This morning I wrote a hopeful email: I wrote a hopeful email to my manager, informing her of my intention to apply for a promotion and needing to solicit her advice before doing so. This afternoon I was told by her manager, a short and abrupt bully of late middle age, quite plainly and in all seriousness, that I would not be recommended for promotion. Her entire response was a commixture of astonishment, incredulity and anger at being confronted with what she clearly thought was a ridiculous proposal. I left feeling dazed and humiliated. If there was ever a conversation which had fallen further away from that which I had previously adumbrated in my brain, I have yet to squirm through it. Not even when I turned up at Nadine Poulson’s house on a school night nearly twenty years ago, stewed on several cans of Lee’s father’s best bitter and was subjected to a savaging by her horrified mother, had it gone so spectacularly wrong, so quickly.

The conversation had a beginning, a muddle and an end but before it began came the walk. The walk is what happens in the civil service, when one is ordered to enjoin in private session with a manager. The order is delivered by the walker from a standing position, usually whilst the walkee is engaged in the middle of something else. This has the effect of immediately disconcerting the walkee, who is thrown into a state of confusion by having to arrest their brain from a complex tax calculation or some such tedium and back into the present in a nanosecond. The walker will not wait for a response, for none is expected and none can be given, other than for the walkee to quickly lock their computer and follow. The walker will therefore be several yards ahead by the time the walkee rises and will remain so for the entirety of the whole embarrassing trudge through the office. No conversation can take place, unless the walkee wants to shout at the back of a rapidly accelerating head and so the walkee scurries behind, never quite catching up, never quite achieving parity, for none is intended and the whole damn office knows. This was curious, for I had hitherto enjoyed a pleasant exchange with my manager only a few hours previously, an exchange which resulted in a promise to spend some time later discussing my application. This was altogether different. I began to strongly suspect she had been leant on, for the pace at which she peddled backwards was something to behold. She had, apparently, misunderstood my email and would not be able to help. The whole thing put me in mind of that particular approach banks and credit card companies take when you default on a payment. The first thing to go is any attempt at polite badinage and instead a distant cold replaces it. Helen and Linda and Joanne are your best friends when they’re selling you the benefits of nought per cent on balance transfers until you’re a day late and suddenly it’s like Ving Rhames losing his L.A privileges but instead it’s “this is Mrs. Jackson calling from Barclaycard” and “I’m afraid we won’t be able to help on this occasion, sir” as you’re banished out of town.

So I approached her manager, a woman I don’t much like in the way that I don’t much like all bullies. She took great delight in telling me that I would not be recommended for promotion because, after fifteen months in my present role, after all the 7am starts, after all the times I went that little bit further for a colleague, after all the proposals and after all the procedures I set up, in order to effect a positive change to a microscopic part of a macroscopic organisation, after all the assistance cheerfully given, all the appreciation gratefully - always gratefully (I may be a foul-mouthed misanthrope here but manners were drilled into me as a child) - and genuinely offered, after all the times I expected a colleague to reciprocate the same and was instead treated with contempt or fobbed away with lies, after the times I was left alone on the telephone, out of my depth, unable to assist the person on the other end, whilst every manager in the vicinity sloped quietly away because they did not want to deal with it, after all that I will not be recommended for a job I could do in my fucking sleep because she does not know the first thing about me.

She conceeded that I may well be competent but competence wasn’t enough, although she made it quite plain she did not know either way and had little interest in finding out. She was so obtuse, so wilfully eager to misinterpret my intentions, so drunk on weilding her pathetic and pointless jurisdiction over me, that it rapidly transformed into a farce. She knows my name, the desk at which I sit but beyond that, nothing. Not about my work, not about the man I am, nothing at all. Is often said that the civil service is a ticket to a kind of utopia at the expense of the tax payer, but the truth is that whilst the benefits are good, the pay is poor and the stress levels are through the roof. Yet nothing, nothing whatsoever, in my working life has destroyed my confidence quite like being told this afternoon that I am so insignificant, so unimportant, that I haven’t even registered as a blip on her radar.

Enough is enough.