Balancing Act

Stacey McRoberts had come up from nowhere. She said it herself, didn’t try to hide her background the way some people do. Instead, she made it work for her. Stacey had joined the company at 16, with a handful of good qualifications and a willingness to make the tea, do the lunch run and photocopy endless documents without complaint. At the time, we wondered why a bright lass like her hadn’t stayed on at school. Turned out she was too ambitious to bother with all of that, and too impatient to get started on reinventing herself.

Now a decade on, Stacey was our Human Resources director. There were those who hinted that she’d earned the promotions lying her back, but we never saw any evidence of that. Believe me, we always know when sex is part of the deal. It’s like Downton Abbey in this place: there’s nothing goes on upstairs amongst the management that we in the downstairs staffroom don’t know about. Or at least, that’s what I used to reckon.

I suppose what’s odd is that she wasn’t resented. I can think of plenty of reasons why she might be. As well as the celeb-style good looks, our Stacey never seemed to put a foot wrong or to have a hair out of place. All that aside, when somebody gets promoted over the people they used to work for, it usually makes for bad feeling. Nobody liked it, for instance, when Mark Toshner got to be Head of Finance over Billy Marshall who’d been there years. If we were honest, we knew it was because Billy was so stuck in his ways you thought his boots were nailed to the floor. Still, Mark put our backs up the way he lorded it over the accounts office and so we made his life just a bit more difficult than it needed to be. That’s offices for you. You need to do your job right and keep everybody sweet at the same time. It’s an impossible balancing act for most of us.

Stacey managed it. She seemed to treat everybody the same way, as if she really valued what they had to say.  She made you feel as though your job was every bit as important as the MD’s. She wasn’t a pushover, though. She’d made all sorts of changes and generally people don’t take kindly to new ways of doing things. But she would explain that, even if change meant hassle, it would all come out right in the end. Stacey had a way of making things – well – happen.

I remember the time she persuaded Di to leave. Di was in with the bricks.  In fact, to hear her, you’d think Di had laid the bricks herself. There was nothing Di didn’t know about the company, nothing she couldn’t do better than anybody else and nobody she wouldn’t put in their place if they annoyed her.  You could hear her shouting all along the corridor when she got started. Di was still a couple of years away from retiring but she had nothing to retire for. She said her work was her life.  And she was the bane of ours.

But Stacey took time with her, tolerating her endless opinions, plumbing the depths of her loneliness and somehow persuading her to choose and buy a tiny labradoodle pup for company. A week later and Di was complaining to all who would listen that work was interfering with puppy-walking, puppy-training and general quality puppy-time. Stacey listened sympathetically and, lo and behold! found the wherewithal to allow Di to retire early on a full pension. It was no wonder Stacey got on.

It was Roy Daniels let the cat out of the bag. Roy was one of the reps who came in for a sales meeting every couple of months. Roy fancied himself as a charmer and he would make a point of coming into the staffroom at coffee time as though he was checking on his harem. Some of them fell for it, some of us just pretended to. Roy and I got on OK, probably because I ignored his nonsense. We were both a bit past all that.

On this particular day, the sales meeting finished early and Roy stopped by my desk and said:

“Fancy a cuppa before I hit the road?” I was feeling a bit bored so I said, “Why not?” and we headed for the staffroom.

Turned out Roy had had an anniversary the week before, and he’d treated his wife to a luxury stay in a posh Cheshire hotel. He hadn’t realised there was a big HR conference on at the same time, but it didn’t matter because the two of them had spent most of their time in the spa when they weren’t out sightseeing. On the final evening, though, when they were having cocktails before dinner, Roy spotted Stacey sitting up at the bar on a high stool.

“The conference had finished,” he said. “I wondered why she hadn’t gone home. She was dressed to kill from what I could see – and I could see quite a lot.”

“Did she see you?” I wanted to know.

“No. And she didn’t spot me later either. The wife was chatting away to me and I was watching Stacey wondering what she was there for. I was just thinking about going over when a group of young blokes came in, on a night out. I saw her clock them at the bar. Half an hour later, she disappeared in the direction of the lift with one of them.”

“No.”

“Yep”

“And then what?”

“His pals made a few rude comments, waited a bit and then drank up. They went off somewhere else.”

“Did you see Stacey again?”

“Not till today,” Roy said. He grinned. “What do you think of that then?”

I didn’t know what to think. There are ways and ways of being lonely, I suppose. At some point, you have to plumb the depths.