I have been in the office every working day since the mandate was announced. That is five days a week, with one exception in March, when I was sick in the finance corridor and sent home early in the back of an estate car. I have since been told that this does not count against me. It is the only feedback of any kind I have received.

I mention it because last Thursday I was lying under the radiator on the second floor, as I do, when a member of the marketing team told a colleague on a video call that she was “fully committed to the hybrid model”. She was at home. I could hear her through the laptop of a man who had come in specially to take the call from a meeting room. I do not understand any of it. I have never once been committed to a model. I have simply turned up.

The Radiator

My duties are not formally defined, which I have come to accept. I arrive at 8.40 with the man from procurement who owns me, take up a position beneath the radiator beside the printer that jams, and remain there until 5.30, with a break at one o’clock to be walked around the car park. In nine months I have not worked from the sofa, nor suggested that my productivity is better in the garden, although it would be.

I am praised constantly. People tell me I am “such a good boy” and “no trouble at all”, which I understand to be a performance review, and one that has not changed since I started. The humans, meanwhile, are praised for “flexibility”, a word that appears to mean being somewhere else with the approval of management. I am praised for lying still beside a source of heat. I do not wish to overstate this, but the two of us are not being measured on the same scale.

“Barney is a genuine asset to staff wellbeing and we value him enormously. Whether he is a member of staff is a legal question we have decided not to explore.” Gareth Pemberton, Director of People Experience

Pawternity

The company has introduced something called pawternity leave, which gives five days off to any employee who acquires a dog. I was acquired four years ago. The man who owns me collected me on a Saturday and was back at his desk on the Monday, and I have thought about this at some length under the radiator.

I have no desk. I have no lanyard, which means I am let through the barriers by whichever human happens to be nearest, and on two occasions I have been signed in at reception as “Guest (canine)”. I have no email address, although I receive a good deal of correspondence at floor level, mostly crumbs. I have not been considered for promotion, and I understand there is no process by which I could be. The most senior thing anyone has ever called me is “the office dog”, which is a title, though not one with anything attached to it.

Coffee Badging

I should be fair about Priya. Priya Nair is a senior account manager who arrives at ten, taps her pass on the reader, and comes directly to me. She strokes me for twenty minutes, announces that she has a hard stop, and leaves. I am told this is called coffee badging. She does not, as far as I have ever seen, have a coffee.

“I come in, I see Barney, I’m visible, and by half ten I’m on the train home. I’d say I’m present in every way that matters.” Priya Nair, Senior Account Manager

I will concede that those twenty minutes are the best of my day, and that she has a very sound technique behind the left ear. I recognise this as a conflict of interest. I have decided to declare it and carry on.

But the point stands. Attendance is, as I understand it, the entire purpose of the policy, and on that measure I am the strongest performer in the building. Last week Helen Okafor, the facilities manager, told me while she topped up my water bowl that she wished everyone was “as reliable as you”. I looked at her for some time. She has no idea. Then I put my head back down on my paws, because it was a quarter past two and there was nowhere else to be.