She swept into reception and swept again into the main office for her meeting with Ms Cod the managing partner. What she saw filled her with despair. Before her eyes were quiet corridors, closed doors, an eeriness amounting almost to silence. Yes, if she listened she could hear a very faint clicking as though someone were typing a mile away inside a room whose walls were padded with cushions. And was that a telephone, or just the friendly chirp of a bird waiting in the garden to be fed a worm in the garden by Hake the retainer?
The fat lady told the managing partner to be seated.
"Now," she said, "you have run out of space and you want to house another 25 paralegals without moving offices. Yes?"
Ms Cod, who had been used to a regime where no one spoke before she did, nodded mutely.
"Well what are we waiting for? Let's have a look around," exclaimed the fat lady as she swept out of Ms Cod's office into the cool calm corridors of MH&P’s Georgian building – an edifice first occupied more than 100 years ago by the firm's founder, Peregrine Mullet, and which had little changed in a century.
A turbulent partners' meeting a few weeks earlier had resulted in the passing of a resolution that the firm must change with the times and go open plan. A junior partner by the name of Ernest Minnow had spearheaded the move, and had somehow persuaded the older partners (or at least those who were still awake and compos mentis) that they had to move with the times and that if the firm did not pack employees into the building as tightly as sardines, they would simply succumb to the larger sharks in the sea and be swallowed up.
The fat lady was the aunt of a distant cousin of the junior receptionist, and was widely acknowledged to be one of Wigan's leading experts in office planning. She had, when approached, agreed with terrifying enthusiasm to supervise the redesign of the interior layout.
And now, clipboard in hand, she was hurling comments over her shoulder to the trotting figure of Ms Cod who was fearful that at any moment the fat lady was going to start personally knocking down walls and pulling up floorboards.
"Doors," said the fat lady "Doors. The bane of my life. I have never seen so many of them. You mean that everyone has their own office? How outrageous is that?"
She explained that her ideal was to banish every door in the building. What was needed here was to clear the decks and create a fully useable open space. The office was roughly rectangular, the shape of the page on her clipboard.
The fat lady began to sketch, and as she sketched she explained to the bemused Ms Cod (whose mouth at that moment was rythmically opening and closing)
"Here is the central circulation route. The carpet will look like yellow bricks. It will give those who use it the sense of adventure that they are about to go somewhere special. We will use quite a lot of colour coding. Only partners will be allowed to walk on blue carpet without special permission. These grey areas will be where most of your workers will be housed. They will not need natural light, but we will be able to install special mood lighting. In the dark winter months the lights will be very bright. That will help to cheer them up. "We will need to talk about noise. Here is a brochure about our special white noise generator. You can have several different types. My preference is the sound of waves breaking, but you can if you want choose our startler sound track. It is the noise of traffic but every now and then there is a loud crash. It keeps them awake.
"And then you will need to locate the work stations. We have designed these pods. See the picture here. They are very compact. They are designed on the same principle as the seats on charter airliners. We give 7 inch leg room for each operative. They also have a little tray which folds down in the seat in front. This gives them a 0.3 square metre work area. We used to call them work stations, but that gave too much of an idea of size. Now we call them work shelves.
"I realise that not all of you will want to work in these pods. There are pods and pods. There are pods for peas and there are pods for beans. Big beans want big pods. So the partners will have elevated work stations. We call it the wedding cake design. The senior partner will sit at the highest level, and look down on those who occupy the inferior layers. From there the managers can watch every one. We have this little device which comes free with every pod package you buy from us. Farmers use something similar (or they did before the Ministry of Agriculture killed off their livestock). It is a little stick and it delivers a sharp electric shock to anyone it touches. If you find that someone is not working hard enough, all you need to do is prod them, and that guarantees they will keep working all day.
"So when would you like us to begin. I can have workmen arrive next Monday morning to start to remove the doors. We can have it all cleared out in a week and the pods can be in place in a fortnight. Yes?"
Ms Cod had little imagination, but in her mind’s eye she could see the senior partner locked in a life and death struggle with a muscular man who was removing his door. She saw huddled displaced persons sitting outside their former offices with black dustbin bags containing their worldly possessions. She saw rebellion. She also saw her door being removed, along with her ability to have animated conversations in private with her new lover Freddie Flounder.
"Just tell me," she said to the fat lady "could we buy the electronic prodder without the pods?"

This article first appeared in Solicitors Journal on 25 May 2001