Secret Reason Your Boss Won't WFH For Long - He Misses The Oreos

There was just one man sitting in the conference room. Well, calling him a man is a bit of a stretch, considering he still didn’t know how to tie a Windsor knot and he still didn’t know the concept of matching his shirt to his trousers and his belt to his shoes. His boss also referred to him as a kid he had taken under his wing, to be transformed from a boy to a man by putting him through the wringer of corporate rigor. So, let's refer to him as The Kid

The Kid had come into the conference room early so that the a/c vent above would dry out his fresh shirt drenched in sweat by the oppressive?Bombay?heat outside. The meeting was supposed to start in 30 minutes and it didn’t hurt to have a good seat at the far end of the room where the bigger bosses wouldn’t spot you and you won’t be expected to run out for errands for other senior people.

The bigger bosses were out on the balcony, smoking. They were dishing out the same cynical gallows humour that corporate honchos across all the balconies in all the corporate offices must be dishing out at that very moment. The background score to this current conversation was the background score of the?Lower Parel?of the new millennium – the constant hum of machines stationed at half-made buildings that go on and on because the machines, unlike the labour, don’t have shifts and unions.

Then the biggest boss looked into his Patek Phillipe and decided it was time to walk back to his cabin and wait till the conference room is full enough for him to make his entry.

Back inside the conference room, 3 IT guys were earning their day’s salary by switching on the laptop, plugging in the projector wire and spotting and pressing that red button on the remote which had ‘on’ written on it. The others had now started coming in slowly. Grim faces talking about grim things, carrying dull office stationery and grey laptops.

The Kid was asked to shift his seat a number of times, and inevitably, he had been shifted next to the entrance. Now there were more people than chairs in the room so people were stepping out to get chairs from wherever they could because the peon was taking his own sweet time to turn up. There were about 25 people sitting in a conference room meant for 10. It’s?Bombay, after all.

As the biggest boss called the meeting to order with a few polite words that meant nothing, The Kid wheeled his seat for the nth time to make way for another senior guy who had come in late and who was both quick and insincere with his apology.

The meeting was now well and truly in motion. The biggest boss was speaking passionately, every now and then taking a peek in his iPad to check if he had left out anything he had to say. While the kid was staring at meaningless colour-coded numbers on the projector screen, there was a knock on the door and the peon came in with trays of coffee, tea and the real chief guest of the meeting – biscuits.

It’s a tough job to feign interest. Its tougher when something else is tantalizingly drawing your attention. You need every sinew in your body to obey you and not turn towards it involuntarily.

There they were in all their brown finery – three plates of biscuits arranged in concentric circles of goodness.

The gym bro with his muscles bursting from his shirt sleeves, went for the Mcvities Digestives in a single, coordinated, gracious movement of limbs that had everybody transfixed on his form for a moment. Now one of the sub-ordinates was talking and observing everybody attacking his favorite Oreo cookies. He couldn’t go for them till the time the boss was done with him but his gaze couldn’t help but follow his enemies from their seats to the plate and back, even as he justified why he couldn't take on a bigger sales target.

The Kid was closer to the table so all the seniors seating around him goaded him to pass them this biscuit and the other. The two middle management stooges wanted him to grab 4 Good Days for them to go with their teas. The Pure Magics were being gobbled up by the senior guys – you see, the biscuits had their own hierarchies. On the outer-most circle were the Parle-Gs. Their turn came when all the inner circles had been consumed.

The biggest boss was now talking about the current recession in the industry and how everybody needed to put in their 200% because he had asked for 150% 6 months ago and that hadn’t proved good enough.

On a day that begins with cramming into a small room with people you come to hate and ends with standing in line to get a cab, which delivers you a kilometer from the railway station - and then cramming into a small compartment with people you come to hate - the free biscuits are your little redemption. The family will eat away at the salary, the boss will make you pay several times over for all the words of praise you ever manage to elicit from him and government will take away what remains for people who were too lazy to work.

But the biscuits will be yours. They will yield willingly to the force of your teeth. The first crisp bite will be followed by many more, as it mixes with your saliva. The cream will swirl on your tongue, tickling you playfully. Finally the biscuit and the cream and the saliva will mesh into an inseparable slush and frolic down your willing throat. That biscuit is your victory and yours alone.

That's why people will always want to go to a workplace.

Its the damn free biscuits.