It was a thankless task, and I tried my best to cheer her up whenever I was in the office. The pressure from the other salesmen, who were less considerate, was such, however, that it was rare for any girl to last longer than a few months on the job.

My first act, after sitting down, was to lean back and put my feet on the desk, to stare out of the window. It might not have appeared very productive, but it was. I needed to collect my thoughts before I launched into the whirl of the day's activities. The problem, as always, was that my thoughts were a complex web of often unrelated facts, conjectures and wishes. The justification for my indulgence in staring out of the window was that it would allow me to plan my day; to decide which of the competing priorities to address first, which phone call to make, which letter to write. But interwoven with these prosaic thoughts were a myriad of conflicting ideas. Fragments of recent conversations, private as well as business, floated into my mind. Sometimes I even allowed myself to be distracted by basic philosophical questions. What really was the meaning of life? But I never found a suitable answer emerging from the grey slate roofs that provide the panorama in front of me. I knew, from past experience, that I could not rigorously exclude these extraneous thoughts, since to be productive I knew I had to be relaxed. In any case, I did not wish to exclude them. It was a time I used to put my private life, as much as my business life, in perspective. All I could do, as a gesture towards productivity, was to weight the balance towards business.

Today my thoughts were heavily weighted towards business, largely because I was still fascinated by the newness of the experiences. No doubt, at some time in the future, the tedium of the new job would reassert itself, to overwhelm me. Then I would have to make a very conscious effort to concentrate on the matters at hand. Now, though, my head was full of fragments of my three months of sales experiences in the medical sector. The fragments were not yet joined together, to make a cohesive whole. It was a mosaic in which whole segments were missing, and the majority of the tessellations were missing even from the rest. So that the picture seemed incomplete and out of focus at the same time. It was as if I was seeing it through a fine mist. The only way I could cope with these messages was to 'defocus' myself; to lie back, feet up, and let the messages flow over me. Then, and only then, the occasional image began to make some sense.

On this occasion my reverie was soon interrupted as Jim, my support engineer, arrived to sit at the desk next to me. I changed my posture to indicate that I welcomed the arrival of the other member of my team. Indeed I did welcome the company. A salesman's life is a very lonely one. Despite being constantly in touch with my customers I could not build the relationships with them that were normal between friends, or even between colleagues. In many respects the customers' existence merely highlighted the loneliness of the job. Selling offered an interesting paradox. I couldn't decide whether I was an introvert or an extrovert; and, in any case, I almost always eventually made friends of my customers, which was cheating but made the loneliness bearable. Now, though, the newness of my contacts in the field meant that I didn't yet have any friends amongst my customers; and the loneliness was sometimes oppressive. So, more than ever, I gratefully grasped at any contact with my peers.

'How's Samantha today?' I knew that the day before Jim's young daughter had apparently pushed the good nature of their pet Labrador too far; and had received a very bloody bite on the face for her troubles. The resulting telephone calls, as Jim's wife rushed her to hospital, had disrupted the normally organised proceedings of the office; with Jim himself rushing off to join them at the hospital.

'Thank goodness it was really only a nip. All the blood made it seem much worse than it actually was. It only needed a couple of stitches, and they won't show.' Yesterday the panic-stricken calls from his wife had convinced Jim that his daughter must be disfigured for life, if not blinded. But, with their kitchen covered in blood, that panic had been reasonable.

For the next ten minutes I was regaled with every detail of the incident. In truth I was no longer interested in the subject. At the time I had been genuinely worried for Jim; for, through the eyes of the panicking wife, it had sounded horrendous. But, now that the reality had turned out to be trivial, my interest had evaporated. Yet, as office etiquette demanded, I simulated interest; and Jim was clearly still needing to talk out the traumas he had experienced.

Eventually Jim's flow of words came to an abrupt end, and normal business conversation was resumed. I opened up with 'I found an interesting application the other day,' I was always exploring the frontiers of my market-place, 'the oncologist at the Royal wants to try and separate human bone marrow of all things. He says he has more than litre of the stuff each time, and wonders if the cell separator will handle it.'

'That really isn't enough to get the machine stabilised, it normally takes the best part of a litre through the machine before you can get the interface positioned correctly,' Jim had already spent nearly a month being trained in the US and exactly what the performance of the machine was, ' though perhaps we could loop it around several times.'

I was disappointed, because it had seemed a good opportunity. But in the sales business you had to expect to lose more often than you won. In any case I was immediately distracted by the urgent warbling of my telephone.

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