Pointless jobs

I tracked attendance in Parliament so you don’t have to

House of Commons, some time in the early 2010s (Wikimedia Commons)

There are days — and my hunch is you experience them too — when the job feels a little bit pointless. The emails, the “sorry to chase” emails, the meetings-where-people-read-out-the-literal-words-on-a-PowerPoint-as-if-we-can’t-read that could have been an email.

In such moments of torpor, I try to cheer myself up by recalling the single most futile, trivial, mind-bendingly unproductive job on my CV. When I worked in Parliament, it was for a time my duty to sit in the gallery above the Commons chamber and jot down the name of every opposition MP in attendance for each debate. The image above is pretty misleading. For much of the time, the chamber looks like this¹.

(Jessica Taylor/House of Commons Flickr)

The obvious question is “why?” Why was I taking down names? But you must never allow yourself to ask it. At least, not in the moment, lest you descend into madness. Only hundreds of hours and thousands of pounds worth of therapy have brought me to a place of — if not transcendence — then at least acceptance.

I worked for a whip which, like naked short-selling, is less exciting than it sounds. I suppose the idea was to keep track of who was actually bothering to turn up for debates, departmental questions and ministerial statements. I think attendance was deemed a good thing, possibly a prerequisite for front-bench promotion. Though nothing ever came of it.

Jack Straw’s Glasses

Nevertheless, I kept assiduous spreadsheets. Colour-coding, separate tabs, charts — the works. Of course, in order to do the job to any level of accuracy, I needed to know the names of all 258 MPs. This is where the face book came in handy. Problem is, MPs are as, if not more, vain than the rest of us.

Consequently, the pictures did not necessarily reflect present-day realities — less a directory than an archive of former jawlines. Without wishing to pick on anyone in particular, Jack Straw’s photograph was so old it still had him sporting those small, round glasses that were the height of male style in the late 1990s.