Office Plants

I used to work in a place where our small team would invariably contain one ridiculously attractive girl. If that attractive girl was good at what we did, then so much the better. But our team had a high turnover of employees (welcome to the world of American Capitalism), and if at any point we were all men, or a mix of men and some frumpy women, then – mysteriously, within a week at most – a girl that looked like she’d stepped straight off a catwalk and put on some normal clothes would suddenly become “the secretary”.

Point being, we didn’t even need a fucking secretary. Oh sure, she’d field calls to us and route them through, send out notices from our team to the rest of the company, order new bottles for the water cooler – all that stuff which would take a seven-year-old dyslexospastic about three minutes to learn. But nobody ever questioned her placement there. Until I joined, of course.

My boss told me that having fit, sociable women in the workplace was a boon to group interaction, dynamics, scenery and therefore productivity. He then went on to say that these girls could never be hired on the basis of actually being any good, because pretty girls never need to learn much to get ahead. Obviously my boss was an American. A fucking sexist cunt of an American, at that – BUT… I conceded his points to an extent.

Not for precisely the same reasons, of course. I mean, this was a guy who – back in San Francisco – had meetings invariably accompanied by massive pizzas. “Boon to productivity”, they said. “Boon to fucking obesity”, in fact. So no, I didn’t agree that pretty girls in an office aid group interaction (how the fuck has the Essex girl “seven-word-vocabulary” ever aided a conversation, ever?) or BS like that. No, it’s way more simple than that. Guys just function better when there’s a pretty girl in the vicinity.

I have no idea how women feel about pretty faces with no brains being employed around the office – I’d assume they fucking hated it, but that’s their prerogative. As far as guys go, we do like pretty, stupid girls being around. They’re nice to look at, nice to order around, and nice to screw in the office supplies cupboard if they’re up for that. You’re in the damned place for forty hours a week, you don’t want to be surrounded by people that you’d never want to shag. That’s bad for the soul. If I got up on a Monday morning and staggered, hungover, into the office to be greeted by a bunch of faces and personalities straight out of an AGM for Princeton “cum laude” graduates, then the first thing on my mind would be to napalm their geeky odiousness into oblivion. However, if there were a few fit girls around, I’d be a lot more perky and far less liable to expose my murderous tendancies. Point is, guys perform better around pretty girls.

Because they want to screw them, yes. Not necessarily actually screw them, but that’s what it comes down to. Guys are totally shallow bastards, and even if they’re in a loving relationship, they will still want to surround themselves with beautiful women. Just like, when women already have a pair of shoes they love, they’ll still want to surround themselves with more, more, more than they could ever possibly wear in a fucking lifetime. We’re all designed in these ways.

So yes, I think what my yank boss was accidentally realising, was that you can’t have a team function on job capability alone. People need a good mix of people in their office environment, and though it’s quite fortunate if you can get a group of people together that have that mix and are good at what they do, more often than not you’ll have to sacrifice competence for other qualities.

Like sacrificing all competence whatsoever for having someone fit in the team. It stretches the fundamental idea a bit, but hey - it works for me.

Or maybe I need a job in marketing.