…indeed, if I may come to the point of this already extensive email, what I am trying to say is that I need you to come and find me please.

Since moving offices a lot over the last few – uh – periods, I lose track of where I am. Right now, I –

am in need of extraction. If that’s the word I mean. I am at a loss. I do not know where I am.

For a long time I believed I was working from home. I was convinced that this office I’m in now was actually a room in my house – I kept thinking, in a minute I should get up and go downstairs, but there was never any reason to get up and go downstairs. The doorbell never rang. I had a kettle and coffee machine in here. I thought I would have to get milk any way, to go out for milk, but I don’t actually drink milk, so I never checked if I needed milk up here. I wondered if Georgina would call up the stairs, to ask me a question. Have you fixed the tariff on the energy bills? But Georgina never called.

It took some time to really sink in that of course, I probably am not upstairs in my house. For example, I do not have toilets like this at my house. The toilets here have a picture of a man on the door – like public toilets tend to do. I haven’t seen a picture of a woman, but there’s bound to be one. And a disabled toilet, there will be one of those. I haven’t looked for these toilets, but they are implied.

These are the kind of clues you will be getting I’m afraid. Clues is the wrong word. It’s not actually a mystery – though that would be fun wouldn’t it? But no, in fact, I have an urgent periodic review to complete, and I need to answer questions about myself which I cannot do alone. I have tried to answer these questions and record them, but something happens. How it goes is, I read the question aloud in my head – like I say the shape of the words inside my head, and then when I try to answer them, to say the answers and then write them down, I cannot do it. And the reason I cannot do it is because I seem not to be there. It’s as if I have asked the questions and looked up and the man (me) who I am asking the question to (also me) has vanished. I am alone at the desk. I cannot answer. I am not there.

I think it has been too long since I left this room. I mean, I have left the room, but I have not left the office, and I feel as though some elements of the building have changed since they put me here. There were a number of men I saw, for example, on a scaffold outside my window. They were working out there, wearing florescent jackets and protective clothing. They had a great number of things attached to belts. We became friends for a while, the men on the scaffold and me. We talked about the weather, and we talked a little bit about the city. I spoke mostly to Jacob, who was somehow in charge I think.

‘Me and the boys, we’re staying in Bishop’s Tyke,’ Jacob told me.

‘Ah right.’

‘You know it?’ he asked, and I felt as though I did know it, but couldn’t place it really on a map.

‘Ah yes of course - out west isn’t it?’ I said. ‘Braintree way?’

‘East,’ he said. ‘Near St. Thomas of the Mould.’

‘Aha – I see,’ I said, though of course I had no idea where that was either. St. Thomas of the Mould? What was that? These places were not familiar to me.

I remember thinking, this is exactly the sort of thing I tend to do – someone might say to me in a conversation, ‘Oh I live here,’ or ‘I am going to a performance near this landmark,’ and I tend to just say yes, how lovely, I know it well. Even though I have no idea where in the city they are actually talking about. And instead of asking, or confessing that I have the special memory of a doormat, or doing anything to actually learn the geography of where I allegedly live, I just mumble oh right, yeah, how lovely, I know it well.

That’s me – or it was me. The actual conversations we’re referencing here, they don’t happen so much these days. I have been alone for a while.

Soon, Jacob and the men on the scaffolding were gone, along with the scaffolding itself, and to my horror, my window. The configuration of room had changed, and I was left without the light that comes in from outside. I missed the window a great deal. It had connected me with the traffic downstairs. This office building is very central. A maze really – a modern, white-panelled, super-campus that has been splintered and forced to fit inside a Georgian terrace in the centre of the city.

I sensed I was still near the road, because I could hear it. The vibrations were still coming through. Buses, arguments, perhaps even the vibration of the underground rail. The new configuration deprived me of a view, and I took back my connections to the outside world through my other senses.

When I had meetings, people would ask about the new configuration. Or, if they didn’t ask, then I mentioned it so we could talk. And they would ask me – when do you get changed? Where do you shave? And I would say at home of course! But in reality, for many years, I have kept a complete wardrobe and wash kit here with me. It looks like a wardrobe for outer wear, for coats and umbrellas and bags, but it’s actually my wardrobe, you see? I go in there sometimes. I am in here now, in the wardrobe.

I am out again.

A young man called Rav used to be in the office visiting me a lot. He was quite new to the company, he said. But was very pleased to be working with me, he said. Rav had lovely manners.

‘Do you work for me, then?’ I had asked him.

‘Well, sort of.’

‘Because I am meant to have a headcount of 15 in this new team they want me to run,’ I said.

A huge promotion, I had been told. The new team I was meant to run had been agreed and approved several months before Rav appeared in my office. My promotion was widely celebrated.

‘It comes with a new team,’ I was told at my celebration drinks. I can’t remember who exactly told me that, but it was confirmed in an email a day or so later. A new team, and soon a new location.

‘You’re being moved,’ Patrisha told me. Have you met Patrisha? No, well, it was a long time ago. Patrisha had a side-hustle breeding corgis. I think it was corgis. She was really dependable as a colleague, but you know, she became more senior faster than me, and we managed to get out to the café less and less often. By the time she told me I was being moved into a new space, Patrisha and I were at the nodding and smiling stage of our work friendship, and looked destined to stay there. Or so I thought, but as I stood in front of her, I realised she was crying.

‘You’re being moved,’ she said, and wiped her eyes.

‘I’ll miss you,’ I said. ‘But we’re still one team, right? I’ll see you.’

‘Oh, yes of course,’ she said. But she seemed distracted or as though it wasn’t quite true that we would see each other again.

‘Honestly, I’ll come and see you, Patrisha,’ I said. ‘I really will.’

But I couldn’t stop her from crying. And honestly, it was all I could do to stop myself from crying too. An emotional day.

‘How are the corgis?’ I asked.

I don’t recall what she had to say about her corgis. No doubt I listened and said yeah wonderful without really taking this information onboard, so now we don’t know, we have no idea, whether Patrisha breeds corgis or if her side-hustle is something else. Perhaps she rescues donkeys. We don’t know.

When they came to move me that first time, I was out of the office. I was on an errand – probably I was buying myself a nice new pencil. I am often in the stationery concession, spending my money on pencils. I came back in from the rain, and I couldn’t find my desk. The configuration of the entire office building had changed, and I couldn’t even find the door to the office I used to work in.

I tried to get into the floor where I had previously been working, but new doors had been fitted.

I tapped on the glass window to try and get someone’s attention. An intern I had never seen before turned around and made a face at me.

‘Hey!’ I said. ‘Hey can you open the door?’

The intern just looked at me. Stubble, lovely copper hair, blue eyes. ‘Sorry,’ he said, though I couldn’t hear him, only see his mouth moving. The mouth of a rock star, it was. He was smiling at me, like, somehow he was happy to see me suffering through the window in the door.

‘I can’t get in,’ I said.

‘Sorry man.’

‘Won’t you get up and let me in?’

He got up, the intern, but instead of coming to open the door, he just shook his head and walked away, pulling at his ass area as he went. I believe his underwear was riding up, and I hoped making him uncomfortable. I’ll never forget seeing him walking away like that touching his ass area in that way. I vowed revenge.

Obviously I never took any revenge on the intern. I mean, I never saw him again. And it’s so difficult isn’t it? For young people now, starting out. The idea of being an intern when I was young was just madness. Why would I work for free? I already don’t want to work, why in the Heck would I do it for free?

It's different now. You have to work in order to be allowed to work more and if you want to be properly paid you have to work even more – you have to always be doing far more than you are being paid to do. You have to impress people – and those people don’t deserve to have you trying to impress them. Not at all. Internships – it’s a dog’s work.

I was thinking these things you know as he walked away from me. I vowed revenge, but in such a way, I thought, that it would also show this intern his true value.

I imagined a scenario in which I could somehow become the intern’s boss. I could add him to my headcount – of which I was confident I could claim about fifteen direct reports. Eleven at a minimum. And I would learn the intern’s name. Perhaps it was Gavin, or Simon, or Henk. Yes, Henk.

And I would assign Henk impossible tasks that would teach him the value of his own work.

‘Here, Henk,’ I would have said. ‘I would like you to remove all the staples from all of the thousands of documents here in this archive of handouts that we no longer wish to maintain. And Henk, when you’ve finished, please could you melt down the staples into their liquid metal state, and, as it cools, shape the melted staples into a decorative paper-opener.

THEN - I’d like you to find out what the Latin is for Know Your Value and inscribe the decorative letter-opener along the blade with Know Your Value in Latin.’

And then, when Henk had completed this task, I would give him the ceremonial letter opener as his transition gift, as he became a full member of the team. And I would smile at him through a door somehow while he opened it, and all at once he would know something. He would come to understand what was wrong with his approach to all this.

I thought all of these things while I stared at him tugging his underwear from his asscrack area.

But then I had to move on, and deal with the immediate issues in front of me. Next to the new door to my old office was another door. This was heavy, old dark wood. I tried my pass on the little pass reader next to the door. It blinked green and opened, so I went through.

A spiral staircase led upwards to a large loft space. I tried my lanyard on the little panel outside the loft-space style office. It gave me a green light and the door released. I stepped inside – instantly the sound changed. It softened. The air became somehow a better temperature (not hotter or colder but just better). I walked around the space looking for somewhere to sit and work. I nodded at people and asked if they were in my team. I am meant to have a headcount of at least 15 people, I said to someone but he was just confused. Don’t worry, I said. But he didn’t answer. He was already gathering his team around himself for a new session of some kind.

Everyone on this floor was dressed differently. They moved in a strange, confident way. I heard them talk about me over the coming months, nothing mean, but just confusion. Who is this guy? They might ask each other, unaware that I could hear them, and that I was a manager. Or, they might say, Should we invite the cardigan man to the social?

I took a desk near a window – yes the same window as I mentioned previously, although it could have been a different window. One evening I feel asleep under my desk – I don’t know when this habit began, but it had been happening on and off for a few years, I suppose, if you include my early days when I was a hungry young associate.

I woke up to find that the office had been reduced while I slept. And now, I was still by the window, and I was still on the same floor, but the cool open-plan loft-style workspace had been walled off from me.

I had a new door in this configuration, that led to a corridor so long that I could not see where it turned. All access to the loft-style workspace was cut off, but I did have a small aperture – a little window – into the place I had previously been. Through it I could see the friends I felt sure I had been making, until I was promoted again and reconfigured again.

The aperture that connected my new room to the loft-style working space looked out onto their new kitchen area. One morning after one of the designers on that floor had been startled by me waving at her, the view was permanently blocked with an industrial bag of pumpkin granola. Sometimes someone would want to have granola for breakfast and would take down the bag of granola, exposing the aperture. And then they would see me, and I would see them.

And then the granola would be replaced in a hurry. For a while I worried that people were not eating properly because of this arrangement. Of course, I could have covered the aperture from my side, but I really felt like this was not in my job description, and I was supposed to be leading a team of as many as fifteen people.

So then I was alone again. I heard the sound of the loft-style working space people for a while longer. And, occasionally, the microclimate inside the building would waft some of their oud-like fragrance into my room, and I would be transported far away.

But it changed again. The configuration changed again. And more times after that, so I felt like me and my little office were sailing on an ocean of concrete and glass. And yet not going anywhere. And yet, as I have mentioned, vanishing somehow away from myself.

Mother was with me for a time. She asked me why I couldn’t see that this arrangement was not good for me.

‘You’ve got a terrible wound in your side, do you know that?’ she said.

‘I do know, mother, yes. It’s not a new wound.’

‘How do you treat it? This can’t be good.’

‘I have a first aid pack, as you can see,’ I said. And I showed her where I would stand and dress the wound that I have in my side.

‘It’s no good at all,’ Mother said. She sounded exhausted.

‘You don’t understand, Mother,’ I said. ‘This is my work.’ And I spat the word work at her with such finality that she went silent for a time.

I didn’t mean to be cruel, but she was in my office in her brown coat, eating jam sandwiches that she had originally made for the train down, but had decided she couldn’t eat in front of the man who shared her table on the train. So she was hungry and eating jam sandwiches.

She was there for a while. Perhaps a few days. The two of us moved and slept awkwardly in the office.

‘How’s Georgina?’ she asked me.

‘Fine.’

‘How about the kids?’

‘They’re fine,’ I said.

One morning I woke under my desk and Mother was gone. She left me some jam sandwiches and a bracelet with a magnet on it that she explained (in a short note) would help me find peace when I was anxious.

I am wearing it now. I am anxious all the time at the moment. I feel as though something has not been done correctly. Somewhere something has gone incredibly badly wrong. Some mistak in the process has happened. I am supposed ot be leading a team of as many as fifteen headcount. And some of them will need metallurgy on their CV. They will need to be comfortable with melting down common office metals.

But nothing has been passed on. All my old managers are gone. The wound in my side, I feel it open at night. It opens at night and breathes softly. My breathing wound is possibly my only company.

I feel worn out, if I am absolutely honest.

What are your skills? I ask myself. How have you delivered on your goals this year?

But I am not there, so I cannot answer my questions.

As a manager, how do you rate your team’s contribution to the customer experience?

I cannot answer. I am not there.

You must come and ask me these things, and then make sure I am there, and that I can answer. You must come…

BEN PESTER is the author of the short story collection Am I in the Right Place? (2021 Boiler House, UK) and the novel The Expansion Project (2025 Granta, UK). His work has been longlisted for the Edge Hill prize. He lives in London.