The Radio

Shortly after we moved the table – and I can’t be sure of exactly how long after as they say; time flies when you are having fun, and I sure was having fun working with this bunch of clowns – there was another incident that involved Liam. This time the undeserving inanimate object involved was the radio. 

Settle in …….

The story starts on a warm spring day, the air on the industrial estate was ripe with the stench of disappointment (from the telesales office next door) and baked bread (from the bakery on the other side.) The mood was calm in the offices of CableCo, I was partaking in my favorite task of reconciling the monthly accounts which was either my favourite job or my least favourite depending on whether or not they did in fact reconcile. The two resident bosses were having a meeting with a supplier in one room and the rest of us were beavering away in our respective offices. Liam was f’ing and jeffing in his corner such was the norm for us. The radio was playing as it always was and we all liked it being on playing a mixture of Heart, Capital and sometimes Gaydio if we fancied a bit of pazzaz to get us through a friday afternoon. 

We all enjoyed the radio being on; all of us except of course Liam who could only work in perfect silence. So we compromised and had the radio on a low volume. It wasn’t a new thing it was on when I had my interview and it had been on pretty much ever since and Liam had been with the company for at least a year before I started so you would have thought he would have learnt to tolerate it by now, and it seemed that 99.9% of the time he did with the exception of the handful of times that he didn’t. Rather than saying ‘can we turn the radio off I am finding it hard to concentrate’ i.e. like a normal person, he would F and Jeff under his breath and mutter mutinously. Unfortunately this then annoyed the girl who sat next to him whose name was Lara (although there was a wall and a doorway separating them) and she would passive aggressively make lots of noise in retaliation.

I have to say due to the fact that my reconciliation hadn’t in fact reconciled I was oblivious to this exchange going on over the other side of the room but I was conscious of a palpable atmosphere change as the morning progressed. The banging, crashing, and mutinous mumbles from Liam were getting harder to ignore and eventually Lara said something to him. Something along the lines of ‘what’s your problem?’ The Radio was his answer. The Radio was too loud he said.

‘Well why didn’t you say and we would have turned it down?’ was Lara’s answer and this was met with more mumbling and swearing and huffing and puffing that eventually resulted in the door to his room being shut which from our point of view was no problem but of course when Andy came out of his meeting he wanted the door open so he could hear the radio and also shout through the door to ask me questions that he already knew the answer to (you know the way bosses usually do.)

This resulted in more cussing and puffing from Liam and tensions continued to rise with neither side backing down, with the end of the day coming to a close under a dark cloud that saw us all breath a huge sigh of relief when Liam banged out the door at 5pm on the nose grunting a goodbye

The next day we all come in to an email sent from David (our oversea’s boss and Liam’s Dad for those that haven’t read The Table) entitled The Radio. 

It has come to my attention (it read) that there is a radio in the office. Some staff of (The Company) have complained about the radio so therefore I don’t want it on anymore. 

‘’Some staff’’ was of course his son and the fact that he thought given that the office contained only 7 people that he could disguise this by saying ‘some’ was hilarious in itself. He also once used the same tactic to complain about my ‘foul’ language but more on that later on. 

Another important thing about the radio from Andy’s point of view was that it actually helped him drown out the sounds of Liam’s foul mutterings because radio or no radio he wouldn’t have been happy providing he had to sit amongst living and breathing human beings. So to take away the radio would also be removing a small piece of Andy’s sanity and on principle we all liked the radio, literally every single one of us except Liam and he sat the furthest away from it. 

So the bosses wrote back to Richard and said the radio would be staying and that Liam was able to ask to have it turned down if it was too loud but that actually the rest of the work force all enjoyed it and felt it benefited them. They also mentioned his general foul demeanor and contempt for the rest of the staff and suggested that perhaps he could learn to be a bit more tolerant when working in a shared office space. 

Well Richard obviously didn’t feel like he could leave it there as the very next day we received word that he would be making a visit to the office all the way from deepest darkest Russia because he felt like there were ‘things that needed his attention’. So we all made ready for his great arrival and essentially carried on as normal. 

The day arrives and there he is one bright Monday morning, his huge Nissan people carrier looming imposingly in the car park. His first port of call was to discuss the radio (of course it was given that we know it was the sole purpose of his multi continent voyage to visit us.) He wanted to interview us all one by one to discuss it which of course the bosses said no, as it was not necessary and also a huge waste of everyone’s time. They instead discussed it amongst themselves for probably way longer than was necessary and then a truce was agreed, the radio would be moved further away from Liam to the very furthest point in the office which happened to be next to me and it could continue to play at a low volume. At one point Andy told me they had pointed out that at any point had Liam spoken to us or them like a normal person i.e. politely and respectfully that compromise could have been come to without the need for his Dad to fly halfway across the world. Andy also told me that at one point he tried to claim that the radio was his property and that he would be taking it away with him because it was his to do as he wished with until one of the engineer’s out the back (who worked for our landlord not us) piped up that it was his radio and he had lent it to us so that scuppered his original plan. 

The whole thing was just so pathetic. If I hadn’t physically been there and heard it I wouldn’t have believed that a man would fly halfway across the world to rescue his son from the dulcet tones of Jamie Theakston and Ollie Mur’s songs in the morning and the ‘going home song’ in the afternoon. If you know, you know – Millennial Radio 1 & Heart listeners will.

Writing this I am also really aware of how times have changed because now-a-days people like Liam with no social skills and a personality disorder would just work from home where they could do their job and not have to see people but over a decade ago that wasn’t an option.