Actually, it’s a hideous sound. Predestined to trigger panic. Because when a wall bursts, that’s always an alarm signal, level red. A crack in the wall finally calls into question the stability of the entire structure. Save yourself who can!
The five characters that the five authors Annalisa Cantini, Alexandra Ava Koch, Anna Neata, Frieda Paris and Felicitas Prokopetz created for their radio play foot on sheet metal invented, but stoically accept the damage to the walls. Only the boss is prone to choleric outbursts, but you don’t need a crack in the wall for that. You don’t really need a reason for that. Perhaps that is also the reason why the four subordinates react so surprisingly calmly: What should throw you off the curve when hysteria is the prevailing mood?
The pandemic and the need to work from home are obviously too banal, too ordinary for the authors to play through the self-destruction of an open-plan office. They let it rip in the masonry, it can be that surreal. If everything is over the top in this story, then if you please, also its trigger.
Once again, the biggest idiot of all is the boss
But if you put all the exaggerations aside – and that’s all the easier the more absurd they are drawn – then the core is exactly this insight: There is no need for an external threat, be it the danger of collapsing or even just drifting apart in the home office to let an office community implode. People can only manage that through incompetence and rebelliousness, weakness in leadership and deadly obedience. And quite splendid.
The biggest idiot of all is, of course, the boss, a prime example of the validity of the Peter principle: according to this theory, people are promoted in business until they reach a position for which they are maximally incompetent. In the case of Mr Manzinger in foot on sheet metal only a few hierarchical levels were required before this state was reached.
Manzinger is never there when you need him. The employees then joke whether he fired himself or is serving time for tax evasion. They trust him to do both – and thus overestimate him. Basically, he is always only three steps away and therefore always there in time to make an inappropriate comment.
The man is disturbing. But what would the staff do if he were actually gone? The goal of their mockery would be gone, the structure of their dreary everyday office life, in short: their professional raison d’être. So: put your foot on the sheet metal, go full throttle – even if the whole office building collapses. Still better than stuffy normality.
foot on sheet metalDLF Kultur, February 27, 2022, 6:30 p.m.