Max Hype

                Sunlight streaked through the floor-to-ceiling pane of glass, high over a pedestrian high street. It reflected from a Newton’s cradle on the broad, hardwood desk, it picked out every stitch in the upholstery of the large leather office chair, and it glared so harshly from the computer monitor as to render it effectively useless. But that didn’t matter; this office wasn’t about practicality or getting work done, it was about looking flash, proving wealth, and thereby convincing people that its occupant was too important to do any work themselves.
                “Welcome to your new office, Max.” Said Rose Thorn, CEO of Cellar and Gloom. Behind her was a clean cut, dark haired, strong jawed and sharply dressed young man. He’d spilled cereal on his shirt, but the positioning of the stain was sufficiently discrete as to be covered by his jacket.
                “Amazing, thank you very much. Your kindness in giving me this space, in which I’ll construct whole new business paradigms, shows you to be an emotionally intelligent leader and a great asset to the company.” He replied, striding enthusiastically over to the window. “And out there is our set of opportunities; a limitless panoply of ways to get Cellar and Gloom to new heights of success.”
                “There’ll be no time for window gazing, Max. There’s important work to be done."
                “Of course. No use in exercising strategic vision without the holistic, results-focused working practice to put it into action. What’s my login to get started?” He asked, looking expectantly at the computer.
                “I.T. will have your details somewhere.” Rose said, dismissively waving her hand.
                “They’re great people, I have no doubt.” He strode confidently to his desk and picked up the brass and wood name plate that had been made for him. “‘Max Hype: Executive Head of Strategic Energising and Revolutioneering’. I like the sound of that.” Grinned Max.
                Already in possession of the surname Hype, Max’s parents should have been more careful when naming their only child. With nine months to plan the decision, they could have easily foreseen the consequences of choosing 'Maximillian'. Alas, they either did not or not would not, and from the beginning, expectations were high for their child. Following hundreds of disappointments from the other five year olds at school, who had expected a ceaseless tide of enthusiasm from the shy and reclusive Max, he had no choice but to lean into the philosophy of hyperbole; he traded the alphabet for buzzwords, learning his colours for superficial morale elevation techniques, and rudimentary pattern recognition skills for exaggerating the impact of changes. By the end of his first year of school, he had cemented in himself the intention of becoming the greatest hype man that the South West of England had ever seen.
                “Glad to hear it. But enough small talk. We should get straight down to business, no time like the present to establish what you’re going to do for us.” Said Rose, sitting down in a gargantuan egg chair. The back rose high enough to knock against the light fittings, so it had to be tactically positioned for the avoidance of several lightbulb replacement fees. “As you’re aware we have a problem here at Cellar and Gloom with low morale and inefficiency, plus I think we need to make some savings on headcount. I was pushing to just fire all the sad and inefficient staff, and then hire happy, motivated, high performing people instead. What do you think?”
                “I think it’s a bold plan, but one that might be difficult to pull off. But I think that having sad and unmotivated staff is, really, no problem at all. It should be easy to get people excited about Cellar and Gloom; after all, you a- sorry, we are the leading supplier of woven solutions to everyday problems. From wicker to ribbon, from wool to cotton, and from twig to rebar, we can weave a fix to anything that breaks.” Max recited from the promotional materials he’d read earlier that morning. “With a portfolio like that, my job should practically do itself. But it won’t, so I’m here to do that work, get everyone excited about their employment again, and elevate our position in the marketplace. But you want specifics, am I right?”
                “Yes, you’re right. Because you just restated the question I asked you, but as a statement.” Confirmed Rose.
                “Great, good. You’re on the ball and I’m on the right track, the track that leads us straight through the mountain of challenge and into the town of marginal but sustainable increases in revenue year-on-year.” Max said. He’d adopted a power stance, with one foot on the desk and the other in the waste paper basket, having misjudged the layout of the room. Thankfully, his natural charisma was allowing him to style it out. “So, I would have to advise against redundancy in this instance, because it would be illegal and difficult to hide that you’d broken the vast majority of employment laws. Instead, I think we should stretch the existing employees to show what they can do, and get them to do more with their day.”
                “More work from the same number of people? I like the idea.” Rose appraised. “It sounds like getting something for free, which is my second favourite price.”
                “Great! With that in mind, my first point of action,” He continued, holding up one finger, “will be to get my boots on the ground and speak to the people of this office, the people who make Cellar and Gloom what it is. With my practiced ‘question and answer’ technique, I’ll extract from them what makes their lives and their jobs more difficult, and learn what I can, straight from the source, about any inefficiency in day-to-day operations.” Explained Max, his arms flying far and wide with spirited gesticulation. Two coffee mugs and a lamp were launched into their air by stray backhands. “I’ll then use what we’ve learned from the people of the company to infuse them with a team spirit, a can-do attitude, and a can’t-not-do philosophy. Naturally, it’s useless to plan any further specific points of action until I have the information from point one, so that’s my whole plan for now.”
                Rose Thorn pondered this answer, and nodded with satisfaction.
                “Good enough.” She said. “We’ll be expecting existing inefficiencies to be addressed within the week, and general performance to be improved as soon as tomorrow, so you’d best work quickly. I know that these timescales are shorter than we discussed previously, and mere fractions of what we agreed during your contract negotiations, but these are trying times and the market changes quickly, that’s just the way it is with woven goods.”
                Max nodded and smiled. It was the only response he knew to openly admitted breach of contract.
                “Great. Glad to hear it. It means I’ll be laser-focused on the job at hand, and only the laser-bright solutions will do. I’ll work on a laser-straight trajectory towards my laser-spot goal and ensure that our accounts stay firmly in the laser-black.” He replied, being sure to remain consistent with his metaphors. It was something on which he prided himself, just like his strong cheekbones and ability to chew through a dining room chair in one sitting. “I’d better start right away, with laser-promptness.”
                “Yes, you had better.” Rose agreed, standing up and stretching her back. “I treat my back like I treat my business; with respect and without second chances. The moment this baby fails me,” she said, pointing a thumb over her shoulder and towards her spine, “it’s right out of there and being replaced with a woven version that’s improved in every way. It was only due to pressure from the rest of the leadership team that I didn’t hire a woven Executive Head of Strategic Energising and Revolutioneering.” She claimed, rather boldly. Max didn’t doubt her for a second. “Prove to me that you’re as good as several strands of something, cunningly interlaced to form a continuous plane or three-dimensional structure, and I won’t have them all fired or beaten by a member of the export control team with nothing to lose.”
                “You’ve got it, boss. I won’t come unravelled.” Winked Max.
                The CEO laughed the mirthless laugh of a busy executive, and made her way out of Max’s office. He strode confidently around to his desk drawers, pulled out a fresh notebook and a blue biro, and set about his grand business.
                Since Rose had apparently seen no need to introduce Max to anyone else in the office, he took it upon himself to do so instead. If anything, he told himself, it would be better that way; you only get one chance to make a first impression, so why not take complete ownership of that process? No preconceptions from anyone else, no attempt to magnify a minor aspect of your personality as an ice breaker, and no standing awkwardly by while someone struggles to remember your name. He was empowered to simply let people take him at his own, sky-scraping, estimate.
                Ever aware that a new executive of any kind would make people feel anxious, Max expertly defused all tailored tension by removing his neck tie. As if that wasn’t enough to show that he was just like the working echelons, he unfastened his collar button to really seal the deal. Nothing said ‘approachable and human’ like a lack of neck constriction. Able to breathe and ready to chat, Max progressed along the corridor adjoining his office, and several others, to the staircase that led down to the open plan areas.
                In line with her general approach to respect for those in her employ, Rose Thorn had insisted on having her own office, as well as those of her senior executives, built onto an inverse mezzanine floor above the mainstay of the workstations. Hovering like a heavy storm cloud, or a cuboid zeppelin of glass and Newton’s Cradles, none of the working staff would ever escape their judgmental gaze. Rose asserted that the only way to keep her workforce under control was the healthy sense of dominance and oppression afforded by ‘looming over the drones, like a buzzard perched above a field of mice’. To that end, having proven too determined for anyone to stop her, the Strategic Trust Redundancy Assurance Platform, or STRAP, as she labelled it, had been constructed and installed at great cost to Cellar and Gloom. Unsure of whether they were angrier that Rose had blotted out the light from the ceiling-wide skylight, or that she’d clearly worked backwards from an acronym for no good reason, the workers below used a number rather different names for it.
                Descent from the STRAP was possible from any of three spiral staircases along its length, or, for the more adventurous executive, via one of many fire-station poles. Standing at the top of one such pole, Max looked down and saw that it terminated in the middle of a walkway, with bins positioned all the way around it. A vague memory came swimming back from his interview, during which he’d been asked how he’d stop a workforce from ‘maliciously and destructively moving bins in such a way as to undermine authority and stand in the way of supervision’. At the time he’d thought it to be an interesting thought experiment, but now he suspected he could see the inspiration behind it.
                Not one to be discouraged so easily, Max did the rounds of the other poles, and was impressed to note that every one of them was completely encircled by bins. From their variously coloured tops, it was obvious that Cellar and Gloom took the separation of different waste-types seriously; almost as seriously as their employees worked to use them for blocking pole descents. Jotting a few thoughts into his notebook, Max smiled to himself at the opportunity to make a dynamic, synergistic entrance that would re-define the executive introduction roadmap for the medium-to-long term.
                Downstairs, in the vast, open-plan office, there was a narrow walkway separating the customer complaints department from the employee break room. An edict from Rose several years prior had prompted not only the tactical co-location of these two areas, but also that the complaints team must only ever take calls on speakerphone. A more cowardly CEO would have claimed this to be a way of ensuring that ‘all stakeholders remain invested in the complaints process, enabling problems to be resolved at all levels’, or perhaps that ‘all complaints operatives have access to a break from the stress of being shouted at by a furious wicker-wholesaler’. Rose Thorn was no coward, however. In her official message to the rest of Cellar and Gloom, she had made clear that this was a two-pronged strike. The first prong, which she called ‘organic break deterrence’, was to make the break room a hostile space by harvesting and repurposing the discordant rage of several simultaneously complaining customers. The second was to make anyone who could withstand the barrage think long and hard about their own failures, because surely only the failures of the whole workforce could lead to customer complaints.
                Although this edict had contributed some of the more concerning reading that Max had completed in his preparation for the role, it had at least armed him with the knowledge that the breakroom could be found wherever the shouting was apparently loudest. He grabbed the top of the pole, aimed himself carefully with respect to the bins, and slid his way down.
                “Good morning everyone!” He called out cheerfully, whistling down the pole until his feet each landed in a separate bin, with crunches of paper and mixed-metals respectively. Right on cue, a sea of faces looked in his direction from desks and break-room tables alike. “I’m Max Hype, your new Executive Head of Strategic Energising and Revolutioneering. As you might observe, I am quite rightly in the bin at the moment, because all I have to work with is what your leadership teams have told me. Their ideas are just like what I’m standing in - recycled waste that won’t get us anywhere. But with your help, I’d like to be able to take a step out of the bins,” he said, lifting up his mixed metals foot up to hip height with impressive flexibility and placing it on the floor, “and into the realm of useful work.”
                Max paused for applause, laughter, cheering, or some combination of all three. All he heard was the tinny, distorted anger of several complainants. They mixed together in a miasma of incomprehensible displeasure that made a primal part of his brain want to immediately run away; whether or not he agreed with her methods and intentions, Rose’s implementation had been undeniably effective.
                “I’ll be visiting many of you over the next few days and weeks,” He continued, when it became clear that no-one else would be offering anything to the discourse, “so that we can align our own roadmaps to delivering increased success-solutions for the business, and so that I can champion your own opportunities for excellence to everyone up in the STRAP. Please be as open and honest with me as you can. Help me to help you. If I don’t get to you today, then have a lovely one, and I’ll catch you soon.”
                Slowly, like leaves rotting off the limbs of a fallen tree, the employees of Cellar and Gloom turned back to their work and sank into their chairs. Max stood in the walkway, one foot still submerged in a puddle of discarded post-it notes and memos, surveying the situation with a professionally-faked smile. He was used to being dismissed on first contact, but nobody in this office had thrown a stapler at him yet, so it was already going better than his previous job.
                He cast a glance down at his notes; the first port of call for the day was to be the admin staff. Rose had complained that they always wanted at least an hour to perform an hour’s work, and were totally inflexible about even trying to do it instantaneously instead. If Ms Thorn was to be believed, then this was the rotten attitude eating away at the heart of Cellar and Gloom.
                Admin was situated at the very end of the office building, as far away from any entrance as it could feasibly be situated without having to sit outside of the structure. Although ubiquitous in its necessity to every other department, it was decided that this department alone should be free from the scourge of the open plan office, instead occupying a thick-walled enclosure. Where the scant few other internal walls of the building were glass, faux-pine, or painted white, the Admin office appeared to be genuine stonework, complete with moss, giving it the aspect of an old cottage lost forever to the deep wood.
                Confidently, Max strode his way up to the door which, on closer inspection, was made from gnarled driftwood that had been sanded and varnished into a flat surface. As he reached for the handle, he noticed that into the driftwood had been carved tiny words in delicate text, far too small to read without some specialist equipment. It was an unusual choice for a corporate headquarters, but it spoke of boldness in interior design that was lacking in so many of the offices in which Max had worked. In a display of extreme consistency, the handle, too, felt like it had been engraved with script of some kind. Holding onto it, Max tried to read the engravings with his palm, but discovered that it was very difficult to do, and made a note in his book to gain that skill later.
                Still unable to hand-read but feeling motivated to learn how in future, Max finally turned the handle and pushed the door open, unveiling to himself a sea of twig-bundles which hung on lengths of brown twine from the ceiling. In the absence of stone walls and a driftwood door, these dangling effigies would have been intimidating enough, but coupled up as they were, it began to form something of a red flag in Max’s mind. Never before in his history of introducing dynamic, agile and operationally excellent strategies to beleaguered departments across many industries, had he encountered dangling effigies. Perhaps, he speculated, this was part of the problem. If the admin staff were spending more time creating pagan idols than completing typographical work, then that might explain some of the observed inefficiencies. Standing with a bundle of twigs gently nudging into the side of his head, he made another note to look into that possible avenue of improvement.
                Looking around himself and peering through the dense canopy of twigs, Max just about managed to make out a brass door plaque which read ‘Main Office’ in normal, friendly typeface. Below it, in unfriendly red lettering, was an addendum: ‘Pay the price for services rendered, but beware that all slights shall be remembered’. This, again, was on the unusual side and a potential sign of issues within the administrative team. Although generally wary of jumping to conclusions, Max couldn’t help harbouring some concerns about the trends he was observing.
                Striding carefully through the effigies, Max grasped the handle, re-doubled his determination to learn hand-reading, and pushed it open to reveal another, almost identical door. Aside from being translated a metre or so along a short, arguably pointless corridor, or internal porch, it was a direct facsimile of the one through which he was currently passing. Not one to be deterred by such fanciful hallway construction, Max pressed on through this new door, as well as the one that followed, and mercifully found himself standing in the promised ‘main office’. It held a pair of desks, facing one another, with a series of interconnected lines and circles of chalk covering the carpet. If he didn’t know better, and the jury was out on whether he knew anything at all about this particular department, Max would have said that they were marking out ley-lines.
                If electing not to leave the room by the door he’d used to enter, there were three options available to him; all of them were of similar driftwood construction, and bore runic markings that had little to no relevance to Cellar and Gloom.
                “Hello there, you look a little bit lost. Can I help you?” Asked the owner of one of the desks, a young lady with a friendly expression and a large stack of papers in front of her.
                Her co-occupant cleared her throat passive-aggressively, eliciting a sigh and a full three-sixty eye-roll.
                “Really?” Seethed the young woman.
                “You know how we do things around here, my pretty.”
                “Don’t call me your pretty, please. Pretty please.” The young lady scowled back. “But fine, if I must.” She cleared her throat in preparation, with none of the passive aggression that her companion had communicated. “Welcome, wanderer. It seems you’ve become lost, terribly lost, in our twisted domain. Why else would you wander into our home?” A cleared throat interrupted her rhythm, and she narrowly restrained herself from cursing. “Our… coven? What brings you, so delicate and fresh, all the way out here?”
                Max wasn’t sure of the appropriate response to that kind of greeting, nor could he account for why the young lady’s voice had become that of a pantomime witch. In the absence of knowing the right thing to do, he just did what he was originally planning to instead.
                “Hello! I’m Max Hype, your new Executive Head of Strategic Energising and Revolutioneering. Just doing the rounds to hear from everyone with their boots on the ground, the workers, the day-to-day doers of this business, to see if I can help to champion the delivery of any oil-slick, bleeding-edge improvements to their working life. I’ve been told that, sometimes, demands are made of you that just seem impossible. Totally not-doable. I’d love to hear your perspective on it.” He rattled off.
                “Oho! Comes seeking knowledge, does he? Wishes to bend the ears of admin and receive our timeless wisdom in return? Or is it our mystical powers of converting word of mouth or hand into the language of the machines?” Responded the second administrator. She was older than the first, but had a passion behind her eyes that was either reassuring or alarming. It was too soon to tell.
                “I have been informed that you do some great work with typography.” Complimented Max. “So much so that Rose can’t get enough of it, and wants more done than you can possibly fit into a day, is that right?”
                “Yes, that’s actually tru-”
                “No amount of work is beyond us! We wield the powers of admin!” Bellowed the second lady, cutting over the naysaying of her colleague.
                “You know, I’ve been terribly rude and not asked your names.” Said Max. “As I said, I’m Max. What should I call you two?”
                “Our names, preferably.” Said the first. “I’m Tina, and this is-”
                “Esmerelda the Wise!”
                “Or Emma, if we’re outside of work hours.” Tina amended, irritably, with a scowl at her officemate.
                “Lovely to meet both of you, and I’m sure you hold the knowledge that’ll let us take this department from snowed-under with work, to snowed-under with praise. I just need you to tell me what your problems are, and how you think they should be fixed.” Max performed, striding theatrically around the small office as she spoke and flinging his arms around.
                “We’ve got too much work, and Rose wants us to somehow do it faster.” Tina said, speaking quickly to avoid interruption. It was an astute decision, because Esmerelda/Emma was not far behind her.
                “We simply need to find the right spell. If we channel the primal energies correctly, then we’ll be able to accomplish what Ms Thorn has asked of us. We will find extra time between the hidden folds of life, and use it to get two hours of work done in forty-five minutes.”
                There was a quiet, clenched-teethed groan from Tina. It was the very specific groan of a person who’s been biting their tongue for so long that their teeth have gone right the way through it.
                “Leaving aside the practicalities of that, Emma, I wonder if we’d be paid for the two hours or the forty-five minutes?” She said.
                “Oh I’m sure that Rose wouldn’t seek to cheat anyone out of their time or money.” Max replied, immediately doubting his own words.
                “Oh no, not cheat us. But she’d measure with whichever clock suited her better.” Tina said. “But that’s all, obviously, well-beside the point because we can’t cast spells!” She growled.
                “Unbeliever. Denying our gifts won’t make them any less real.” Esmerelda dismissed, producing a series of stubby, crude candles and placing them on her desk. Tina rubbed at her face as her colleague, in a clear violation of the office’s fire safety policy, lit them one by one and started rummaging in her drawers for feathers, leaves, and similar woodland sundries. “With these reagents of natural power we will find the key to doing more work in less time.”
                With non-judgemental curiosity, Max watched Esmerelda variously wave, burn, stack and chew her reagents, muttering incoherently as she did so. None of it, to his inexperienced eye, seemed to be making a dent in her to-do pile, whereas Tina’s fervent typing was doing at least some amount of good.
                “And how long has this been your normal work procedure?” Max finally asked.
                “For time immemorial…”
                “Since June.” Tina corrected. “We complained to Rose that she was asking us to get two hours’ work done in one, and then she told Emma that we ‘always manage to work some magic, just get a better spell’. I think it pushed her over the edge of something sinister, because now she’s convinced that we’re all witches.”
                “Hence the décor?”
                “Hence the décor.” She confirmed. A flash of light, apparently from the conflagration of a dried spring of birch, evidenced Esmerelda’s continued efforts. “The real problem is that there’s too much to do on each job; some of it is pretty brainless stuff, but none of it can be multi-tasked, and our lords and masters in the ivory tower won’t let us hire anyone.”
                Under normal circumstances Max would have objected to anyone using such language about their leaders, but the STRAP was literally supported on a series of ivory columns, thanks to Rose Thorn’s ties to illegal poaching operations. It was hard to tell someone off for a figure of speech that was literally true.
                “Boils and bloating.” Esmerelda grumbled. “You can mock me all you like, girl, but you can’t outrun your own gifts, nor can you tarnish mine. I’ve already granted the doors of this office sentience with my powers, and they’re growing every day, little by little, with practice and memory of the old ways. Oh yes… you must have noticed that they yielded to a very light touch.”
                Max thought about it for a moment. He hadn’t noticed anything at the time, but supposed that, in hindsight, they had been rather well hinged. He smiled.
                “You might just have cracked it, Esmerelda.”
                “Oh no, please don’t tell her that.” Tina complained. “She’ll never type again and I’ll have all the work to do.”
                “Ah, that’s the joy of it! Esmerelda has already cast the right spell, so she can get right back to her normal work again. The key was in the doors all along!”
                “Is that some management speak  or…”
                “You said that some of the work was brainless, right?”
                “Yes…”
                “And you know what else is brainless? Doors. They don’t have brains, but if the work is brainless then that won’t be a problem! We can outsource some of the lighter administrative tasks to the manifold doors of your department, and that’ll leave the rest of you to focus on the meatier work.” Beamed Mr Hype, looking at her expectantly for buy-in to the change journey on which he wished to take them.
                Tina all-but stabbed her desk with the nib of a pen. With gritted teeth and pursed lips she gave one final glare to each of Max and Emma, then returned silently to her work.
                “I’ll get out of your hair and work on this right away.” Max said, confidently striding his way over to the door through which he’d entered. Standing silent and still in the doorway where he’d left it, the door didn’t readily show any signs of sentience. Then again, he’d met a lot of management executives in his time about whom the same could be said, so he didn’t want to leap to any judgements.
                "OK door, we're all stepping up, so I need you to give 110% as well. Do you think you can keep taking care of your current responsibilities and also take on some light administration? It'd really help to broaden you as a worker and elevate your career; and hey, being broad is great for a door, right?" He laughed professionally, giving the door a good-natured nudge with his elbow. It swung away from him lightly on its hinges.
                "Oh come on now, don't shy away. You've got what it takes to push beyond your current role. Maybe if some of the administration is too much then you can start by just opening up a little further each day. If you can say 'yes, today I went just a little further than yesterday', even just a tiny bit, then you will always be improving." The door gently came to a halt, running out of momentum, and then drifted steadily towards him again, either due to self-awareness or under the action of the automatic door-closer mechanism. The truth would surely be lost to history.
                "Yeah, that's the spirit. I knew you had it in you. You'll be in management in no time. And hey, if I can rely on you to spread the word to the other doors in the building then that’ll really show the leadership qualities we’re looking for." Max beamed with a wink, before striding successfully back to the desks. Tina was resolute in ignoring him, and had gone so far as to type with a renewed fervour and aggression; the whole office sounded like a thunderstorm of plastic keys. Esmerelda, on the other hand, looked up with a mixture of hope and determined pride in her eyes. “I’ve had a chat with the door and it’s going to give it the old college try. This could be the start of a bold new paradigm in co-working between furnishings and more traditional human resources. If there are any other elements of the building that you can imbue with sentience then I would encourage you to let me know. Imagine a world in which the carpets clean themselves, the walls take coffee orders and the printer is placed in charge of conducting market research into the latest trends in wicker vehicles! You could be the key to Cellar and Gloom’s future, Esmerelda.”
                The self-styled witch, who had combined the company’s general dress code with a long, black dress and traditional pointed hat, gave Max a toothy grin.
                “Ah, exploiting the old ways for material gain… when will you precious non-magical fools ever understand that you know not the powers with which you trifle.” She cackled.
                “I’m not hearing a no…” Max added, with his best attempt at a cheeky smile that didn’t violate any HR regulations.
                “And as long as it comes with a suitable increase in pay, I won’t say it.” She replied. That finally piqued Tina’s curiosity and the typing storm slackened off a little.
                “Let me speak to the higher ups about that potential investment opportunity in new skills, the kind of skills that enable envelope stretching and business defining competitive advantages over the other wicker solution providers.” Max answered, skilfully euphemising the phrase ‘probably not’ in such a way as to give hope. “But that’s some great work you’ve done already! Really top drawer stuff. I’ll remember you, Esmerelda, and I’ll be back to see how we’re getting on. See you later!”
                “Until we meet again, young man…” Esmerelda replied in her best sinister drawl, and Max strode hurriedly away.
                “Wait!” Tina called out. Max acquiesced, and span, dancer-like, on his heels to face her again.
                “I think I’d like to be trained too.” She said. Esmerelda smiled a broad, toothy grin. It looked like she’d applied some prosthetics for effect, but if she really had made a door sentient then Max couldn’t rightly question her approach. “I mean, if Esmerelda here has shown it to work then, er, well, we’ll get further with two witches than one, right?”
                “Ah, so you’ve been won over to a new, more efficient way of working by the effective change-management championship of your colleague? What a tremendous success story!” Max celebrated, making a hurried note in his book.
                “Uh, yeah. Yeah, that’s right.” Tina said, ignoring the little voice in her head that screamed witchcraft wasn’t real. Rationality be damned, if there was a pay rise at stake then she’d claim to have any powers the company wanted.
                “In that case, of course we can! But I’ll want to take a full set of required training and courses to Rose before I ask about it; we’ll have more luck encouraging her to house a new witches coven that way, trust me.” He explained, squatting down for a longer chat and opening up his notebook. “Esmerelda, you’re our expert here. Please, tell me what we need.”
                Rubbing her gnarled, warty hands together, another creation of her amateur makeup artistry, Esmerelda cackled with delight and launched into a preliminary shopping list of the magically powerful ingredients they’d need for the training, as well as enough dark, heavy fabric to make robes for everyone in the admin team.
                For nearly an hour the older witch talked, detailing all the forgotten arts in which she would need to instruct the other members of the team, and Max worked in real time to turn them into a set of upskilling workshops that would increase the agility of the workspace talent-scape.
                “and I think… once we’ve covered infusing the carpet with the hatred of a thousand wronged daughters, everyone’ll be able to perform the spells we need.” Esmerelda finished, leaning back on her chair and taking a drink from a hitherto unnoticed wooden flagon. It leaked a lot at the edges.
                As if it had been nothing at all, Max stood up from his hour-long squat, closed his notebook gently, and smiled at the admin pair.
                “That all sounds great. Absolutely perfect. I’ll take this to Rose and get some sessions organised for you, but I really do have to go now; lots more people to talk to.” He said, quietly wondering if any of them would transpire to be druids. “I’ll catch up with you when I can.”
                “Be sure that you do, young man. Breaking a promise to a witch is rarely a good idea.” Esmerelda warned as Max made for the door.
                “We’ll curse you to have hands for knees and knees for eyes!” Tina howled after him, receiving much approval from Esmerelda.
                “Rose will be fully appraised of the risks.” Promised Max. As he pushed the door open he heard a crumpling clunk, as if he’d opened it into a stack of papers. Looking down at the floor on the other side he saw two piles of paper, vindicating his auditory identification skills. One of them was neater, with groups of ten or twelve sheets stapled together. The other was a series of loose sheets, with a pile of bent, recently removed staples nearby.
                “Hitting the ground running, door! I love it, you’ll be going places. Now you just need to spread the word; I believe in you!” He said, stepping over the pre-shredding and striding on his way.            Back outside of the witches coven that admin had become, Max leaned against one of the mossy stone walls and hastily scratched some lines down in his notebook. Consulting the to-do list overleaf, he saw that his next point of contact was in sales, relatively close to where he’d slid down a pole and landed in some bins. With any luck, his brief stint in admin would have given the nearby employees time to digest his great first impression.
                The long path back to sales was narrow and bright, running between banks of desks from other departments and overhung by aggressive fluorescent bulbs. In order to segregate one department from another, the decision had been taken to place coloured plastic filters over each of the lights in their respective areas. This was fine for the ‘Wicker Legislation’ department, whose lights were a subtle yellow and allowed easy reading of the new laws that were passed on wicker goods almost daily, but utterly devastating for the much smaller, and even more reading-focused, ‘Small-print Shrinkage’ team. Under their deep, murky, green-brown lighting it was almost impossible to resolve the microscopic text printed onto their prototype labels, even before they applied the latest round of font-size reduction.
                The state of the lighting, however, was not Max’s top priority, and so he strode on by with a cheery smile, looking into the lightless abyss of Small-print Shrinkage and hoping that someone in there was looking back out. What he was looking towards, dead ahead of him, was the looming skyscape of sales, towering a full desk-height above the rest of the office.
                Another of Rose Thorn’s ideas for business dominance, keeping sales physically elevated above the rest of the office was a clear reminder that selling things was the most important job of all. In a company-wide message that had been emailed, posted on notice boards, and projected on the walls of the building with illegal lighting equipment, Rose had stated outright that quality control was worthless, keeping the books in order was a waste of precious resources, and anyone who dared to claim that legal matters were important would be given a formal written warning. Only sales, as the overlords of all that drove the business, should be allowed to consider themselves anything but detrimental to the continued operation of Cellar and Gloom.
                Naturally, the missive prompted a few questions and concerns from the other employees of Cellar and Gloom, which Ms Thorn found to be incredibly disrespectful and irksome. However, in a move which she considered to be grace of the highest order, Rose allowed the rest of the leadership community to discuss the matter with her over a fifteen minute canape break. The following day she released a second communique, this time posted in the lavatories, clarifying that her statements in the first message should not have been taken out of context. With this, she considered the matter closed.
                Having dealt with whatever insults the employees had managed to imagine up from her perfectly reasonable communications, Rose had arranged for the elevation of sales to be completed immediately. In order to maximise efficiency, she’d insisted that each salesperson also be assigned a dedicated member of the finance team, to be ready at their beck and call for the complete working day. This had been tricky for the logistics team to resolve, until one of them had a masterstroke that was later accredited to a member of the sales team: bunk-desks.
                Standing at the edge of the sales and finance area, Max was struck by the beauty of the lurid pink lighting behind a cityscape of two-storey desks. Phone lines and power cables rained down from sales above, like vines reclaiming an abandoned warehouse at the edge of a rainforest. The occasional glittering shower of paperclips would rain down onto the finance team below, or spilled coffee would run along the edges of their ‘ceiling’ and threaten to fry their computer, but on the whole, precipitation was scarce and they saw no reason to complain about that. Their real source of frustration wasn’t the bunk-desk at all. It was, in fact, the bunk-chairs.
                “Backwards! I must use my drawers!” Commanded one of the sales reps, on his teetering, elevated chair. Connected by a long metal bar to the chair of the finance specialist below, he could rotate himself perfectly autonomously, but his legs dangled into the abyss, blocking the view of the finance specialist an occasionally kicking their in-tray over. With a resigned sigh, the poor man below dug his heels into the worn carpet, groaned slightly with exertion, and wheeled his top-heavy burden from the desk to the drawer pedestals
                 Above, the sales rep fished around in a drawer for a few moments, shaking like a lone tree in a high wind. Max watched with interest as the finance man tried to steady the chair, bracing his legs against the furniture with thighs straining and the exertion on his face severe. It was a wonderful demonstration of synergy and teamwork.
                His contact within sales was to be a lady named Juliana, who apparently sat at desk number forty-three. Sure enough, there were numbers printed on each of the two-storey desks in the block; the uppermost desks had gold or brass numbering such as one might find on the wall of an upmarket suburban home, whereas the lower tiers had to make do with carvings in the desk itself, sometimes overwritten with marker pen or picked out with sticky tape as befitted their status as relative peasants.
                Leaving the unfolding drama of drawer usage behind, Max walked along the avenue of aggressive customer sales, reading along with the numbers to find Juliana. Immediately, it became apparent that he had been exercising every ounce of his naivety in expecting any kind of sequence. The first desk had been number twelve, followed by ‘F’, followed by a set of hieroglyphics that presumably meant something to somebody. All he could do was walk around and search dumbly for forty-three.
                “Mr Hype? The bin-legged man?” Called a woman from on high. Unaccustomed to answering to that particular epithet, Max nonetheless looked towards the voice and saw, a couple of rows of desks over, a smiling face on a second-storey chair.
                “The very same! Juliana, I presume?” He called back, striding expeditiously through the desk labyrinth to approach her.
                “That’s exactly right. I was told to expect you at some point this morning, and it seems that you’re as reliable as a wicker bus from Cellar and Gloom, the only public transport guaranteed to rot within one winter or your money back.” She replied. Max laughed politely, but made a firm mental note that the wicker buses might need a different selling point. Or at least a rework of the money-back guarantee.
                “That I am! But don’t worry, I won’t be demanding a ticket.” He said, his mouth laughing but his eyes not joining in. “It’s clear that you’re a busy woman so I won’t keep you long. I just need to know what I can do to make your life around here better.”
                “I’d love to sell more wicker into the fireproofing industry.” Juliana answered in an instant. There was a sparkle in her eyes that told of many years spent yearning for such a chance. “Maybe some really dry weave so that it won’t rot, and it’ll stay there, ready to be fireproof, for years and years.  We could pack out every home in the nation with it.”
                Max wasn’t a wicker specialist. He wasn’t even a wicker amateur, in fact, but he did like to think that he knew a thing or two about kindling. Exciting as Juliana’s passion was, he couldn’t help feeling that turning every town in the country into an unlit bonfire was, realistically, rocky legal ground on which to tread. It was time to steer her tactfully away.
                “That’s great, and we’ll see what we can do about it, but if you’ll indulge the question, what do we sell most of?”
                “I’ll tell you what we don’t sell enough of: wicker kitchen appliances. Everyone’s got wicker chairs and tables, wicker desks, even wicker lavatories given a tight enough weave and adequate lining, butt kitchen appliances are a whole new application we could break into.” Juliana replied, showing off every last bit of her telemarketer listening skills.
                “I hear you. You’re preaching to the choir.” Max said, holding his hands up. “The leading product, however, is the wicker shirts, yes?”
                “Imagine a wicker kettle! Wicker’s naturally insulating properties would be amazing for keeping the heat in and the cold out, so you get a brew in no time at all.”
                “Be that as it may, our most productive paradigm of co-working will be to discuss the shirts and-”
                “If you need a wicker spatula I can get some on order. Very non-stick, great at slipping between pastry and a tray.”
                For some time Juliana continued, reeling off a list of products that Max wasn’t confident existed in the catalogue, the stores, or even the minds of the research and development department. That didn’t detract, however, from how extremely tempting the saleswoman made them sound, and Max found himself having to actively resist the urge to refit his entire kitchen with entwined twigs. In the end, though, his persistence in questioning about the leading product lines prevailed, with a heavy slump from Juliana into her chair. Steve from finance, on the lower bunk, barely managed to keep the tower balanced.
                “Urgh alright fine, if you want me to bore you to tears then we can talk about the poxy shirts." Grumbled the saleswoman, throwing her arms petulantly to either side. “What do you want to hear about them? How they can strip the sun of all its light and literature of all its beauty? How they’ll turn a radiant sunrise into a monochrome visual torture of drab greys? Oh yes, let’s all buy wicker shirts and then, while we’re at it, perhaps we could have a thrilling time watching a rain-soaked pavement gradually dry over a four-day period.”
                “I get the impression that you’re not a fan of the shirts, Juliana.” Max Hype astutely observed, cutting deftly through layer after layer of subtext to find the subtly hidden clues in Juliana’s words.
                “It’s not the shirts I dislike per se, Mr Hype. It’s selling the bastard things. There’s no challenge there anymore, they fly off the shelves of their own accord, without me having to do any convincing or schmoozing. Time was that I could turn someone from physically retching at the idea to ordering a whole new twelve pack every month.”
                “They’re very brittle, you see. Break pretty much the first time you try to put them on.” Steve explained from below. Juliana’s nostrils flared and her eyes widened, but her ears underwent no change of aperture shape or diameter.
                “Did we ask you to interrupt me, Steve?” She snapped. Steve rolled his eyes and went back to looking at his computer.
                “Anyway, they sell themselves now. Everyone’s hooked on them.”
                “Despite breaking before they’re useful?”
                “No-one notices or cares about that.” She sneered, giving a dark look downwards at what she could see of Steve. “Being expected to call someone and try to sell them a wicker shirt is like trying to convince a puddle to be wet or screaming at the beach until the tide comes in; nothing you did changes anything, and although you can technically claim success, the truth is that you were worthless in the transaction.”
                “It’s the feeling of redundancy where previously you used to be an integral part, right?” Came the suggestion from below, which was well on the way to eliciting an approving nod from Max before Juliana spoke again.
                “Shut up Steve! You’re here to finish my orders, not have ideas or drink when you’re thirsty.”
                The unmistakable sound of ceramic coming to rest on a wooden desk told of Steve’s compliance to Juliana’s dehydration-forward edict.
                “What I need,” she continued, now assured that Steve’s hydration would be under her sole control, “is challenges. I need to feel like I’m convincing someone to spend their money on something they never would have claimed to need, or even want, before I’d spoken to them. The day I sold a woven staircase to that sofa removal company was one of the proudest of my career.” She reminisced, a smile playing across her face upon confirmation that Steve wasn’t trying to pull a fast one and take a drink from the mug without her notice. “We’d make a profit every day, on every transaction, if I could spend my time taking care of the hard sell instead of peddling clothing, Mr Hype.” As she looked down at Max, awaiting the outpouring of praise and sympathy to which she was surely entitled, when something caught her eye. “Erm, hang on a second, Mr Hype. Steve! Who gave you permission to comb your hair this morning?”
                “I don’t need permission to care for my hair in my own ho-”
                “Whoa, whoa whoa! One, how dare you speak to me. Two, how DARE you speak to me. Three, how dare you contradict me? And four how dare you speak to me?”
                “Even when directly asked a question?”
                “Especially then! Now get that hair ruffled up. I won’t hear anything more on the topic of you being presentable without my say so, because it would obviously be some kind of play to be taken up by another salesperson. You’re mine. And five, what led you to believe that you had a right to shoes?” Raged the saleswoman, the bunk-chairs rocking like a lighthouse breaking free of the rock and setting sail on an adventure of its own.
                “You’re just making things up now, Ju. I’m not taking my shoes off because you tell me to.” He said, pinching the bridge of his nose through a heavy sigh.
                “You bend to my will, servant!” She shrieked. Steve looked at Max and rolled his eyes.
                “You seem to have the kind of team spirit, community drive and co-operatively aligned para-dynamic social paradigm that I like to see in a finance team member.” Max complimented, even though the nature of the praise was reasonably unclear. “Do you have any suggestions for ways in which the current working philosophy could be shaken up?”
                “Of course he doesn’t. He thinks what I tell him to think, and that is, exclusively, ‘Boy howdy would I love to book in these orders that Juliana has secured. What a champion she is, and what a travesty everyone else is by comparison.’” Juliana clarified for Max, directing a stern look at her lower-deck colleague.
                “I’d quite like to canvas opinions from everyone with boots on the ground, as it were.” Max said, extending an olive branch of diplomacy that could scarcely have been less deserved. Juliana simply tutted and rolled her eyes.
                “Go on then. You have my permission to address the dreg directly, but don’t be surprised when all you get back is a blast of static.” She huffed, spinning on her seat and snatching up the phone.
                “So, as I was asking before your colleague offered a bleeding-edge opinion on the key discussion point I was trying to bottom out with you, what would you say needs to improve here?”
                Steve glanced upwards, just in case he was about to get a telephone receiver thrown at his forehead for the third time that week, but it looked like Juliana was cold calling about wicker manhole covers again. He gently lifted his mug and took a clandestine sip before the hawk eyes swivelling above could notice.
                “The problem as I see it, Mr Hype, is the watercoolers.” He said, calmly. Max looked at him expectantly. He’d had such high hopes for Steve as a downtrodden drone who was literally talked down to all day; those were the sorts of people who could be relied on not to cling to bizarre notions of what might be wrong with a company. Instead, he was about to launch into some tirade about the drinking facilities.
                “I’d be fascinated to hear more of your insight. The watercoolers aren’t something I’d considered.” Max said, his professionalism overpowering the waves of reluctance to waste more of his own time.
                “There’s a stigma around them in this place. A real stigma. You see what I’m drinking here?” He said, showing the mug to Max. It was full to the brim of the brightest orange squash that Max had ever laid eyes upon. “This is neat squash. Not a drop of water in it. And it’s because if I dare to go to the watercooler everyone will lose faith in me.”
                “Wh… why do you think that?”
                “I don’t think it, I know it. It’s accepted wisdom around here that if you drink from the watercooler, then you’re weak. You deal in small amounts of fluid that have to be cooled by means other than your own graft, so you’re weak, like a tributary when we should all be strong, like a glacier.”
                “A glacier?”
                “Yes. They’re strong and mighty. They carve out valleys, like we should be carving a niche in the wicker space. Glaciers already contain all the water they need, and so should we when we get to work.” Steve explained, sipping from the syrupy fruit concentrate in his mug.
                “Did this, by any chance, come down from Rose Thorn?” Max asked, softly.
                “Erm…” Steve pondered, rubbing at the side of his face. The sugar had made his cheeks go numb. “Yes, you know I think it did, come to mention it.”
                “Got it.” Max made a note in his book. “So, do you have any ideas on what to do about this watercooler stigma? I mean, it’s clearly nonsense.”
                “Is it though? If so many people believe it then it might well be real. I think that we should replace all the watercoolers with ice sculptures; everyone chips off a piece to drink when they’re thirsty.” Suggested Steve, miming the use of an ice pick with stunning fidelity. “We’ll be chipping away at that which chips through the earth, making us the mightier of the two. Morale will increase exponentially if we get that in place, mark my words.”
                Having heard enough before Steve had even begun, Max stood up and closed his notebook with the finality that only clapping pages can achieve.
                “I’ll take it to Rose and see what we can do. If this tributary versus glacier stuff comes from her then I think you’ve got a good shot of seeing it come to fruition.” He summarised, throwing out grains of hope like a split bag of rice being carried over the kitchen counter.
                “I hope so, Mr Hype.”
                “Thank you for your time, Steve. And you for yours Juliana. I’ll see what I can do about clearing your time for more exciting sales pitches… I suppose…”
                “Thank you.” Steve mumbled, before a phone receiver fell from above and struck him on the forehead.
                “Too much talking without permission. You forced me into it.” Juliana said, simply. “I’ll speak to you soon, Mr Hype. See if we can get you a wicker notebook by way of celebration and fitting in around here, eh?”
                “That’s a good id-… ohh, nicely done there Juliana.” He said with a smirk, gripping his notebook a little more tightly. He’d never considered himself to be a fickle man when it came to stationery, but Juliana’s smooth sales talk had nearly changed him. He made a mental note to exercise caution around her.
                Sitting alone at a table in the break area, Max pondered on what he’d heard over the course of the morning while reviewing the notes in his notebook. Drifting around him on the air were sounds of furious customers complaining that their woven shoes had come undone, or that their exclusively wicker hot water tank was both leaking and rotting, while the complaints department calmly and politely told them where they could shove their problems. He took another bite of his spaghetti carbonara sandwich, feeling each strands of pasta try to cling on to their companions, and pull the rest of the filling out as they were bitten.
                Admin’s time problems and witchcraft solution. The inflated ego of the sales team and their demands for a challenge, rather than making money on the products that sold well. The notion that drinking water made one weak, unless it was frozen and travelled across continents over millions of years. There was a common thread running through all of them, much like the voice of a young lady who was displeased about her wicker tea set ran through both ears like a sawblade.
                “How do I report all this…” he muttered through his mouthful. From the corner of his eye he caught sight of a cupboard door, as it ever-so-gingerly attempted to wipe down the counter while no-one was using it. The doors were clearly getting word out far and wide about helping, and at least that was one success story.
                Max’s chewing paused as he interrogated his own thoughts for a while. In his heart of hearts, he knew that he was comfortable with explaining that a woman in admin had cast a powerful spell using witchcraft, and that the result of the spell was sentient doors taking care of menial tasks. There was no doubt in his mind that he could deliver that information, and the subsequent business case for witch training, without a single worry. And yet, the much more banal root cause of everything was hanging over him like a clocktower’s bell, secured only by a second-rate wicker chain that hadn’t received the premium weatherproofing treatment: Rose Thorn. The figurative namesake in the side of her own business. Everything that was going wrong was a result of her direct action, or declaration, or questionable grasp on how time worked.
                One of the complaints department representatives threatened the caller with a bowl of hot butter directly onto the pillow. Max would have accepted that gladly, rather than telling Rose that she was incompetent. It wasn’t a matter of how insulting she’d find it; insulting people was fine when it was the truth. The real problem was how she’d react, and whether or not he could keep a) his drastically inflated salary, and b) his promises to help the people he’d spoken to.
                Usually he could construct some sufficiently contrived phrase out of words like synergy, dynamic, front-loaded, buyer-to-pipeline, six sigma and ultra-lean-like-processes to make any criticism sound like good news or an exciting way of changing the workplace, but this? This was proving to be a struggle.
                Some more bites of carb-on-carb carbonara and a quick demonstration of impressive upper-body strength later, Max had climbed back up the pole to the STRAP. Standing high above the open plan savannah of variously deluded employees, some of whom were shouting at people with defective products, and others who were riding their colleagues like a medieval ruler on a sedan, Max still struggled with how to speak to the CEO. Maybe he could make some metaphor about flying too close to the sun, or the air being thin up here and needing to ground herself, or maybe that was folly. He sighed and, dejectedly, strode his way back to his own office.
                As he reached the door, he noticed something peculiar. Someone had stuck a ‘to do’ list onto the glass with a magnet. This was confusing for several reasons, and not least among them the fact that glass isn’t magnetic. Pondering this, he read the list and saw with some contentment that the top two items were ticked off. Whoever was using the list had apparently finished removing staples from the shredding, and then had put the staples into the correct recycling bin. With a glance down at the ochre and puce coloured bin on the opposite side of the door, there was indeed a soft covering of staples on the surface of the refuse. Next to that was a mail sack full of shredded papers.
                Max looked critically at his door, and then cracked a smile. If this hinged panel of glass could seemingly do the impossible, with nothing more than stubbornness, a good attitude, and witchcraft to help it along, then he could confront Rose Thorn. He didn’t even know the meaning of the term false equivalence, and it would serve him well today.
                “Thanks door.” He said, earnestly. It swung gently open to let him in, and he prepared for what was shaping up to be his life’s greatest meta-strategic knowledge upload from one workplace human asset to another, regarding the intra-organisational cessation of counter-productivity enhancing diktats, stemming from the most senior managerial space occupiers within the company. In short, he was going to get hyped.