This week 26 years ago, I started office life. Wearing a cheap suit and awkwardly knotted tie, I clicked through the security gate at One Southwark Bridge, London, the FT’s office from 1989 to 2019 — and a sick building if ever I saw one.
At about 5pm that first day, the full horror of the office-worker’s existence dawned on me. School had done its job of preparing me for the regimented daily tedium. But at least school generally ended mid-afternoon. In the office, long after the January night had fallen, my new colleagues kept bashing away at their computers in a room where the windows didn’t even open. Careers spent seated under fluorescent lights had denatured their bodies and skins. One day, I realised, I would be them. I’m not big on Wordsworth, but I remembered the lines that John Mortimer’s fictional barrister Rumpole was always quoting:
Shades of the prison-house begin to close