Free The Room by Jonas Karlsson Page A

of the desk. “I took the liberty of—”
    Jens didn’t let Karl finish his sentence.
    “So how daft do you have to behave to get a pair like that?” he went on, to scattered laughter.
    Karl gave a strained smile, holding the pen in the air.
    “Let’s just say that I have a certain amount in the budget for pastoral investment in personnel matters—”
    “That’s still not fair,” Ann said.
    “No,” Jörgen said.
    “This seems to me to be all too typical,” Hannah with the ponytail said, folding her arms over her chest. “We didn’t get any contribution to the Christmas party. But apparently there’s money available now.”
    “Now listen,” Karl said, leaning back in his chair with the pen under his chin. “That’s not the same thing.”
    “So he can turn up and get given stuff just because he acts a bit crazy?” Jörgen said.
    Hannah with the ponytail held her arms out.
    “It seems to me that it’s very unclear what the applicable rules actually are.”
    Several people nodded.
    “The question is,” Ann said, “what sort of signals are we sending out?”
    —
    When we went back to our places John appeared alongside me. He put his hand on my arm and hissed in my ear: “I saw what you did at lunchtime.”
    I raised my eyebrows and did my best to look uncomprehending.
    “Don’t act all innocent,” he went on. “I saw you. If I see you again, I’ll tell. Just so you know.”

32.
    The snow carried on falling, and I carried on working. I tried to stick to my fifty-five-minute periods. I even tried smiling. Every time anyone happened to look in my direction I fired off a broad smile, but the whole time I could feel how suspicious everyone else was of me, trying to pretend I wasn’t there. Karl came over to our desk. First he chatted with Håkan, then he turned to me. As if everything was normal.
    “And how are things with you, then, Björn?”
    “What sort of things?” I asked in a neutral voice.
    “Well,” Karl said, and I could hear how unsettled he was. “What have you spent the last few days doing?”
    Naturally he didn’t want an answer. He was asking in that pointless way that people do when they ask how you are. They don’t want to hear about your health. They just want to hear their own voice, and say things they’ve said before. They want to make a noise in a social context.
    “Why do you want to know?” I said.
    “Because I’m your boss,” he said.
    I looked him in the eye and had a distinct sense of being the stronger person.
    “I’ve initiated a process for developing a set of guiding principles for the department, identified so-called focus areas, specific targets in various sectors, and gathered a number of criteria. I have chosen to call one of my focus areas ‘operations in the center.’ ”
    I clicked to open the document and pointed at the screen.
    “I plan to use this to measure the benefit we deliver to customers. To that purpose I have drawn up a questionnaire intended to find out what you customers think about my services.”
    He looked at me.
    “Us customers?”
    “I usually think of you as customers.”
    “What for?”
    I allowed myself a gentle sigh.
    “Are you really asking me that?”
    Karl looked away for a moment and gazed out across the open-plan office. He put his hands on his hips and clenched his jaw. Then he looked at me again.
    “Yes, I’m really asking you that,” he said.
    “I think you maximize your potential better if you imagine a customer at the other end.”
    I could tell he was impressed even if he was unable to grasp the full extent of the idea and absorb it there and then. I pointed at the screen again.
    “So I’d be grateful if you could take the time to fill in this customer questionnaire which you’ll find by clicking this link. The survey contains five questions dealing with the quality of our services, and one question asking if you think any other service should be provided. The questions are divided according to the