The underground city of New Melbourne featured docks that always stunk of mudfish. Dirk hated the smell almost as much as he hated the taste of the hideous fish itself. Slimy and somehow coarse at the same time, as if you were eating the sand in the ocean itself. In the few instances he’d been forced to try it, Dirk had been reminded of that time his father took him cod fishing, back before the Collapse. Cod was unpleasant, but compared to mudfish, it seemed a nobleman’s finest delicacy. 

He wrinkled his nose as he continued along the docks, wishing this client had chosen a more… refined place to establish their business. But alas, here he was, almost feeling like he needed to vomit into the muddy, underground lake. At least it wouldn’t be any more disgusting if he did.

When he’d decided to start life anew in the underground, he’d expected to be working exclusively in the heart of New Melbourne. Unfortunately, many of his clients hailed from the outskirts of the city or even the uninspiringly named towns surrounding it.

Office design near Melbourne had been a lucrative business, or so he’d heard, in the old surface-dwelling days. Now, however, it barely gave people in the industry enough coin to get by. Still, the job had other perks, at least. Those certainly hadn’t existed pre-Collapse.

Although he was tempted to sigh as he spotted the stairs to his target, Dirk held back, knowing it would only lead to a stronger stench of mudfish in his nostrils. A pink neon sign out the front advertised the business: Fishmonger’s Accounts. A small business of accountants for the dockside workers, who currently needed some new ideas for office fitouts. Melbourne businesses were only as good as their offices, as Dirk had been told many times for some unknown reason, so it made sense that they needed a fresh coat of paint, so to speak.

Climbing the stairs, Dirk cracked his knuckles, ready for whatever abomination awaited him inside. 

When you could move and transform objects with your magical mind powers, doing everyday jobs was easy work. Of course, it hadn’t always been this way. Dirk had spent countless hours manually doing this sort of work before his powers had developed – as was the case for almost all those who had Ascended in their jobs. Most people didn’t have the patience to stick with a job long enough to Ascend at all.

The Collapse had been ten years ago now, and it had taken eight years for Dirk to reach this point in his career. Really, he was still a fledgeling when it came to magic.

Given that Ascending was fairly rare, the services of the Ascended were… expensive. Not in coin, of course. No, they traded in something much more valuable than that. Something not everybody had access to.

Setting his mind on the job at hand, Dirk considered the Melbourne office design that he was standing in. He was impressed with how well the designer had matched the office to the dockside vibe of this business. Dirk could tell that the designer had considered the employees of the business and their own clients as well. 

He decided it would have also looked if the designer had given it a peaceful, old ocean vibe. Not the brown and grey water of New Melbourne’s docks, but the calming blue of the old water, back on the surface. As he began to psychically arrange the furniture, transmuting some of the old chairs into fancy new ones in his mind, Dirk could see it coming together. Yes, if the designer had gone with Dirk’s vision, they would have been considered the best business for Melbourne office fitouts ever.

Once, he’d been naive enough to believe that simply possessing the magic he had was enough to get people lining up outside his own office, but that was far from the case. He had rivals now, going for the same select few jobs – rivals with far more experience and more networking connections.

Maybe I watched one too many TV dramas set in the mid-twentieth century while I was at uni, but I always imagined that paid work would take place in an inner-city office filled with filing cabinets, teetering stacks of paper in overflowing in-trays, and minibars on little trolleys. Despite the fact that the characters in these shows never seem to be having the greatest of times, I can’t help but long to participate in their particular brand of mundane glamour.

I should have known that actual workplaces, here in the contemporary (and non-fictional) world would be completely different. To the credit of real-life offices, things are considerably more efficiently organised than they were in my imagination. Paperwork is not really a thing in this day and age, so hard-copy files and physical in-trays are virtually non-existent in most workplaces. Minibar situations, too, appear to out as far as Melbourne office fitout trends go.

I just think that a tiny injection of that old-school vibe could go a long way in terms of making some of these places more fun to work in. Now, I get that work isn’t necessarily supposed to be fun, but is there any reason why it shouldn’t be? As far as I can tell, when it comes to recruiting office designers, Melbourne businesses tend to opt for companies that can reflect their unique brand. As it happens, ‘fun’ is not typically part of that.

From what I understand, there are many companies around now that do see themselves as ‘fun’, and their offices as thrilling environments to work in. Call me old-fashioned (please, do it), but my idea of fun is not lime green sculptural seating and on-tap vitamin water. My idea of fun is role playing a character from a glamorous age gone by. Sure, this might not be about to happen for me any time soon, or even halfway appropriate given that I work for a robotics company.

Perhaps I need to shift my mindset to one of being a character in a fictional future.