Corporate Days

By Tim Spicoli

A middle-aged, mid-level executive in the middle of a mid-life crisis ...

Sid Vickers is in his late-forties; a white-collar worker who struggles with Sydney traffic, passenger congestion on his weekly bus commute, the political undercurrents inside a modern corporation, the responsibility of providing for a wife and two young kids at home, and his work-life imbalance generally.

As the female CEO at the American insurance company he works for, increasingly makes his (and every other employee’s) life a misery in these tougher economic times, sardonic Sid conspires to finally take some action rather than wiling away his days feeling sorry for himself.

With a Roald Dahl “Tales of the Unexpected” twist, this book diarises the one hundred and fifty days it takes for Sid to change his situation ...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: Mar 31, 2016
• ISBN: 9781925447453

Tim Spicoli

Tim lives on the beautiful Mornington Peninsula with his wife and two young kids. He works full-time at a small-to-medium sized Australian-owned insurance company with a June year end and enjoys driving his Schwarz V8 coupe to work each day on the uncongested backroads of semi-rural Victoria.Tim moved to Australia from New Zealand about twelve years ago and spent over eleven years “living” and working in Sydney before escaping with his family to the “Deep South” in winter last year.

Book preview

Friday 10 Jan

It was on the street and at shop counters that Sid noticed it most.

The difference between a big city and a small town that is. In a big city you get obligatory politeness, a short spat of niceties, but if you attempt to engage in any kind of conversation you get a half smile, a quick look downwards, then they look up and away and smile their routine at the next customer in the queue. Because there’s always a next customer in the queue. The next customer would groan and roll their eyes if they had to listen to you and the shop girl having a chat. They’re in a hurry. Grab a quick bite to eat and then back to the desk for more emails, arranging meetings, finalising reports.

Big city life; more money but no time.

In a small town the shop girl is glad to chat. There is no next customer to serve and she’s glad of the reprieve from the boredom of checking her mobile phone for messages she knows won’t be there. The men’s shirts are all racked, the cufflink display stand is all in order (and who wears cufflinks round here anyway?), there’s nothing left to do but watch the second hand on the clock above the counter tick methodically, second by agonising second, towards lunch break.

Sid Vickers is a Sydney sider. Living in the big smoke, chasing the dollar, climbing the ladder. He works for an American insurance company, so he lives in a world of aggressively pursuing new opportunities, working on his executive presence, and engaging with the business, all very meaningfully of course.

It’s tiresome, all this wordage for the same old same old. He’s in his (very) late forties, carrying a bit too much around the middle, a bit too little on top, the crow’s feet are getting deeper by the day, the ear and nostril hair thicker and more widespread. Suits bought a year ago don’t really fit any more. The pants are now too tight but it’s getting too expensive to keep upsizing.

He imagines that later on he’ll go for a bike ride, or do some chin ups. But the working day and the long commute will grind him down. He’ll walk from the bus stop in the middle of the M2 motorway to his house in the suburbs. He’ll get in the door and the fridge and TV will be ready waiting, and he’ll once again sit on his ever expanding arse and try and forget the drudgery of the day (and replace it with some other kind on the telly).

Twenty years earlier he’d been a high school teacher in a small New Zealand coastal town. The working day all over before 4pm, he’d walk briskly home to be greeted by his Alsatian dog and, after changing and gulping down a glass of water, he’d take the mutt out for a long walk while he rode his bicycle. Twenty years ago and twenty kilos lighter. Absolutely fucking broke on a teacher’s salary and no prospect of ever affording a house in a city with a population large enough to support some level of culture, so he knew he wouldn’t stay teaching for long.

Growing up in Auckland in the 1970s and 1980s, the semi-rural teaching post (after Teachers College in Dunedin) was faced with some dread. Like most who grew up in big cities, Sid thought a destiny ending in a small farming town was going to be a living nightmare. But it wasn’t anywhere near as bad as he expected. There he experienced the chatty shop girl, never in too much of a hurry to pass up a five or ten minute chat about nothing in particular. It was notably different to Auckland, where you wouldn’t even know the name of the bloke who lived three houses up the road.

Ditto Sydney twenty years on.

But of course, in time, the friendly next door neighbour who kept bringing her lettuces over of a Saturday morning, always angling for a chat and the (unlikely) possibility that Sid might actually invite her in, became a major shagging nuisance. Sid was thankful he’d played rugby when he was younger because old nosy Rosy kept trying to look around him and into his house and he kept side-stepping into her line of sight. In the end he just stopped answering the door and turned up the stereo.

Sid vividly recalled craving some good old fashioned, big-city, neighbourly indifference on many a Saturday morning while living there.

Similarly, when a shop girl (and by this time even shop assistants in small farming towns had been transformed into Customer Service Representatives) said, you’re the teacher from up the Boys’ High School aren’t you?, Sid knew his teaching tenure was decidedly finite. He missed his big-city anonymity. The irony of all this was not lost on Sid.

On leaving town he also left teaching. He re-trained as an insurance professional in some obscure area of mathematical specialty. He spent more than eight years in Wellington, New Zealand’s capital city, before relocating to Sydney. He’d been in Sydney for over ten years now.

The relocation from windy Wellington to sunny Sydney was quite some shock to Sid. If he stopped and looked up, the height of the skyscrapers in the Sydney CBD made him feel giddy and insignificant. It was on those same overshadowed Sydney streets that he’d first noticed that practiced disinterest people really got into their faces. Sid thought he had probably practiced the look himself in recent years; the big city slowly eroded your soul.

The daily bus commute was like being stuck in a forty five minute elevator ride. All passengers facing forward, looking down, rows of white wires in earholes, no talking.

Then, when he arrived on the ground floor of the building he worked in, he had a de ja vu elevator ride. Everyone facing forward, looking up and pretending to be deeply engrossed in watching the red LED numbers slowly incrementing and eventually stopping on their floor.

Only difference was, on the bus you had windows to look out of, and here Sid would really notice the size of Sydney as he crossed the harbour bridge, the enormity and expanse of those rising vertical columns of glass, carpet and computer terminals.

Yet ironically, by taking the same bus route every day, Sid felt a strange sense of familiarity in his little groove, which stretched out along the M2 motorway and on into the CBD, amongst those clustered monoliths where he spent the best part of his day, five out of every seven.

All the same, there was no denying the beauty of Sydney and its harbour.

But as he stared down at the looming CBD from his harbour bridge vantage point on the 610X bus, he couldn’t help thinking that the bus window was very apt.

Sydney was like a beautiful woman behind a thick glass panel – you can see how lovely it is, but you can’t reach out, touch it and get amongst it – it’s just way, way too expensive.

Monday 13 Jan

Sid had read somewhere recently that the middle years really were the toughest.

Stranded in a valley of misery, too far from the leisure-filled days of retirement, and too far past the pleasure-filled nights of youth. Sid reckoned he still had many years of five day weeks before he’d be able to ease back.

Sid knew he could really work up feeling sorry for himself, and he did a bit that Monday morning as he yet again boarded the 610X bus, amidst that foul fug of morning breath, body odour and a notable lack of fucking seats.

He stood near the front by the door, hoping for a gulp of cleaner air whenever the bus stopped. Staring out the window he saw mostly men and women his own age, slotted comfortably behind the wheels of their clean, odourless, properly air-conditioned, single occupancy vehicles. Nice cars, European stuff. While the sour grapes bloomed year round in Sid’s mental glasshouse, he knew in reality that these suckers were paying over twenty bucks a day in tolls, over twenty five bucks a day to park, and faced the inevitable stop, start and merge routine all the way from the Lane Cove Tunnel to the CBD. And all that before they’d even shelled out for fuel, servicing, tyres and insurances. He once again settled on the rationality of his thirty six dollar weekly bus pass and the marvel of the bus lane.

This morning, there was little to look forward to. Mostly Sid liked his actual work, it was just the tricky American-style office politics that did his head in. Top-dog corporate Yanks couldn’t cope with any kind of negativity. Everything had to be spun to sound way more positive than it really was, and everything had to be expressed in that creepy corporatese they all insisted on talking in. If you didn’t mirror this use of language you could feel the glass ceiling forming above your head. The US were in town and so the Aussie management would be high-fiving all week.

So much smiling. All that phony matey-ness and formula banter; most of them had capped and whitened teeth. Sid wondered how many American women had married one of these even-toothed-grinners only to end up having ugly kids with yellow gappy teeth. Mind you, all that silicone…

As the day passed, you got a real sense of the shallow competitiveness of American society; when they went out for coffees mid-morning it was a bit breezy outside but there was no movement from any of their hair, it was so full of hair spray. Further scrutiny revealed little to no movement above the cheek line when the smiles did break out, and no crow’s feet either. Sid concluded they had all had Botox as well, but long enough ago for the little needle marks to have cleared up. As ever, the neck and Adam’s apple gave away the true age.

Sid was tied up with the Yanks until early afternoon, but thankfully they always did an extravagant lunch at the Japanese barbeque place on the corner, so at least he had Wagyu tenderloins to look forward to. After lunch, with a meeting free afternoon, Sid closed his office door and, every time someone walked past the glass panel next to his door and looked like they were about to interrupt, Sid snatched the handset off the base and began nodding and hmm-hmm-ing.

Most days were a variation on this; an abundance of work in the proverbial in-tray, but a mountain of meetings with people you just wouldn’t spend any time with given a choice.

At day’s end Sid would slump into his seat on the 610X bus and gaze thoughtlessly out the window, all the way up the M2.

Thursday 16 Jan

Of course, with the US leaders in town, there had to be the obligatory gathering for all employees and the once-in-a-quarter chance to hear the Global CEO tell everyone (again) what a great business we worked for, what a great country Australia was, and how it was all because of our collaboration, communication and connectedness. The Global CEO said these were his three C-words.

Sid had a C-word of his own to describe the Global CEO.

These occasions closely resembled one of those US evangelical religious gatherings you saw on day-time TV. The congregation all in rows staring ahead at the preacher, lots of clapping and canned laughter, PowerPoint slides of the Global CEO’s charity work with African-American kids back in the US and, of course, at the end, presentation of achievement awards and certificates for all those employees who still thought it was worth going above and beyond for a round of applause and a $500 (pre-tax) gift card.

As ever, the Human Resources department were roving around with iPhones and iPads, filming and photographing, so the whole charade could be loaded onto the company intranet within hours. Then each employee would be sent an email with a link, so the entire experience could be relived again (and again) back at one’s desk.

Despite it all there was some upside to these occasions. The back row seats became a magnet for the more subversive staff members. Looking along the back row now, Sid could see Kathy from Legal and Dino from Reinsurance sotto voce-ing out of the side of their mouths, eye rolling and sniggering. Sid allowed himself a little wry smile too; at least he wasn’t totally alone.

The Global CEO would never have seen any of this back row shenanigans; there was one of those mirror-tiled disco balls spinning slowly from the ceiling and, with all the camera flashes and his constant grinning, he was blind to anything beyond about the third row from the front.

In any case, there were enough scripted