How can a whole day go by so quickly? It’s been more painting and patching today, with two visits to the building supplies emporium down the road. I won’t go into the gory details, but today we needed a ladder, a garden fork and spade, some wood glue, and sandpaper. I was in the garden, the bedroom, up the ladder, digging up bushes, and of course, applying filler.
It’s peculiar how time flies when you’re focused. This is true all kinds of work, but seems more prevalent in physical, repetitive tasks. You’d think it would be the other way around. We’ve touched on this in connection with the therapeutic effects of painting a wall (as opposed to watching paint dry, which is legendarily less absorbing), but my recent encounters with sandpaper and paint got me remembering.
The first legal job I had in London was as a temp in the Settlement department of the London Stock Exchange. It was 1993. For every trader shouting “buy” or “sell”, a train of events would ensue in the physical world to change and record the ownership of the shares – and all of this was done on paper.
Motorbike couriers would speed around the City carrying transaction slips and transfer documents; the change of ownership would be chronicled with the registrars; the consideration (the money) transferred; and price and volume data recorded on a database. At the interface of the physical world of paper and the computer realm was a long room in a building at 4 Christopher Street, London EC2.
(Digression: this building was later used as the police headquarters in the TV series ‘Life on Mars’ and is now reborn as a funky shared workspace facility – a far cry from the dingy factory we worked in.)
Down the middle of the long room ran a narrow conveyor belt, each side of which sat rows of women at mainframe computer terminals. On delivery by the couriers, bundles of transfer documents were loaded onto at the far end of the belt and travelled along until grabbed by one of the ladies, who would flip it open one-handed and swiftly enter the information into the system with the other – chatting all the while to her colleagues.
This would take less than a minute and the bundle of documents was then placed back on the belt, to be carried to the end of the room, where stood a lowly unskilled temporary worker on minimum wage – me. My role was to read the code stamped on the bundle and toss it into a series of plastic baskets according to its number. Early on, this job seemed incredibly easy – a total doss – but it soon became boring to the extent that drying paint would have been a welcome and engrossing diversion. There was plenty of time to engage in idle thoughts.
What I didn’t know – but soon found out – was that at the time London’s equity market was settled on an account basis: all trades executed during a two-week period had to be complete by its end. This meant that early in the period, there was little pressure to settle. This was when I started. Later in the period, as the deadline approached, pressure mounted to ensure the money was transferred and the new name entered on the register.
With the account date looming, the traffic of documents down the conveyer belt increased exponentially. There was less and less time to ponder: more and more bundles had to be seized, their codes read, and the correct basket found. The ladies chatted, their fingers flew over the keys, and the documents piled higher and higher as they advanced inexorably down the belt. I found myself wishing for another set of hands. My eyes blurred as they scanned the codes. The threat of the bundles cascading off the end of the belt was unthinkable – it was a challenge to work ever faster and never fail.
And then . . . a zen-like state descended. The codes popped off the page at a glance; each bundle was gathered smoothly and dispatched into its basket in one movement, even as the next was being swept up. Time seemed suspended – did the conveyor slow down as the heaps mounted up? I was as one with the belt, the ladies, the chatter and rattle of capitalism’s relentless cycle. It was possible to stand outside myself and watch myself as a cog in a huge machine.
And then, as night follows day, as the tides ebb and flow, it was time for lunch.
To be fair, I only did this job for two or three account periods, and was then moved to another department. The whole enterprise was already doomed – millions were being invested to transform the system to a paperless settlement model, and account periods gave way to ‘rolling settlement’ – far more capital-efficient and cost-effective. You didn’t need hundreds of part-time, temporary and contract workers anymore and within a couple of years it was gone. All those remarkable ladies who never failed to settle the market were let go.
Funnily, though, the camaraderie of that odd paper processing factory was the strongest I’ve ever known in any workplace. The jobs weren’t all as menial as mine, but everyone was part of the family – and the alumni still keep in touch all these years later. It’s tempting to think the nature of the work had something to do with that — and the millennials with their Macbooks who now occupy the space won’t get to experience it.
Anyway, it just goes to show that even the most basic unskilled labour can have a fascination at its core if you look for it. And though it wasn’t obvious then, getting to know the system on the front line was a huge benefit which underpinned my future career. From the most unlikely acorns, some sort of oak may yet grow. And if not, there’s always lunch.