The weather is just as unpleasant as yesterday, if not worse—muggy and humid, warm enough to be annoying but not hot enough to provoke businesses into paying for air conditioning—and there's a stale tang of vehicle exhausts and fermenting dog shit underlying every noisome breath I take. Wasps buzz around the overflowing litter bins on the street outside the office as I nip into the staff entrance to the store, then push through a plywood door labeled BUILDING MAINTENANCE ONLY and up a whitewashed stairwell with peeling linoleum treads. (A lot of people go through that door every day, and they don't look much like store employees, but for some reason nobody seems to notice. Or more accurately, they can't notice.)

At the top of the stairs there's another door. This one's a bit more substantial. The wards make my skin crawl and send pins and needles singing up my arm as I push it open, but they recognize me as someone who belongs here, for which I am profoundly grateful. (A couple of years back a gang of thugs decided to ram-raid us and steal the office computers. Boy did they get an unpleasant surprise . . .)

I slouch over to reception. "Are there any messages for me today?" I ask Rita.

Rita, who is about a year younger than my mother and about as maternal as an iron maiden, stares at me in brassy-eyed surprise. "Iris said she wants to see you, if you showed up today!" she declares. "Are you signed off sick or something?"

"No, but I might be contagious."

"Be off with you." She turns back to her web browser, dismissing me, and I take a deep breath and head for Iris's office.

Iris is my (How to describe our relationship accurately? Person from Porlock? Morlock?) latest line manager. I seem to get through about one a year. It wasn't always so: but Andy got moved sideways into Research and Development, and before him, Harriet and Bridget are, ahem, long-term indisposed. They took on Angleton and lost, epic level. I actually work directly for Angleton these days, but Angleton isn't a manager according to our org chart; he's a DSS, and DSSs are too important to burden with boring administrative duties like overseeing staff performance appraisals. So although I work for him, I have to have an actual manager to report to, at least in theory, and that's where Iris comes into the frame. She handles my interface with Human Resources, Payroll, and general admin stuff. She doesn't know everything I do, but she knows I work for Angleton and it's her job to be my manager-on-paper. And she's good at it.