The department used to be run by senior academics, who rotated the role among them. Now it, like most other departments in the university, is controlled by a manager brought in specifically to run the budget. Mary has somehow adopted the air of an academic, perhaps hoping this will make us trust her. But she doesn't really know much about academic life, and I often overhear Yvonne filling her in on what sort of things the academics traditionally do.
Mary looks pissed off. "So who is here?"
"Max is in. Oh hello, Ariel. Ariel's in."
Mary and I both know that my being here is of importance to nobody. I'm teaching one evening class this term and that's it. I don't have any admin responsibilities and I am not a member of any committees. I'm simply a Ph.D. student, and I don't even have a supervisor anymore. So I'm surprised when Mary looks at me as if I'm someone she needs to see.
"Ah, Ariel," she says. "My office, if you've got a moment."
I wait for her to walk past me into the corridor and then I follow her around the corner to her office. She unlocks the door and holds it open for me while I walk in. I don't think I've ever actually been in Mary's office before. She's got two of what they call the "comfortable" chairs set up facing a low, pale coffee table, so I sit at one of these and she sits at the other. I'm glad the days of having to face your boss across a desk are over. You can't do that kind of thing with computers in the way. Everyone faces walls or screens in offices now.
Mary doesn't say anything.
"Did you have a nice weekend?" I ask her.
"What? Oh, yes, thanks. Now." She goes silent again, but I assume that she's about to say whatever it is, so I don't attempt any more small talk. "Now," she says again. "You're in quite a big office on your own, aren't you?"
Damn. I knew this would come up one day.
"It's Saul Burlem's office," I say. "I've just got a corner of it, really."
This is a lie. Once Burlem had been gone for a couple of months, I cleared the surface of his desk, moved his computer to the coffee table, and made myself a large L-shaped arrangement out of his desk and mine. I've filled all the shelf space with my books, in case I ever have to do a runner from the flat in town, and generally populated the office with moldy coffee cups and all my research notes. I have a whole drawer full of things I believe might come in useful one day. There are three small bars of bitter chocolate, a Phillips screwdriver, a flathead screwdriver, a socket set, a spanner, a pair of binoculars, some random pieces of metal, several plastic bags, and, most worryingly, a vibrator that Patrick sent me through the internal post as a risqué present.
"Well, it's quite clear that Saul isn't coming back to us for the foreseeable future, so that means that a large portion of your space is unused?"
I can't do anything else but agree with this, at least as a theory.
"Right," says Mary. "Look. All heads of department have agreed to provide temporary office accommodation for the members of staff who have had to leave the Newton Building. It's going to be a squash for most of us but still, it has to be done. We've agreed to take four. Two are going to share the Interview Room, and two are going to come in with you. OK?"
"OK," I say. But I must look horrified. I love my office. It's the only really warm and comfortable space I've got in the whole world.
"Come on, Ariel, I'm not asking you to leave your office or anything like that. Just to share it for a while. You'd be sharing it anyway if Saul was around."
"I know. Don't worry. I'm not complaining or—"
"And we all have a responsibility for refugees."
"Yes, I know. As I said, it's fine." I bite my lip. "So ... Who are they? Do we know yet? I mean, do I know who I'm going to be sharing with?"
"Well." Mary gets up and picks up a sheet of paper from her desk. "You can choose, if you want. There's ... Let's see. There's a theology lecturer, a postdoctoral fellow in evolutionary biology, a professor of bacteriology, and an administrative assistant."
Well, I'm not having a bacteriologist in my office, although he or she would probably find a lot in there to study. And I fear an admin assistant might take the same view of my office as a bacteriologist.
"Um," I say. "Can I have the theology person and the evolutionary biologist?"
Mary writes something on her sheet of paper and smiles at me. "There. That's not so bad, is it?"
I leave Mary's office, wondering if she speaks to everyone as if they are children. I do try to like her, but she makes it difficult. I think she's been to some management training that tells you how to "empower" staff and let them feel that they've made the terrible decision that, after all, they're going to have to live with. Oh well. I still haven't even checked my post, so I go into the office to do that.
Yvonne already knows about the new office arrangements.
"I'll come down later and help arrange the desks," she says to me. "And Roger will be in with another desk as well, and some more shelving. We're going to put Professor Burlem's computer into storage, and any bits and pieces from his desk, so if you could maybe start sorting those out...?"
There is no post for me, in the end.
When's "later"? Whenever it is, it leaves me less time to get into Burlem's computer than I'd thought, especially now they're going to put it in storage. I lift it back up onto the desk and plug it in and switch it on. This won't be the first time I've tried to get into it, although the first time was really just a halfhearted attempt to see if there was any clue to where he'd gone. Then, as now, I was confronted with the login screen that asks for your user name and password. I know his user name: It's sabu2. But I have no way of knowing his password. The last time I did this I pretended I was in a film and confidently typed in several guesses before realizing that it was a stupid idea. This time I am going to use a more sophisticated hacking technique. And I learned in a book last year that the most sophisticated hacking technique doesn't involve guesses, algorithms, logarithms, dictionary files, or letter-scrambling software. The most sophisticated hacking technique is where you simply convince someone to give you the password.
Who knows our passwords? Computing Services definitely do, but does Yvonne? I think for a minute. Yvonne can't have our passwords, but what if she needed to get one for some reason? Presumably she'd just get in touch with Computing Services. It can't be that big a deaclass="underline" Everything here officially belongs to the university anyway, including all the files on our computers. And Burlem has disappeared, so ... Could I just ring up Computing Services and pretend to be Yvonne? Probably not. She probably rings them all the time. They'll know her voice. Um. I think for a minute; then I run my fingers through my tangled hair a couple of times, set my expression to "very worried," and go back upstairs.
"Ah," I say, as soon as I walk in. "Yvonne?"
She's drinking tea. "Yes, Ariel? What can I do for you?"
"Um, I'm having a bit of a problem. A huge problem, actually, and I don't quite know what to do about it."
"Oh. Anything I can help with?"
"I don't know." I frown, and look down at the brown carpet. "I think it might be hopeless, actually. But..." I sigh, and run my fingers through my hair again. "Well, you know how Saul's computer is going into storage later on today?"
"Yes?"
"Well it's got a document on it that I need, and I don't know how to get it. I don't think I can. Saul's not here, and I don't have the password anymore. I used to have it, of course, but I've forgotten it and ... Oh. How can I explain this? Basically there's this anthology that someone at Warwick's putting together, and I was supposed to finish the, er, bibliography for Saul and e-mail the document over to them. It doesn't have to be there for another month, which is why I wasn't too worried about it. But I was just starting to pack the things away for storage, like you asked, and then it just came to me." I shrug. "I suppose I really need some sort of miracle or something. I don't suppose you'd know how to get a document from a computer with no password, would you? I mean, you're not by any chance an experienced hacker in your spare time?" I laugh. As if any of us would ever hack into a computer.