Chapter 3

The New Kid

THE FIRST DAY of a new job is much like your first day at school. Your shirt is ironed, your pencil case is packed, your shoes are polished, and you show up on time. Filled with an anticipatory enthusiasm and an eagerness to please, you are unfailingly polite to everyone you encounter at your new workplace. The woman at reception is treated to your winningest smile, the maintenance man receives a warm handshake—even the guy filling the Coke machine finds himself the target of your charm campaign.

And just as in the school playground, you spend the first few days scoping the new territory—working out who the kingpins are, where the cool kids hang, how the office politics fall, where the pitfalls lie, and how best to avoid them. Most workplaces have enough people and are sufficiently multilayered that you need a good couple of weeks to get the lay of the land. At the ICC I had taken the measure of the place within an hour of arriving. Whether it was the gray walls, the all-pervading silence, or the generally sleepy ambience, I knew almost immediately upon entering the building that the ICC and I were not going to be natural bedfellows. And that perception was only reinforced as the days passed.

A week into my new job I had been to three meetings that appeared to have nothing to do with me, had sat in on four briefings that were definitely outside my sphere of responsibility, and had been copied on at least a hundred e-mails that didn’t concern me. Committees were being created to make decisions on important projects, then subcommittees were formulated to review those decisions before they were enacted. Though English was nominally the language in which the majority of the work was conducted, people used words and expressions that were foreign to me.

“We’ll need to drill down some of these key variables to make sure we are all singing from the same hymn sheet,” they would say, adding:

“And before we action any of this let’s make sure we’ve given it some blue sky thinking and put all our ducks in a row.” Unsure what they were talking about, I developed a habit of nodding sagely while scribbling in my notebook. I was getting a crash course in the strange world of corporate office life.

Most disturbing, however, was the sudden drop in my pace of workplace activity. All previous professional incarnations had seen me working in the bustle of a newsroom. All the newspaper newsrooms in which I had toiled as a hack, and certainly the twenty-four-hour TV newsroom in which I had worked in London, had been notable for daily scenes of barely constrained chaos. Even in the brief periods of downtime, when a news story wasn’t breaking or sixty reporters weren’t all frantically bashing their keyboards to meet deadline, a newsroom always had an amazing energy. A buzz that invigorated everyone in the workplace. The only buzz audible in this new working environment was the sickly one emanating from the clock on the wall. Even the timepieces at the ICC seemed apologetic, as if to tick too loudly might jolt employees from their slumber.

And then there was the work itself. As the self-described “world business organization,” the ICC existed to create the rules by which international commerce was practiced and to lobby bodies like the United Nations and the World Trade Organization on behalf of the private sector. For a former gossip columnist, more accustomed to red carpets than red tape, it was a distinctly odd marriage. And it was a union that apparently had many of my new colleagues also scratching their heads. Barely two weeks into my tenure, a bet was running among my more savvy coworkers about how long I would last in the job. To their way of thinking, there was no way my particular species of fish would cope for long in the ICC’s murky waters.

But if the institution was distinctly moribund, at least many of the people with whom I worked were young and dynamic. Like me, they had come to Paris from all corners of the world. English, Swedish, Swiss, Canadian, American, Togolese, Moroccan, Austrian, Russian, Brazilian, Finnish, Lebanese, Greek, Mexican, and Italian—there were even a handful of fellow Aussies and, of course, a healthy number of Frenchies. Like me, the younger members of staff had mostly come to the ICC for the chance it afforded to live and work in Paris. The work experience was definitely secondary to the life experience.

The fact that at least half of the staff were French—especially those at the administrative end of things—meant that my French would improve exponentially. It also meant I got to witness firsthand the impressive force of the powerhouse French work ethic. It wouldn’t be long before I knew the French for “express delivery doesn’t exist,” “you must be joking if you think I can get it to you before the end of the week,” and “that’s not my department.” If nothing else, I reasoned as I slowly got to know the place, this job was destined to be amusing.

During a session in my first week the human resources manager spelled out to me my benefits and entitlements as an employee under French law. I was contractually bound to work thirty-five hours a week—any more would be a contravention of French law. France’s previous, Socialist-led government had legislated the drastically shortened work week in a failed effort to create jobs, and no attempt at compromise since had convinced the unions to relinquish it.

I was legally required to take a lunch break of at least one hour. Each day I was to be given one “ticket restaurant” in the value of eight euros. This state-funded lunch voucher system was designed to ensure that the entire nation had one good square meal a day. And I was entitled to six weeks of paid vacation each year, plus a week’s worth of public holidays, which the French honor religiously.

This will be a laugh, I thought to myself. A seven-hour workday, public holidays every other week, a subsidized meal every day—talk about a free lunch!

Then the personnel manager turned to matters of superannuation and retirement.

“Once you have worked here for thirty years, you will have accrued quite a lot of superannuation and retirement benefits. You might want to start thinking about how you will want to invest it,” she said.

It was all I could do to disguise my befuddlement. Thirty years? Was she serious? Did she really think I would still be here in thirty years? I was a twenty-eight-year-old Aussie drifter, on the run from London and in search of a good time in the City of Light. What possible need did I have for a retirement plan? I didn’t know where I would be in the next six months, much less in the next thirty years. Certainly I had no greater ambition with this job than to give it a year, collect a salary, and live it up in this remarkable city.

And yet I left the personnel office feeling decidedly nauseous, wondering if in my enthusiasm to hop across the Channel, I had made a grave mistake. Was I trapped in this job and now destined to while away the best, most productive years of my professional life fighting with intractable mailroom staff and eating state-funded lunches?

I took myself to the Grand Corona café on the Place de l’Alma, sat alone on the terrace, and ordered a coffee. Paris bustled around me. Across the Place de l’Alma and on the other side of the Seine, the Eiffel Tower rose impressively toward the clouds. No, I reminded myself, I wasn’t trapped. The vision was intact, and my motives for being here remained untainted. I had come to suck the marrow. If Paris truly was a movable feast, as Hemingway once famously asserted, then I was determined to take a place at the table, roll up my sleeves, and tuck in. If this job was a means to that particular end, then all the better. Besides, a position that offered international travel, a healthy salary, and (though it wasn’t exactly my bag) exposure to the higher echelons of the corporate and intergovernmental worlds wasn’t all bad.

If the ICC was prepared to put up with me for a year, then I reckoned I could just about try to put up with them. I was in Paris, after all.