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office were louvred open and a small figure was making the lonely walk along a rain-lashed fairway. But the hundred feet between where Tosser was sitting and I was standing was filled with something that was as much New Age encampment or squatter settlement, Peruvian barriada or Tunisian soukh, as the editorial floor of a national newspaper.
    The brave vision of Boyd Allen and Partners, the architects, had failed to take into account the fact that the light streaming in through the ziggurat curtain walls, at the same time as achieving their aim of rendering the building transparent from the street, would also wash out the screens of the visual display units and fry the operators alive where they were sitting.
    As a result, sheets, blankets, tarpaulins, squares of newspaper and anything else that might deflect light and heat have been gaffer-taped to the windows, creating a constant feral dusk. People sit in isolated mandalas of light with pyramid ionisers and personal air-deodorisers and cheap Korean plastic fans, insulated from the unpredictable forces eddying around them in the darkness.
    The conditions, and the increasingly wildfire rumour that the present clean-desk policy is soon to give way to a no-desk policy (the ‘non-territorial office’ and ‘hot-desking’ are the new words we are currently hearing) have brought out something unmistakably tribal and primitive. The blocky inertness of many people’s computer terminals has been enlivened with post-it notes and picture postcards and bills and bumper stickers and every manner of printed ephemera, as well as Christmas cracker thingumajigs and furry little creatures wearing vests with slogans like ‘You’re no bunny til some bunny loves you’ and ‘Hug me, I’m dirty’, and rock star pictures and football pennants and Garfields delivering cutesy messages of love and hope. The terminals have taken on the funk-spiritual look of Third World shrines or the worship sites of some plump, bug-eyed folk deity.
    The screens of the terminals that were logged-on but unattended showed hypnotic, swirling, maze-like patterns traditionallyassociated with ritual, trance, meditation: meteors, spermatozoa, polygons, spirogyra, Escher birds, the patterns you see when you’re punched or nutted into a lamp-post, tumbling vectors and arcs and sacristy-coloured twill weave, shoals of weird reflective neon-patterned fish swimming in the electromagnetic radiation.
    And materialising out of the real world chiaroscuro – formidable uniformed women with cover-girl smiles and airy spraywork hair, remnants of the American trainer/hostess teams, the Shandies and Mindies and Candies, brought in to help us confront the ‘informational isolation’ and insecurity we are programmed to feel when confronted with the new technologies; plus, tufted, leather-armoured motorbike messengers as scary as Bantu or Yoruba. If I hadn’t been drinking I’d have thought I’d been drinking.
    In the outer office, Betty Cooper was on the phone talking to Tosser Dosson’s wife about the new holiday outfits they were planning for him and looking like a subsidiary character in the early, black-and-white days of Coronation Street whose name I never knew but who was eventually killed off, although the actress, I believe, is still living. (The resemblance resides mainly in the area of the hair and the lightly salted-and-peppered upper lip and the enormous come-rest-your-head grandmotherly bosoms.)
    The effect aimed for (and achieved) in Howie Dosson’s inner sanctum is briary Rotary Club suburban: deep-polished cherry-wood desk and conference table; leather-framed family pictures and award certificates and citations; deep-pile blue rug with oriental motifing; miniature raked Zen pebble garden; low suspension ceiling; high-street stereo stacker system.
    He always seems happier, less challenged away from all this, though, in the part of the office with the synthetic carpet tiles and unit seating and chipped and