"Where’s Shabbat gone?” muttered my colleague Rachel, across the synagogue office. “I can’t find Shabbat. Someone’s moved it!”
Obviously, Rachel hadn’t actually lost Shabbat — this would have far-reaching theological implications for all of us — she’d merely found an error in the synagogue diary spreadsheet. To everyone in the office this was completely self explanatory but without the appropriate context it sounded pretty peculiar.
Every industry develops its own private language, its own frames of reference, that are so normal to its employees that they barely notice they’re using them. My previous career as a children’s book editor lent itself especially to this phenomenon. In my very first publishing job, as a lowly editorial assistant, it was my responsibility to take the minutes at the editorial meeting. One week, as I was reading them over before distributing them, my eye fell on a particular line: “There was general agreement that the pig should get his comeuppance”.
One of the agenda items had been a picture book we were developing about a recalcitrant pig. Debate had raged about whether the pig should, in the end, get away with his misdeeds or whether he should pay for them. The latter was agreed upon, and my minutes duly recorded this fact.
The conversation round the table had been completely serious — a group of experienced publishing professionals engaged in the important business of their day. It was only when I thought about how the conversation would look to an outsider that I realised I’d entered a slightly unusual working environment.
After that, I started jotting down conversations I overheard in the office when they struck me as particularly surreal. For example:
“How big is a crow’s nest on a ship? Would a troll fit in one?”
“I suppose it would depend on the size of the troll.”
“Is there a standard troll size?”
And:
“Do you want the frog to talk in this book?”
“He could say ‘ribbit ribbit’.”
“OK.”
And:
“What happens at the end?”
“They all leg it on a bus driven by a penguin.”
I spent a lot of my publishing career doing contract work — six months here and twelve months there — which meant that I never got too entrenched in a company’s culture and was able to keep an objective eye. On the flip side, it also meant that however well I understood the industry I was working in, I was still frequently bemused about what went on in each workplace.
One morning in the shiny, high-rise offices of Dorling Kindersley, for example, as I was hard at work among the neat rows of desks, a designer sat down on the floor near me and tipped out a vast pile of Lego.
I watched out of the corner of my eye as, with serious concentration, she constructed an elaborate princess castle. No one else even turned around.
“Um… d’you mind me asking why you’re doing that?” I said to her eventually.
“It’s for a book of ideas for things children can make with their Lego collections,” she explained. “I have to build each model to make sure the instructions in the book are correct.”
While the serious work of an industry can be incomprehensible from the outside, it’s the in-jokes that are properly impenetrable. My husband, Anthony, is a fact checker for the BBC. He and his equally pointy-headed colleagues investigate the numbers quoted by politicans and other leading figures in public life, and call them out when they are false or misleading.
“I was in the pub with a bunch of other fact checkers,” he told me. “I made a joke that had the punchline: ‘Then at 4am, I realised it only covered the service sector’. Everyone cracked up…”
“You probably had to be there,” he added.
And last October, one of my colleagues in the Jewish professional world turned up in a t-shirt saying, “I love Cheshvan”. It took me a while to get the joke… Cheshvan is the month after Tishrei. Tishrei contains the High Holy Days, then Succot, then Simchat Torah. It’s an unbelievably gruelling time if you’re a rabbi or work for a community… hence, it’s a huge relief when you get to Cheshvan and it’s all over for another year.
I’m not sure it was worth the effort to understand the slogan — the t-shirt wasn’t that funny. But then again, perhaps it was worth it. It’s a very human thing to want to belong, and an in-joke is a powerful way to experience that feeling.
There are countless groups that develop secret forms of communication in order to exclude others. Take the handshake of the Masons, for example, or the impenetrable slang of teenagers. The private language of the workplace isn’t like this — it’s a natural by-product of a group of people toiling together through the years, all in one discrete area of work.
Neverthless, the more I understand the codes and jokes and references specific to my own working world, the more I do feel I belong — and that gives me a warm glow.
@SusanReuben
