Maurice

In the mid-eighties I found employment in a large accounting office. On my first day, early on a Monday morning, I was shown to my desk. There was hardly anyone about, but Maurice was in and he came over.

Maurice would have been forty-five. Coke bottle glasses dominated his oval, academic face. His hair had thinned out, exposing a fair amount of scalp. He was short, slight and unathletically pear-shaped. His unfashionable attire looked as if he was still dressed by his mother. Maybe he was, maybe he still lived with her, maybe it was she who insisted he wear socks with his sandals. I never found out. I never asked. It never mattered. He walked up to me with a short-stepped, light-footed shuffle, propelling him without the assistance of his arms, which stayed by his side. He didn’t exactly cut a dashing figure, but of the half-dozen others in the office he was the only one to welcome me. I warmed to him instantly.

During the comings days and weeks I noticed a few others like Maurice, all guys, all office assistants, all doing menial stuff like opening mail, filing, photocopying, running errands, making coffee and tea. They were the butt of most of the office humour. They didn’t mind. Common to them all was a simple, childlike disposition. Common to all of them also was the absence of career prospects. None of them would rise above office assistant. None of them seemed to mind. You could ask them to do anything; they always obliged.

Maurice and I took a keen interest in each other. We became friends. He was widely travelled, cultured, intelligent, engaged with current events. I couldn’t understand why he had settled for a permanent job at the bottom of a pile of clerks. He said that he never ‘fitted in’. He dropped out of school. University was out of the question. He could never summon enthusiasm for anything that had the slightest whiff of a curriculum. He went where his nose led him. He knew a lot. He’d read most of the classics, he read newspapers and magazines. He could talk about anything. There was a lot to him. He was worthy of emulation. But he thought so poorly of himself that he felt the need to create an outrageous fantasy to bolster his self-esteem.

Maurice never mentioned womanising to me, but almost everyone else in the office was an audience for fictitious stories about his private life. He laid it on thick. He had the knack of making a story believable. His women were “mature singles” as he put it. He was a paid-up member of a number of dating clubs for a more mature person. And, according to him, he was making hay in unending sunshine. He played out before a rapt audience his process of chatting up a date. He would announce that he was going to ring up a prospect, then with a flourish dial the number and conduct his wooing loud enough to enable his listeners to catch every word. After arranging a time he’d triumphantly replace the phone and notch up another score. His audience sometimes applauded him. Every afternoon at five sharp he walked out of the office and vanished off the face of the earth, materialising the following morning or the following week to resume his tales of conquest.

The following year, the board decided to do a sweep of all departments to get rid of ‘dead wood’ as one of them put it when he thought he was out of earshot. Among the first to fall foul of the razor gang that descended on the office was the bunch of smiling, affable office assistants.

I maintained contact with Maurice for a while. He applied for job after job, lowering the bar to improve his chances. His delicate stature ruled out manual labour, leaving practically nothing else. He told me that none of his retrenched colleagues found permanent employment. Eventually he gave up looking for work and returned to his parents’ home in Garfield.

I realised it was the end of an era when society was kinder. If there was one thing full employment gave Maurice, it was acceptance. He got out of bed in the morning with a sense of purpose, somewhere to go, a place where people knew him and joked with him. His salary was peripheral to his sense of belonging to a society which had a useful place for him.

When society turned ugly and unfeeling, Maurice was cast into outer darkness. He was brutally reminded that he was a social misfit.

People like Maurice play an important role. They remind others that there is more to life than climbing corporate ladders, amassing wealth, and acquiring and upgrading material things. Despite his fantasies, Maurice displayed contentment with his lot. He didn’t ask a lot of society. A humble place at the bottom of the ladder was all he desired. Acceptance meant everything to him. Without it he was reduced to nothing.

Downsizing, outsourcing and contracting have no place for the soft skills of people like Maurice who made the office a better place. For one thing, he brought out the best in his colleagues. Some of them told me that no one ever believed Maurice’s boasts, but no one felt sufficiently ill-disposed to him to tell him.

Maurice was the only one of the office assistants I knew well. Workplace trends of the eighties and nineties consigned to the scrapheap a number of innocent, worthy human beings.

Who gave people the right

To include and to exclude

To set the bar for acceptance

To jettison those who don’t cut the mustard

To banish those who don’t pass aptitude tests

Or will never possess letters

Bachelor this, Master that, society’s so-called betters

Who gave people the right

To destroy the souls of decent folk

Brand them as misfits

Because they lack greed and ambition

Because they don’t have what it takes

To scurry up corporate ladders

All they want is a job

To give them dignity and self-respect

They ask for so little

They intrude on no one’s aspirations

A threat to no one