These are dif­fi­cult times, and per­haps you’re hold­ing tight to your con­trac­ted hours and hop­ing that the downs­iz­ing fin­ger doesn’t point your way. You are not con­sid­er­ing approach­ing your head of depart­ment to sub­mit a request for a raise. And so you would not look at the shelf and think: oh, that’s the self-help book for me. This is a good thing. Perec offers no guide for the eager.

George Perec’s The Art and Craft of Approach­ing your Head of Depart­ment to Sub­mit A Request­For A Raise tells the tale of a man’s decision and inde­cision as he wor­ries and won­ders and wanders around his office looking for the right time and the right way to ask Mr X for a pay raise. He vis­its Ms Wye at times. He pays atten­tion to what was on the cafet­eria menu. He hopes Mr X’s daugh­ters are well and don’t have measles. He cir­cump­er­am­bu­lates the office wait­ing for the right moment. This comes at “the two hun­dred and fifty-fifth bid” (2011:79) and it isn’t an instant success.

What I love about this piece is how all those moments of uncer­tainty that make up organ­isa­tional life, all the things that go through your mind when you’re at work but not work­ing, the pos­tur­ing and the won­der­ing and the pos­i­tion­ing are brought into a for­mula of no/yes, 0/1, recur­sion and slight devel­op­ment. The book’s about the sys­tems that lie within the messi­ness of liv­ing and work­ing. It is pre­faced and inspired by a flow­chart illus­trat­ing com­pu­ter­ised decision mak­ing pro­duced by Perec’s fel­low Oulipian, Jacques Per­ri­aud. Perec makes ‘real’ the grey media of the flow­chart adding the uncer­tain­ties, false steps and coin­cid­ences that make up a work­ing life. Almost real: it’s a story with just one full stop.

Play the game your­self theartofaskingyourbossforaraise.com

Ref­er­ence

  1. Perec, G (2011) The Art and Craft of Approach­ing your Head of Depart­ment to Sub­mit A Request For A Raise, trans David Bel­los. Lon­don: Vin­tage Books.