I have been asked to keep this short, which is reasonable, as I am a Labrador and the deadline falls close to lunch. But I have attended this office five days a week since March 2018, without a sick day or a late start, and I feel that entitles me to an opinion on the current conversation about attendance.

For those who have not been following it, coffee badging is the practice of arriving at the office, being seen by the correct people, drinking a coffee at a pace that suggests no great enthusiasm, and then going home. I have observed it at close range from beneath the desk of Sandra in Accounts Payable. It takes about forty minutes. Sandra calls it ‘making an appearance’. I call it a walk, but sad.

‘I always say hello to Murray, he’s lovely. Then I’ve got a thing at half ten.’

Sandra Whitlock, Accounts Payable

The Matter of Remuneration

I am paid in biscuits. They are good biscuits, and I do not wish to appear ungrateful, but they are delivered at the discretion of whoever happens to be eating a sandwich nearby, and there is no formal schedule. I have no pension. There was a Christmas bonus in 2021, which was a chew shaped like a bone, and I understand it was also given to every other dog on the floor, which is one dog.

Management is of the view that I am the reason people come in. There is a laminated sign by the lifts that says ‘We are a proudly dog-friendly workplace’, accompanied by a photograph of me taken in 2019, when I had a better coat. At a recent all-hands meeting, Gareth Pemberton, Director of People and Workplace Experience, told the room that I was ‘at the heart of our culture’, and that ‘when colleagues see Murray, they remember why they come in’. I was asleep at the time, beside a radiator, which I accept is a fair summary of the culture.

I would point out, with respect, that nobody has ever come in for me. They come in because a calendar invitation told them to, and then they say hello, and then they leave. I am not the reason. I am the thing they pat on the way to the exit, like a handrail.

On Flexibility

I have never been offered a hybrid arrangement. In 2022 I raised the matter by lying across the doorway of Meeting Room 3 for most of a Wednesday, and was told this was a fire safety issue. I have since learned that I appear on the desk booking system as a recurring reservation for 14B, under the name ‘Guest (Dog)’, and that the occupancy report lists me as a ghost booking, on the grounds that I have never once swiped in. I do not have a badge. I have a tag with a telephone number on it, which has been scanned by more people than the turnstile.

Hamza Rahman, Facilities Coordinator, confirmed this. ‘Murray is our most reliable attendee,’ he said. ‘The system just can’t see him. I’ve raised it with IT. They said they’d need a ticket, and then they asked if he could raise it himself.’

I mention all this not out of bitterness but out of a long familiarity with the building. I know which floor tile creaks outside the finance director’s office. I know that the third-floor printer is always about to jam and always does. I know that the good coffee machine was removed in 2023 and replaced with one that produces something the colour of a pond, and that colleagues who attend for forty minutes are, in effect, being asked to drink it as a gesture.

I will be here tomorrow, and on Friday, which I gather is the day the policy is most keenly contested. If anyone does turn up for the full day, I will be by the radiator. I shall not judge them for the forty minutes. I only ask that, if they are leaving anyway, they take the long way round past my desk, and that they check their pockets first.