24 January

Thirty-eight years since I diffidently reported for service at 2-12 Gresham Street EC2 on the first of 10'652 days on the payroll of the Post Office, BT and a number of its subsidiaries and joint ventures. For my first two years, Master of Arts, University of St Andrews and altogether, I fiddled around with office layouts, trying to persuade the trade unions to allow us to cram yet another desk into this office or that.

It seems extraordinary in these post-Thatcher days that we allowed trade unions to hold the organisation is such thrall. But then, as a boss of mine was known to remark from time to time, the 'Business' existed primarily for the benefit of the people that worked in it. We still used the civil service grading structure, and each grade had its 'space standard' for office planning - as if Clerical Officers (55 sq ft) required only half as much air to breathe as Higher Executive Officers (100 sq ft). Division heads were entitled to a positive sanatorium of 200 sq ft - and they came in a heap of different hierarchical titles: Telephone Manager (Class 1), Assistant Secretary, Staff Engineer, Principal Executive Officer and so on. The fact that Typists qualified only for 40 sq ft no doubt accounts for the extinction of the species.

And the old firm had a language all of its own: trade unions were known - bafflingly to the newcomer - as the 'staff side'. A memo that the boss wanted to discuss with you would arrive in the in-tray bearing the terse endorsement 'Mr Smith. Pse spk. WFJ'. And then there was the imperative-infinitive. 'To see.' 'To note.' 'To file.' Economical, I suppose, but plug-ugly use of language. If the 'staff side' did not agree with a management (sorry: 'official side') proposal, the next step was a 'full and frank' chaired by the boss's boss's boss, followed by 'registered disagreement' and, as like as not 'executive action' (unilateral action by management despite union disagreement).

I won't go on to the TLAs (three-letter abbreviations), but one sentence in three uttered in discussion between staff would be so heavily populated with TLAs as to make it utterly impenetrable to the outsider.

In those first two years, I was paid rather less in total than a month's pension in 2010, though one promotion and the inflation of the Wilson years soon saw my annual salary make it into five figures. But there was no doubting how skint I was in the early years: there was an age scale of pay below the main scale, and I never hit the max of a salary scale. By the time I'd been promoted to the level of my incompetence, pay was entirely grace and favour, with some pretence of negotiation.

Good times, bad times: certainly among the worst years were 1987 to 1989, when I madly agreed to peddle the Total Quality Management message. As with so many good ideas, it had been transmogrified into a monster by consultants (name on application) and invested with cult status and yet another new language, as impenetrable as it was superfluous. Still, by exposing me to some of the higher echelons, that job opened the door to some interesting times abroad. Best, I think were the two years I spent in Switzerland, working on the setting up of a new telephone company. Exhausting, often frustrating and sometimes desperately lonely, it was a job I can look back on with satisfaction. When BT sold its share in the joint venture, it did so at a vast profit.

Well, looking down from the vantage point of Day 3'220 of retirement, I still look back on BT and its predecessors like a loving grandparent, with a kind of benign puzzlement. The paralysing inefficiency of the early days, the obsessive cost cutting of the Thatcher years and beyond, the almost suicidal bandwidth auction and the insane addiction to regular and pendulum-fashion re(dis)organisations were far more trademarks of the firm than any reputation for good service. My recent experience of BT, to whom we have given our telephony and internet business, has been very mixed. My next little test will be in securing my pensioner discount on the broadband subscription - that may be fun.

Here and now, there is birdsong, there are glimpses of the sun, and there are signs of plant life in the garden. Sedums are showing some good shoots, and I have hacked back the penstemons, hoping that this will encourage them to excel yet again this summer and autumn. A few intrepid pansies and polyanthus are showing colour, and the daffodils and crocuses are through the soil, if not yet showing colour. The magnolia, climbing hydrangea and judas tree appear to be budding up nicely. There have been no new goldfish corpses since the last great freeze. So maybe, amid this inchoate euphoria, I need to remind myself that it is still January, and that the worst of the winter could be yet to come.