The Unfinished Tale Of Sophie Anderson by Martyn J. Pass

a company, we should be looking ahead to the future with an optimistic eye, it came out sounding hollow and emotionless and entirely scripted, no doubt cut and pasted from the book. The faces around the room, my colleagues, had completely glazed over and most people were either looking past the boss to the wall behind him or up at the ceiling where a broken light fitting caused the brilliance of the bulb to flicker and dance around us.
    "So, moving forward, I'd like you all to..." I looked at the table and found myself staring at Tom and his still-unruly hair. He was writing something on a piece of paper but I didn't know what it could be. Surely he wasn't taking notes on the boss's speech? The receptionist usually recorded the entire meeting on her phone and stored the file on the computer so what was he doing? I wondered.
    "Pay rise?" whispered Dave who was sat beside me. Frank was a few seats down next to some of the lathe operators.
    "Chance would be a fine thing," I replied. Tom suddenly looked up from his paper and I realised he must have heard me whispering. There was the faintest hint of a smile at the corners of his mouth and I looked away before I turned red again. I didn't trust my face any more, it kept letting me down at the worst possible time. Better to look at the accountant sat in the corner, eager to produce his graphs and charts mid-way through the meeting. He was a little man (as you'd expect all accountants to be for some reason) with huge spectacles that turned his eyes into oversized pools of watery green. He wore a grey shirt instead of the usual Riley uniform and he wore a black tie with the smallest knot you've ever seen and it looked like it was cutting off the circulation to his head. Despite my unfair description of him he was a lovely man and he was always eager to help anyone he could.
    "I bet they mention work speed," whispered Dave again. I nodded. "You watch."
    Once the usual 'state of the company' bit was out of the way the meetings always turned a little more personal. This was the time for getting down to business and dishing out a few choice words. In times gone past there'd been some shockers - a sudden explanation for a dismissal two days earlier, the announcement of a baby NO ONE knew about despite our effective gossip system, a dead colleague (in fairness, we already knew but it had to be told 'officially') and the shock pay rise of three years earlier (never to be seen again). This meeting lived up to Dave's expectations though.
    "I'd like to take a minute to encourage us all to dig a bit deeper and really work hard at getting the jobs out on time..." The days of the hard-bitten manager were long gone. Ten, maybe twenty years ago, that statement would have sounded more like 'lads - you're getting fucking slow and jobs aren't going out. Pick up the pace or you're fucking sacked'. Now that's gone and it's all 'dig deeper' and 'excel' and 'aim for the stars - you might land on the moon' and other such motivational, patronising statements that avoided direct confrontation. What were you left with? None sense dressed up as 'inspirational'. Some of us would just like the plain old way, to be told to get a grip and sort ourselves out, or my favourite - 'give your head a wobble!' . Now, in light of Frank's slowness, we were getting some serious verbal diarrhoea and no one could flush the toilet.
    "So can we all pull together and keep pushing ourselves to achieve our aims and objectives as a family, not just as a business..."
    Family? The only similarity work has to a family is that you don't pick who you have to spend most of your time with! I decided long ago that work was NEVER family, that it was a business that was meant to be PROFESSIONAL and that meant being treated like a contracted worker, which was what we were: people hired to do a job in return for a wage. A two-way partnership - we work, he pays. It's a binding agreement handed down by countless generations so society could be