The Takeover

The takeover was announced on a Wednesday, in a room that had been booked as "team catch-up", by a man who flew in that morning and used the word "family" four times in eleven minutes.

Rhoda had been running the office for twenty-two years, which meant that she had watched three sets of owners describe themselves as a family, and had learned to judge people instead by whether they knew where the stationery was kept.

Nothing changed for six weeks. Then everything was renamed. The office became a site, the customers became accounts, and the small cupboard by the fire door, which had held spare kettles and one broken heater since 2011, became a matter of some interest to a person in a different building.

Lanyards arrived. Everyone was given an induction into systems that half of them had been using, in older versions, for a decade. Rhoda sat through hers without comment and answered two of the trainer's questions when he was asked something he could not answer.

In November she was asked to produce a handover document. The request came from a woman called Priyanka, who was pleasant on the telephone, apologised for the short notice and explained that the integration team needed "local knowledge captured" before the restructure.

"Captured," Rhoda repeated, writing it down. "Right."

She started it properly, and the first eleven pages went easily: passwords, keys, the supplier who would deliver on a Saturday if you rang before ten, the invoice that always arrived twice and always had to be paid once.

After that it became difficult. How was she supposed to write down that Terence in the workshop had to be told about changes on a Monday and never on a Friday? That the heating in the corridor worked if you turned it off and on again in that order and no other? That the workaround for the ordering system had been invented by a man who left in 2016 and had never once been written down, because writing it down would have meant admitting it existed?

She wrote thirty-four pages in the end, which was thirty more than anyone expected and about two hundred fewer than the job actually required. It was submitted on the last day of the month and acknowledged within the hour by an automatic reply.

In January she was invited to what was described as an informal chat and turned out to be an appraisal. Her role, she was told, had been reviewed and would be retained, with a new title, reporting into a structure that was drawn on the whiteboard and rubbed out at the end of the meeting.

The new title was longer than the old one. The duties were vague in a way that could be read as freedom or as a warning, depending on the reader's mood, and Rhoda was in no particular mood at all.

"We really do value the loyalty," said the man from the other building, meaning to reassure her. "Twenty-two years. There aren't many left like you." It was, she thought afterwards, the first entirely true sentence anybody from the new company had said to her.

Had the handover document been read by anybody, she would have known: three of the thirty-four pages contained deliberate small gaps, left there in October and never filled in. Nobody had asked about them.

They wanted an answer by the Monday. On the Friday she cleared her desk of the year's paper, put the kettle on for the last people in the building and drove home the long way, past the industrial estate where the firm had started in a unit with one window. She has not yet said what she is going to do.