The years had taken their toll from Bill Wiggins, physically more than mentally maybe, but ethically more than both.  Even so, he now sat at his desk, staring at his office phone, about to do something that, deep down, he wasn’t comfortable with.  A few years ago, that would have bothered him more than it did now: there may even have been a time when he’d have objected to it and refused – but those days were long gone.  Still, he was hesitant.

Bill was a nice enough bloke really, aside from a small, but fairly crucial and entirely inescapable detail: he just simply and unequivocally did not want to be doing this sodding job.  His background was as an industrial engineer (a ‘real one’, as he saw it), landed at university almost by accident.  ‘Come and cover for someone on maternity leave,’ they’d said.  So, for a change of scenery and an extra line on his CV, he’d left his ‘proper job’ for a few months lounging about in academia.  That was 14 years ago, and he’d never escaped.  He’d never taken a higher degree or any teaching qualification (these things were ‘expected’ but always avoidable) and, being on the verge of turning 60 now, had no intention of ever doing so.  He had simply – largely because he knew no other way of behaving – brown-nosed his way into and through middle-management.  He still didn’t understand higher education, research, academia or academics – absolutely none of it; it was as much a mystery to him now as it was back then, but here he was now as head of department!  He despised everyone under him as whingeing layabouts and – like most managers – was pretty sure that, if he had a dozen people like him working for him – instead of the lazy shits he was lumbered with, everything would run like clockwork.  The needle having fallen off his moral compass some time ago, he consoled himself with a succession of extra-marital affairs around The Shack and hoped all the problems stacked up outside his door would go away on their own.  They never did, of course, but he had at least discovered one trick: that management was a hell of a lot easier if you hid with other managers rather than spend time with the team you were supposed to be managing.  In fact, on Vince Plumb’s MAP gauge, he probably had the biggest negative score in the university: he avoided the lecturers, technicians and suchlike under him like the plague.  Although he now earned enough, under the new de facto system, to be a professor, he alas had not kept his nose – and other parts of his anatomy – sufficiently clean.  He had no particular interest in that sort of recognition anyway.    The only thing that kept him going most of the time was the knowledge that this shitty situation would only continue for another few years, before he could retire on a nice, inflated pension – calculated from his current salary.  Then NSU, and absolutely everyone in it, could categorically, 100%, not-a-shadow-of-a-doubt-about-it, fuck right off.

He glanced across his office at a heavily-painted, middle-aged woman sitting at the small conference table in the corner of his office.  She held his look confidently and nodded.

‘Go on, luv’ she prompted in a thick scouse accent.  ‘It’ll be fine.’

Bill set his teeth and picked up the phone.

‘Oh, hi Jenny.  Are you free?  Great.  Can you pop along and see me please for half an hour or so?’

*

40 yards along the corridor, Jenny Weatherill put her office phone down and swallowed hard.  This was it!  It was Friday again, and a cloud had followed her all week.  More than one cloud, actually.  Was this bollocking going to be about telling Alex to give up university and steal cars or sending an NSFW poem to a random web guy she didn’t know, or both, or something else she’d done wrong, or something she hadn’t done?  And which was worse?  She didn’t know, like so much else here.  Fatima looked up quizzically and sympathetically: she’d told Pat and her about it all.  She pulled a face, shrugged and left the office.

 For Jenny, the last week had rolled on in much the same chaotic manner as the previous two.  Obviously, within seconds of sending the obscene poem to web guy Saturday night, she had sent another email – with profuse apologies and the correct attachment – but his response had been terse.  She was used to I.T. folk not being the best communicators in the world, but she still didn’t know where she was now on that.

After the weekend, another four days had passed in a haze.  She was still way behind on marking – and lecture preparation.  As the new lecturer, she’d been lumbered with far too much teaching and most of it, being part of a new programme, came with a considerable amount of extra work to write assignments and suchlike.  This wasn’t just a question of setting the work to be done: that was the easy bit; but each part of each piece of work also had to be mapped against module and course ‘learning outcomes’ and then against national benchmarks and there seemed to be a different process for each stage.  It also all had to be ‘approved’ by some – as yet unseen – mythical force.  She was beginning to see some structure in The Shack now and recognise patterns but, unfortunately, the structures seemed designed to confound progress and the patterns were that, whenever she tried to do anything, she usually did it the wrong way and upset someone.  Everything needed a form, and most forms needed other forms.  The admin teams were just as stretched as the academics so she was quite often pointed to the wrong form, which then required a different form to make good before she could start on the right one.  Then everything stopped dead until the form could be considered by the appropriate committee, or manager, or external examiner, or something – she didn’t really know.  Everything stopped dead, that was, except incurring the wrath of someone further down the chain for the process not being complete, even though they should have known that she couldn’t …., etc., etc., and so it went on and on.  Jesus Christ!  Slowly and surely, though, Pat, Fatima and Ramish did their best to guide her through the minefield and sometimes Vince showed her how to bypass it altogether.  Even at this early stage, and despite her natural diligence, she was warming to his approach somewhat.

She had also had her official ‘induction’ session earlier in the week … apparently.  At least she had sat in a room with four other new recruits for three hours while a junior member of the HR team had stood, his back to the attendees, reading word-for-word from a series of Powerpoint presentations, written by his boss several years before.  He (or his boss) had covered the history of NSU, its ‘mission’, ‘values’, ‘something else important in inverted commas’, academic and administrative structure, ‘key’ (senior obviously) staff, equal opportunities policy, grievance procedure, this policy, that procedure, some process, and lots more that Jenny would never be able to recall ever again; just about everything, and beyond, in fact, except anything remotely helpful in terms of how to actually do her job.  Large parts of it, even to her inexperienced eyes, were clearly already out of date.  (One listed admin director had died at least two years before.)  More than once, Jenny had wondered quietly whether she was in the right room and, more than once she realised she was getting familiar with the sensation.

She had gone to the Labour Party meeting the previous evening, almost as penance.  Alex wasn’t there, which avoided some awkwardness, although Ivan seemed unusually cool with her.  He’d probably thought she was a reasonably decent human being until last weekend.  She didn’t speak herself when the meeting got going but listened attentively and found bits of it surprisingly interesting.  One local aspect was particularly fascinating: in fact, she’d been thinking about it before the phone rang.

Deadend was a fairly poor, smallish, quite rundown town suffering economically from the gravitational pull of Mugsborough to the west: property was cheap and investment minimal.  But the surrounding area was rural, which made for an interesting political tension.  So, whilst the town council was Labour-run, the wider constituency of East Mugshire hadn’t been since Blair’s 1997 landslide.  The current MP was a pompous, and incredibly stupid Tory farmer, keen on the death penalty, private medicine, tax breaks, benefit reductions, pissing on homeless people – the usual stuff.  But what had particularly caught Jenny’s attention was that these balance-of-power conflicts apparently played out across a number of local committees and other bodies: NSU’s board of governors being one of them.  Aside from a single internal staff election and a few ex-officio positions (the VC, for example), most governors were co-opted externally from Deadend’s great and good; although naturally having to restrict this to those that could be bothered to give up their time did reduce the pool somewhat and possibly affected the balance.  At present, at least three governors were known (within the local party) to be card-carrying Labour members and, set against them (it was believed) two Tories, along with several (perhaps) non-aligned pillars of the community.  Having been so unexpectedly engrossed for a couple of hours, a determination, probably spawned by a combination of frustration and guilt, to do something more constructive with her life had made Jenny promise to several people after the meeting that she would at last get more involved.

Anyway, that would all have to wait now until she found out what depth of shit she was in at work.  She knocked hesitantly on Bill’s door and entered.  He was sitting at his corner table with a stern-looking woman Jenny didn’t recognise, her make-up more trowelled oil painting than pastel or brushed watercolour.  This really didn’t look good.  An HR stormtrooper?  Bill’s manner, however, was surprisingly light.

‘Ah, Jenny, come in. Sit down. Have you met Laura Potter?’

Laura Potter!  Bloody hell!  No, they hadn’t met but Jenny knew the name well enough.  She would have laughed if she hadn’t been so terrified what was going to happen next.  In the hierarchy of Pat and Fatima’s directory of dubious NSU legends, she was royalty!

There were those who called Laura Potter’s rise to power ‘meteoric’ and, although in truth it hadn’t happened uniformly quickly, the analogy was perhaps a better one than most gave credit for.  Just as a meteor has probably been displaced from its distant path by some random collision, then kept on course by gravitational pull beyond its control, so Laura’s introduction to the warmer areas of the academic solar system had been the result of a series of haphazard events; and now a combination of momentum and irresistible internal forces kept her on her way.  That she was promoted far beyond her abilities was accepted by almost everyone, along with the resignation that it was now too late to do much about it.  Most merely waited for her inevitable wipe-out from planetary impact and hoped to be far enough away from the fall-out to escape ruin.

It had begun over two decades before in the old Deadend Poly days.  A black hole had suddenly been discovered in the catering finances and, unbeknown to anyone at that early hour of the day, the kitchen manager had not turned up for work that morning – never to be seen again as it happened.  The then principal’s bellow of, ‘Get me whoever’s in charge!’ was relayed in panic to the refectory.  As the elder of two work-placement food servers then on duty, Laura embarked on a career of misunderstanding and incompetency by presenting herself in his office within ten minutes.  While he mistook her for the deputy manager (there wasn’t a deputy manager and never had been), she misinterpreted his questioning regarding financial budgeting as concerning catering tray portion control and they got on splendidly.  Within a week, on his not-to-be-gainsaid instructions, she had filled the vacant position and never looked back.  Four months’ later, at another time of reorganisation, she was fortuitously able to take credit for some resourcefulness initiated by her predecessor, promoted once more, and the ‘Laura Laughs’ (pronounced like Cilla Black saying ‘lorra laaffs’ due to her Liverpool origins) legend had begun.  Eventually, as her true inadequacies were exposed, she was moved – usually promoted – around various sections of the campus to avoid public embarrassment.  No-one really knew what her current role of ‘Director of Distinctive and Irregular Projects’ was but she was now the fifth-highest paid in the university and drove a Porsche.

Unfortunately, as is often the case, Laura’s sense of entitlement had grown with her rising status, while her human qualities dropped away in proportion.  She now regarded her own expertise and opinions – like her authority – as absolute and dismissed any objections to anything she did as academic snobbery.  (It was true that many academics, and even some admin staff, still referred to her as ‘the head dinner lady’.)  This envy, as she saw it, for anyone who had ‘worked their way up from the bottom’ annulled any and all forms of criticism levelled against her, from not being able to spell five-letter words, through regularly missing meetings through ‘I.T. glitches’ (forgetting how to log on to shared calendars and suchlike), to once driving into the local MP crossing the visitor car park on foot.

Jenny sat down opposite the two of them and waited for the onslaught.  However, she could tell immediately that their manners weren’t entirely consistent with disciplinary action.  She couldn’t dispel her nerves though.  They talked, ‘How are you settling in?’ nonsense for a minute or so, then Bill got down to business.

‘So, Jenny, you probably don’t know why we’ve asked you here?’

‘No, not really; unless it’s the complaint?’  Idiot!  She didn’t need to volunteer that.  She wasn’t good at this ‘knowledge is power’ stuff.

Bill and Laura’s eyes widened slightly.  Laura cut in.

‘No; no complaint. What’s that about then, luv?’

‘Oh, nothing really,’ Jenny stuttered; she realised she was shaking slightly.  ‘Or the dirty poem?’  Oh, no; she really wasn’t good at this!

‘Er, no; not that either,’ answered Bill, eying her doubtfully.  Yes, now; now would be a great time for him to have to take an urgent phone call, or a fire drill, or just for the floor to open up and swallow her.  She fought to exert some self-control.

‘Sorry, I’m nervous,’ she attempted a smile.  ‘I try to be funny; it doesn’t always work.’

Bill and Laura smiled at each other and visibly relaxed.

‘There’s no need to be nervous, luv,’ cooed Laura.  ‘We’ve got some good news for you.

The next sentence seemed to stick in Bill’s throat a little, but he managed to cough it up eventually.

‘We’re going to give you a promotion!’

OK, now then.  Right.  Hold the phone.  Cancel the fire drill.  Call off the crack-in-the-floor thing.  What?

*

‘Except it’s not really a promotion, is it?’  Ramish, insisted, somewhat ungraciously Jenny felt; although in truth, this had rather dawned on her before she’d travelled the 40 yards back from Bill’s office.  He’d been somewhat inventive with the terminology, she’d quickly realised.  The warm glow, initially kindled by her not being in trouble, then fanned by the ‘promotion’, had faded fast, and she quickly felt like she’d been duped.

‘Yes, programme leader isn’t a job,’ Fatima agreed.  ‘It’s a role. It’s not more money: it’s just more work to do.’

‘Yes, OK,’ admitted Jenny.  ‘I should have known I wasn’t going to get made senior lecturer after three weeks! But they said that, if I take on the PL role, it’ll look good on my CV and could help when I eventually apply for SL. That’s right, isn’t it?’

‘Might be if you live that long,’ muttered Vince.

They were all: Ramish, Vince, Fatima, Pat and her, back in the office the three women shared.  Their small expanse of standing room could accommodate no more.  They were discussing Jenny’s ‘news’.  She had been offered the role of programme leader for the new international online ‘project’ Alan Sheldon-Keynes, the deputy VC (DVC), had been talking to them about a week before and, still reeling from the relief that she wasn’t in trouble, had accepted.  Now, away from the forced smiles of Bill’s office, it already wasn’t looking like such a great idea.

‘So, why do you think they asked me?  Because I’m new and daft?’ she moaned.

‘Maybe a bit,’ said Pat, taking a softer tone, ‘but also because most of us have some sort of programme-level responsibility already. I’m PL for mechanical engineering; John’s electrical; Kevin’s aeronautical; Seb’s civil and production; Fatima has the entire master’s suite. There aren’t many of us left.’  She cast a wry look at Vince.  Yes, it was true, Jenny realised.  He tended not to get lumbered with this stuff: it was just assumed he was busy with his research but there hadn’t been much in the way of output recently and no-one really knew what he was up to these days.

‘Ramish is probably next in line,’ suggested Vince, ignoring it all, ‘but he’s asked some awkward questions about it, so they probably don’t trust him.’  Ramish suddenly looked relieved as the thought penetrated.

 ‘But it’s a massive programme.’ Fatima pressed.  ‘They’re talking several hundred students eventually across loads of different countries in the Far East. It’s going to be difficult to maintain any academic quality when we just put the material online and leave the classroom delivery and assessment to the colleges out there.’  She added apologetically, ‘It does really just look like a huge money-making exercise.’

‘Which it is,’ agreed Vince.

‘And, of course, it’s not even written yet,’ Ramish pointed out.

‘Nothing’s been produced yet,’ agreed Pat.  ‘Nothing at all. There’s no programme document, no structure, no mappings. It’ll all have to be approved and validated internally and externally: that’ll take forever with something as big and new as this.’

‘And yet, it has to be in place for the start of the next academic year,’ Ramish pointed out, still with perhaps a little more enjoyment than Jenny thought necessary.  However, she suddenly recalled two points from the earlier conversation with Bill and Laura and brightened slightly.

‘I’ve been promised validation “won’t be too much of an issue”,’ she said naively offering the first of them.

‘No, I bet it won’t!’ Vince roared with laughter.  ‘Shiny Boy’ll take care of that if the top bods want it to happen.  It’s different when we come up with the ideas: they never get anywhere!’

‘Even so,’ insisted Pat, ‘the paperwork will still have to be produced, even if no-one looks at it! And it’s huge. It’s three years of undergraduate and a year postgrad.  That’s two or three dozen modules specifications you’ll be needing the rest of us to write for you.  You’ll have to coordinate all that, pull it together into the different years and get it all documented and approved.  Then the teaching material itself will have to be written from scratch.  Not only that, but it’ll all have to go online in advance.  And we still don’t know why we’re using that private e-learning system instead of the one we’ve got here.  That’ll take time to figure out too. You’ll just never get it done all on your own.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Jenny, knowing deep down that the second point she was about to add wasn’t going to make it better.  ‘That’s why,’ she quoted from memory, ‘I’m to be the “focal point of a small team” working on this apparently. I’m going to have “experienced people guiding me”. That’s what they said.’

‘Who?’ they all demanded suspiciously, almost in unison.

Jenny swallowed hard.  ‘Well, apparently two people,’ she mumbled.  ‘One’s Laura Potter: that’s why she was there.’  The room dissolved into laughter: ‘Laura laughs, Lorra laaffs!’ was chanted in amused disbelief.  ‘I don’t know the other yet,’ she quickly conceded as a relief.

‘Probably Triple-A himself,’ suggested Fatima, still sniggering.

‘Please God, no!’ Jenny groaned, pricking up her ears as she did so to a sound outside.

Short, rapid clippity-cloppity steps could be heard coming their way along the corridor.  They all instinctively hushed, perhaps expecting a follow-up visit from Bill, Laura, or perhaps even Alan S-K.  Instead, a short, wide suit presented itself in the doorway.

‘Hullo!’ the toffee apple on top of it gurgled, ‘I’ve been sent along by Professor Alan Sheldon-Keynes to assist with a special project!’

(End of Chapter 3. Chapter 4 will be available on 1^st June!)

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