Untitled – Thomas Ott

Looking at this revives a memory for me of the occupation I had when I won it almost 20 years ago. The eBay auction for this drawing by Thomas Ott ended on a Friday afternoon when I was in work. Smartphones were not yet a thing. Although personal use of the internet on office computers was forbidden I thought that if I used my discretion there would be some leeway so 15 minutes before the end of the auction I put in a bid which was as much as I could afford, closed the office and carried out one of my duties which was to deposit the day’s takings in the company’s bank which was ten minutes’ walk away, and when I returned I was pleasantly surprised to discover I had won.

Back in the twenty-noughties I had a job-share as an office junior in a branch office of a national newspaper. I was a “junior” in respect of my status only as even then I was well-advanced in years, and I should also add that the nation of which the newspaper claimed to be the organ had a population of less than the city of London, so it is not quite so impressive as it might first sound. My duties included assisting customers use the photocopier, selling copies of the newspaper, but the main revenue-generating task was using one of the office computers to run a program called Sentinel. In spite of the cool-sounding name I was not required to remotely control Trask-engineered androids to identify, track and then capture/eliminate genetically superior humans but instead I used the application to book classifieds and BMDs – births, marriages and deaths. It was the last of those three that my job-sharer informed me, after I had gotten my feet under the table (but before we fell out and got on each other’s nerves), that resulted in my immediate predecessor leaving the job suddenly and after only a short tenure – she had recently lost her husband and found the practice of typing up several death notices a day too distressing. It would be overdramatic for me to liken this to Jack Torrance being told what happened to the previous caretaker at the Overlook, but there was always this looming presence in the background of what might happen if I lost it. By that stage in my life I was if not young enough then lucky enough to have not experienced the loss of anyone to whom I was particularly close, and I did wonder at the time if dealing with bereavement daily would make me extra sensitive or desensitise me to losing a loved one.

Thomas Ott is one of comics’ originals. There are a few comics artists who have worked in scratchboard but he is the only one whose entire body of work is executed in that medium. Much of his work is quite bleak and whatever humour there is tends to be extremely dark. The labour-intensive medium in which he works seems to add to this with its air of creeping dread and the way violent acts and death never seem to be too far away. My drawing may be a rejected version of the last panel in a ten-page story called The Job found in the Greetings from Hellville collection. In this story a bespectacled guy undertakes a job which involves death and we discover at the end that it was performed so that he can have the ability to look at beautiful things, and once the mission is finished he resumes a normal existence.

One day my job-sharer and myself were told that one of the managers was coming over from HQ which was 70 miles away to convene an emergency meeting. At first it occurred to me that it was because of the friction between myself and my job-sharer, which we had already been warned about, making it necessary for our manager to come down and knock our heads together. Then I thought it might be our personal use of the office internet was not so easily overlooked. It transpired that the reason for the visit was neither of these. We were told that the office was no longer economically viable resulting in the two reporters and pair of advertising reps on the first floor being made to work from home and my and my job-sharer’s duties would be centralised in HQ which was 90 minutes’ travelling away. We were being made redundant. It was similar to a bereavement and it saddened me that my job-sharer went straight to stage three of grief: bargaining, as they tried to convince the management to perhaps open the office for restricted hours so that they could keep their job. However, the decision had been made. Myself? I was more stoic about it. You cannot de-invent the internet and its onward progress was affecting the circulation of print media and traditional working practices. Together with this was that during the few years I was with the company I had keyed in the death notices for both my parents – you couldn’t make it up – and that gave me some perspective about losing merely a part-time job. So it followed shortly afterwards that on a summer’s Friday afternoon I closed the office as I had done many times before except on this occasion it was for the very last time. “Nothing lasts forever,” and “everything ends”.