The Time-moan and the Meeting-moan

There are variations in our workplace moans, but even these are largely predictable. Everyone moans about time,

for example, but junior and low-grade employees are more likely to complain that it passes too slowly, that they

have another seven sodding hours of this shift to get through, that they are bored and fed up and can’t wait to

get home, while more senior people usually whine that time just seems to fly past, that they never have enough

of it to get through their ridiculous workload, and now there’s another bloody meeting they have to go to.

All white-collar executives and managers – right up to top boardroom level – always moan about meetings. To

admit to enjoying meetings, or finding them useful, would be the secular equivalent of blasphemy. Meetings are

by definition pointless, boring, tedious and awful. A bestselling training video on how to conduct meetings (or at

least make them marginally less awful) was called Meetings, Bloody Meetings – because that is how they are

always referred to. English workers struggle to get to the rung on the corporate ladder where they are senior

enough to be asked to attend meetings, then spend the rest of their career moaning about all the meetings they

have to attend.

We all hate meetings, or at least loudly proclaim that we hate them. But we have to have a lot of them,

because of the fair-play, moderation, compromise and polite-egalitarianism rules, which combine to ensure that

few individuals can make decisions on their own: a host of others must always be consulted, and a consensus

must be reached. So we hold endless meetings, everyone is consulted, we discuss everything, and eventually we

reach a consensus. Sometimes we even make a decision.

Then we go and have a good moan about it all.

The Mock-moaning Rule and the ‘Typical! ’ Rule

All this talk of moaning may be making the English sound rather sad and depressing, but that is not the case. The

curious thing about all of these moan sessions is that the tone is actually quite cheerful, good-natured, and,

above all, humorous. In fact, this is probably one of the most important ‘rules of moaning’: you must moan in a

relatively good-humoured, light-hearted manner. However genuinely grumpy you may be feeling, this must be

disguised as mock-grumpiness. The difference is subtle, and may not be immediately obvious to the naked ear of

an outsider, but the English all have a sixth sense for it, and can distinguish acceptable mock-moaning from real,

serious complaining at twenty paces.

Serious moaning may take place in other contexts, such as heart-to-heart conversations with one’s closest

friends, but it is regarded as unseemly and inappropriate in collective workplace moaning-rituals. Here, if you

become too obviously bitter or upset about your grievances, you will be labelled a ‘moaner’, and nobody likes a

‘moaner’ – ‘moaners’ have no place in ritual moaning sessions. Ritual moaning in the workplace is a form of social

bonding, an opportunity to establish and reinforce common values by sharing a few gripes and groans about

mutual annoyances and irritations. In all English moaning rituals, there is a tacit understanding that nothing can

or will be done about the problems we are moaning about. We complain to each other, rather than tackling the

real source of our discontent, and we neither expect nor want to find a solution to our problems – we just want

to enjoy moaning about them. Our ritual moaning is purely therapeutic, not strategic or purposeful: the moan is

an end in itself.

Genuine grievances may be raised in these sessions, about pay, working conditions, tyrannical bosses or other

problems, but even these moans must be delivered with humorous grimaces, shrugs, eye-rolling, mockexasperated

eyebrow-lifts and exaggerated stoical sighs – not with tear-filled eyes, trembling lips or serious

scowls. This is sociable light entertainment, not heavy kitchen-sink drama. The appropriate tone is encapsulated

in the English moan-ritual catchphrase ‘ Typical! ’ which you will hear many times a day, every day, in every

workplace in the country. ‘Typical! ’ is also used in moaning rituals in many other contexts, such as on delayed

trains or buses, in traffic jams, or indeed whenever anything goes wrong. Along with ‘nice’, ‘typical’ is one of the

most useful and versatile words in the English vocabulary – a generic, all-purpose term of disapproval, it can be

applied to any problem, annoyance, mishap or disaster, from the most insignificant irritation to adverse events of

national or even international importance. Eavesdropping in a pub during a turbulent political period in 2003, I

overheard the tail end of someone’s ritual moan: ‘ And now on top of it all there’s all these terrorist threats and

we’re going to be at war with Iraq. Typical! ’

There is something quintessentially English about ‘Typical! ’ It manages simultaneously to convey huffy

indignation and a sense of passive, resigned acceptance, an acknowledgement that things will invariably go

wrong, that life is full of little frustrations and difficulties (and wars and terrorists), and that one must simply put

up with it. In a way, ‘Typical! ’ is a manifestation of what used to be called the English ‘stiff upper lip’: it is a

complaint, but a complaint that also expresses a very English kind of grudging forbearance and restraint – a sort

of grumpy, cynical stoicism.