【英语生活】职场人士该关心什么？

Why is it,” the radio presenter asked me, “that you have such a negative view of working women?”

“Um,” I said. “I don’t.”

She pointed out that I had just written a novel* in which the female chief economist of a large oil company spends more time agonising over the colleague she has fallen in love with than over her latest oil price forecast or over the prospects for renewable energy. “Surely that doesn’t put working women in a good light?” she asked.

On the contrary, I said, this has nothing to do with working women and everything to do with the human condition. Wild, obsessive love is more distracting than any oil price forecast. While it lasts (which isn’t usually long) it simply trumps everything else.

She didn’t look convinced. If I had thought about it a bit more I would have summoned Shakespeare to my defence and argued that it is no coincidence he didn’t compose a sonnet beginning: Shall I compare this spreadsheet to a summer’s day?

It is not just that love is compelling, it is that most of the big things we are supposed to think about during the working day aren’t terribly compelling at all.

Freud said that love and work are the two cornerstones of humanity. Which one looms larger and wakes us at 3am depends: sometimes it is love and sometimes it is work. Yet even when it is work, it isn’t the big things that count, it is the world three feet from our desks.

I work in the newspaper industry, which is dying. Have I ever lost one single second’s sleep over that? No. I am interested in its demise intellectually but emotionally am quite unmoved. This is because I am old enough for it not to matter much to me – the current model will just about see me out.

In the past three decades I have watched with relative unconcern my employer make profits followed by losses and then profits again. If those profits or losses had reflected well or badly on me, I would have minded a lot. At one point, when my job looked slightly insecure and when colleagues who I liked were leaving, then I minded a great deal. Otherwise, not.

Instead, what concerns me are pettier things: the disposition of my boss, the quality of my own latest column, and whether there are Maltesers in the vending machine. It might not be attractive, but it is perfectly natural – and I don’t think it’s a girl thing, either.

It is quite unreasonable to expect an oil economist to long for the oil price that is best for their company. Instead they long for the price that will show their latest forecast to have been right.

Equally the three men who campaigned so inhumanly hard to become the British prime minister didn’t do so just because they cared about pensioners and the size of the deficit. What they wanted above all was the notepaper with 10 Downing Street written on the top.

One of the comedies of working life is pretending to care about big things. If you are prime minister you need to play very hard at this game. If you are a corporate foot soldier you don’t have to try so hard. Indeed, you can sometimes even afford to show a little glee when things go wrong for your company. After all, bad news is usually quite exciting.

Very rarely, however, some genuine caring about big, distant things is called for. If I were a BP employee and had been looking at the pictures of the orange stuff on birds and thought about the 11 dead and that it was “my” oil lying on the sea, I think I would feel a twinge, despite knowing it had nothing to do with me. Yet even then, these big disasters don’t linger in the hearts of the corporate man and woman for very long: real, petty life crowds in soon enough.

When I interviewed Lord Browne a couple of months ago, the former head of BP said that he had never lost a night’s sleep because of work. If you were the sort of person who fretted unduly about work, he said, you shouldn’t be the chief executive of a big company.

Some might say that if Lord Browne had fretted a bit more, the company’s record on safety might look rather better than it does. But that’s a cheap shot. I’m with him: the real things that cause us anguish should be the personal things. Ironically, it was those personal things that did for him – and for the characters in my novel – in the end.

*‘In Office Hours’ is published by Penguin

“为什么你对职业女性的看法如此消极？”电台的女主持人问我。

“嗯，我没有啊。”我答道。

主持人指出，我刚刚写了一部小说^*。书中描写了一位爱上同事的某大型石油公司的女首席经济学家，她更多的时间是在为爱情烦恼，而不是为自己最新的油价预测或可再生能源前景操心。“这肯定不是在正面描写职业女性吧？”主持人问。

我答道，决非如此，我那决不是在描写职业女性，而完全是在描写人生体验。疯狂而令人着魔的爱情，比任何油价预测都更令人心烦意乱。在这类爱情的持续期（一般不会太长）内，它简直就是最最重要的事情。

主持人似乎并没有被我说服。如果我当时再多考虑一下的话，我会把莎士比亚(Shakespeare)拉过来当挡箭牌，并提出，莎翁没有把十四行诗的开头写成这样决非巧合：我是否应把这张电子表格比作夏日？

这不只是因为爱情令人着魔，而且是因为我们工作时间本应思考的大事多数毫无吸引力。

弗洛伊德(Freud)说过，爱情和工作是人类的两块基石。哪块更重要、能让我们凌晨3点醒来，取决于具体情况：有时是爱情，有时是工作。但即使是工作，也不是那些重要的大事，而是在我们办公桌三尺内的职场生活。

我在报业工作，这是一个行将夕阳产业。我是否曾因此有过半刻的寝食难安？没有。在理智上，我对报业的消亡兴趣盎然，但在情感上，我却不为所动。这是因为我已经年纪一把，这种前景对我影响不大——当前的模式大概刚好能撑到我退休。

过去30年里，我对雇主的盈盈亏亏一直不大关心。如果这些盈亏对我有所影响，我或许会牵肠挂肚。当我的位子看上去有点不稳，或是我喜欢的同事离职时，我会心事重重。其它情况下，我很淡定。

相反，我关心的是些更琐碎的事情：老板的性情、我自己最新一篇专栏文章的质量、以及自动售货机里是否有麦提莎巧克力球(Maltesers)。这种态度或许不招人喜欢，但它不带半点矫情，而且我也不认为只有女人才这样。

指望石油经济学家祈求最有利于其公司的油价，非常不合情理。相反，他们祈求的，是能证明自己的最新预测正确无误的油价。

同样，那三位竞选者为英国首相职位争得你死我活，也不只是因为他们关心养老金领取者和赤字规模。他们最想要的，是抬头上写有“唐宁街10号”的便条纸。

职场生活一个好玩的把戏就是假装关心大事。如果你是首相，那你必须认真地去玩这套把戏。如果你是公司里的一个小卒子，则不必那么叫真。实际上，有时你甚至可以在公司遭遇麻烦时，表露出一丝幸灾乐祸之色。毕竟，坏消息通常都相当激动人心。

但在极少数情况下，我们应当由衷地关心一下千里之外的大事。如果我是英国石油(BP)的雇员，那么当我看到身上覆有橙色物质的海鸟的照片、想到有11名雇员遇难、而且“我的”石油还在海面上漂浮时，我认为我会感到内疚，尽管心里知道此事与我毫无关系。但即使在上述情况下，这类大灾大难也不会在职场男女的心中逗留很久：真实、琐碎的生活很快就会填满他们的心灵。

几个月前，我曾采访布朗勋爵(Lord Browne)。这位英国石油的前掌门人告诉我，他从未因工作而失眠。他说，如果你是那种过分操心工作的人，那你就不应该去做大公司的首席执行官。

有人可能会说，如果布朗勋爵当时多操点心，英国石油的安全记录现在看起来或许会好一些。但这是在恶意中伤。我站在布朗勋爵一边：我们真正应该操心的是个人的私事。讽刺的是，最终让布朗勋爵——以及我小说中的人物——碰得头破血流的，正是那些个人的私事。

*《办公时间》(In Office Hours)，企鹅出版社(Penguin)出版

译者/汪洋