Key to the Highway

Human existence has always been, and always will be, about pecking order. The key is not to find yourself too near the bottom of it. Every office, every school, every government, and every community – all about pecking order. The bigger the chicken the more the feed. Result? An even bigger chicken.

Frank Randolph thought these thoughts as he strode fuming from the building which housed his latest employment, his sensitive instincts once again bruised by bureaucratic chicanery, this time over access to a key.

Office life was full of pettiness, he was sorely aware of that from past experience. Why he had thought it would be any different in his native Scotland he wasn’t quite sure. Perhaps he had expected better of his compatriots? God knows why? Recent experience had shown them to be ten times worse than anything he had experienced elsewhere.

“Like a fucking primary school in there…!” This exclamation was more than muttered at the busy bus stop outside where many fellow commuters turned around to discover its source.

“In there..” he genuflected with his head towards the building that he, and certainly most of they, had just come from “Like being back at school”

There was little doubt that the putative travellers understood the gist of this but none seemed eager to follow it up with further enquiry.

Something happened to adult people as soon as they enter their place of work. Outside of it they performed the most astonishingly mature roles. Looking after sick or elderly relatives, buying houses, maintaining cars and other impressive possessions, bringing up children, yet, as soon as they set foot in the office they somehow deteriorated into petty-minded little tyrants determined to deflect, rebuff, refute and refuse, to bicker, grumble, back-stab and, as was apparently the case this day, to hold on to keys by employing all the devious cunning and instinctive sense of demarcation in their possession. In fact ‘possession’ was the key, and ‘the key’ was a possession not in the gift of many at all.

There were in existence two keys for the ‘archive room’ where were kept the files of all members of staff currently and previously employed in the service. Frank Randolph required access to this space in order to retrieve the files of those seeking to take advantage of a voluntary redundancy package that was on offer. Frank himself was one such ‘redundancy-seeking’ individual. The trouble with all this was that neither he, nor anyone else on his small team, currently had a key to the archive room. Two other teams did, and both were proving highly resistant to the notion of sharing them.

Randolph had a lowly status, both within his team and within the organisation generally. A turbulent and self-destructive existence had left him at aged forty-nine desperate to take any job that would prevent the necessity to move back down south where he would essentially dependent on family for living quarters. Such a notion could never be entertained so he’d landed this lowly clerical job. He was, in effect, an elderly office junior, a term no longer employed in these modern times, so Human Resource Assistant Administrator he was deemed to be. In reality though, and in Antipodean argot, he was’ lower than a snake’s bollock’s’.

He certainly had no power over anything as covetous as a key to the archive room….

Frank had once been on the academic staff of a ‘university’ in the north-west of England. It had been a polytechnic but it had become a university. This ‘new status’ allowed it to do many clever things to do with funding and putting bums (preferably foreign) on seats but it appeared to Frank to do little to enhance academic prowess. Indeed, judging by the meagre intellects of some of the students he’d confronted, the new institution was willing to accept everyone and anyone who applied and hand them all average degrees as a matter of course. The word among the staff in their not-so-ivory-towers was ‘for Christ’s sake don’t fail anyone, they’ll cause a tremendous stink and get it over-turned anyway’. Some of them barely had the nous to take out (citation needed) from their wiki-plagiarisms.

He’d been the friend of Professor’s and eccentrics (often one and the same). His only contact with them now was if one of them had a letter printed in the Guardian. He’d had to lose touch with the whole lot of them in order to avoid so many hurtful reminders. He’d fallen in love with the girl in the admin office. Bad mistake. She’d ‘copped off’ with so many of his colleagues (and some of his students) that, had he merely been her pimp and not so smitten, he could have earned a fortune.

A lot of alcohol under the bridge since then. Really, he was lucky to be alive.

Maybe this key thing was some sort of symbolic test. If he could work it out maybe it would unlock a door, though hopefully not into his own personal ‘archive room’. Maybe it held an answer for him? 

Or, more likely, it was just ‘power-games’ among very minor bureaucrats.

Yes, a rather pathetic power game was what he had now become embroiled in. Neither of the other two teams would release the key. Well, actually, one would if you approached them when their ‘team leader’ was off, but that was next to no good as she wasn’t often off and he needed the key on a pretty much daily basis. The other team just blankly refused to cooperate, they at least had the credibility of being on another spur altogether. ‘This is our key you should have your own key’ was their attitude, or sometimes they would allude to the other key-holding team claiming ‘they’re supposed to share their key with the rest of your Spur’. Either way, they were immovable (although he did have a friendly contact on this team who once gave him the key as long as one of their team could act as a chaperone and retrieve the key. He could then ring them from the archive room and they would come down and close it up for him).

They obviously feared he was actually going to run off with their key.

Yes, pecking orders! Everywhere you looked.

Look at car drivers. They despise pedestrians, and the motive force for this hatred is ‘pecking order’. Car drivers believe them to be superior to pedestrians – socially, economically, technologically, in every way. Car drivers also hate cyclists. Pedestrians don’t have such a good time with cyclists either as they often encroach upon the pavement with their wheels. Pedestrians resent this bitterly. Pavements are the pedestrian’s domain, cyclists can use roads, yet they arrogantly use both. Drivers of big cars, those ones where they’re sat way up high, look down on everyone, physically and socially. Drivers don’t like buses either. Buses are full of lazy pedestrians and they’re also big, cumbersome things that are afforded ‘bus lanes’ i.e. part of the road denied to cars. Car drivers have so much contempt for these that they sometimes cheekily use them to speed forward up the queue.

But, the whole thing is fucked up. The despised driver of buses is also likely to be a car driver on his time off. Most cyclists will also own a car. How would you know if that bothersome pedestrian who you’ve had to stop at a Zebra Crossing for is not a car driver just out for a walk?

The ultimate contempt the car driver can show to the lowly pedestrian is to splash him with dirty water. Not deliberate of course (well, sometimes it is) just lazily inadvertent. So lacking in empathy are they with the poor pedestrian that they are not totally careful about puddles. They’re in-attentiveness is in itself a show of derision.

The ‘team leader’ bitch on his own spur, the one in ultimate control of the second key (we’ll call this key ‘the second key’) was a sour-faced dumpy female in her mid-twenties. She was on ‘temporary promotion’ as team leader as the real one was on maternity leave and she was keen to show her colours. Her contempt for Frank Randolph was apparent from the start and would only grow. This ‘new entrant’, this ‘middle-aged new entrant’. Maybe no-one was taking her seriously as a team-leader and she was taking it out on him. She was sneeringly contemptuous from the start. She was friends with his ex-colleagues on the Customer Service team where he hadn’t lasted long and he knew they talked about him. He could imagine the conversations.

“S’posed to be this right clever guy but the amount of times we had to help him out with such simple stuff….”

That would be the gist of it. They’d enjoy bigging themselves up as ‘smarter than the smart guy’

“you can have all the degrees in the world but if you haven’t got common sense”

Should be printed on the Union Jack those words….

British folk don’t really do clever. He’d thought maybe Scottish folk…

In a way, it’s as well us Brits can’t access guns easily otherwise we’d be gunning each other down in droves like they do in the US. Guns are such emphatic weapons. Knives are more problematic. You have to somehow attach yourself to the other body using your own force, wheras with a gun it does it all for you and you can separate yourself from your victim. No chance of him grabbing at your hands as the knife plunges their guts, eyes bulged and staring at you, almost like a lovers embrace going on. None of that with a gun. Fair bit of accuracy and ‘lights out Vienna’.

Second-key bitch deserved to die. She’d made his position intolerable. His own team-leader, another of her canteen friends, was completely ineffectual in coercing the key from her, despite his teams urgent need for it. He waffled something about ‘ordering another one’ but this was proving problematic because of some obscure ‘security’ reason no-one understood. He asked her one more time and she gave her stock answer that ‘the key had to be available to her team at all times’. That was how she talked. None of her team had any need to go to the archive room.

Now it was she who would be archived….