A Shock to the System Read Free

They represented to him the threat of the unknown, and he was constantly heard to remark, ‘I’m glad I’ll have retired before the bloody things take over completely.’ The whole Operations Research Department (or O R.), computers and those who tended them alike, he dismissed under the derisive sobriquet of ‘Space Invaders’.
    In the early ’Seventies, under George’s predecessor, most of the Personnel Records had been put on to computer, a proceeding which George regarded as ‘more trouble than it was worth’. There was a feeling in certain areas of the company that the system was now outdated and should be replaced with something more modern, but George resisted the change. ‘Over my dead body,’ he would splutter after a few whiskies in the bar. ‘Not while I’m in charge. I don’t care what they do after I’ve gone.’
    And Graham Marshall, the Head of Personnel’s customary companion, would nod agreement while he made his plans for what would happen after George had gone. The system would be modernised. Though he knew nothing of their technicalities, Graham recognised the power that computers could bestow. And it was a power he intended to harness when he was in a position to do so.
    Because there was little doubt by the end of the ’Seventies in the Department, or elsewhere in the company, that Graham Marshall was poised to take over George Brewer’s job (and the five-thousand-pound increase in salary it entailed), when the incumbent reached retirement age in 1982.
    That prospect paid for the years of nodding and curbing his true opinions, for the long and, since George’s wife had died, increasingly difficult business of getting away from his boss in the evenings. It would all have been worthwhile when Graham was appointed Head of Personnel.
    Since George had not reached this eminence until the age of fifty-three, and Graham would be only forty-two when he achieved it, there seemed little doubt that he was destined for even higher reaches of management.
    On the strength of these expectations, early in 1980, Graham and Merrily Marshall took out a thirty-thousand-pound endowment mortgage on a much grander, though rather dilapidated, house in Boileau Avenue, Barnes. It would mean a couple of years of economy, but when he got the new job, things would ease considerably.
    There was no doubt that Graham Marshall would continue to be, in his parents’ oft-repeated words, ‘a success’.

CHAPTER TWO
    It was after the move into the Boileau Avenue house that things began to change. Whether the change was for good or for bad was not at first clear – certainly there was no sense of things ‘going wrong’, but events of the ensuing six months produced a marked difference in Graham’s attitude to his life and circumstances.
    First, there was money. He had, needless to say, done his sums carefully and knew that the house was a good long-term investment. But the property market was sluggish. There seemed to be no immediate sign that prices would rise, as they had done so gratifyingly over the previous decade.
    And the outgoings on the new house were considerable. The Marshalls had dispensed with a private pre-purchase survey. Graham, in unconscious echo of his father’s manner, had announced that, since the building society was prepared to lend so much money on the property, there couldn’t be much wrong with it. This economy was rewarded by a sudden bill for woodworm treatment, which ate up what was left of their savings after the expenses of the move.
    Graham and Merrily had prepared theoretically for certain retrenchments after they moved, but they found their reality unpalatable. Ten years of living above their income had nourished habits of extravagance which they found hard to break. The spectre of worrying about money, which had loomed over Graham’s childhood but been exorcised in his early twenties by