The Photocopier Lease That Renewed Itself While I Was Away Burying My Mother

The cabinet in the corner

I started at the firm in the middle of a winter, when the light in that office went orange at about four in the afternoon and everyone put on a jersey without saying anything about it. It was a small engineering outfit in Pietermaritzburg, eleven people, run by two brothers who had inherited it from their father and who still called the workshop "the back" as though it were a room in a house. I was hired as the office manager, which in a company that size means you are the office, the manager, the tea, the switchboard and the person who knows where the spare keys live.

On my second day, one of the brothers showed me a grey four drawer filing cabinet in the corner of the passage. He put his hand flat on top of it, the way men pat the roof of a car they are selling.

"That's the contracts," he said. "Everything's in there."

I asked him if there was a list.

He thought about it for a while, honestly, as if he wanted to give me a good answer, and then he said, "There's a list in my head."

I laughed. He laughed. That was the whole handover.

What was actually in the drawers

It took me three afternoons to go through it properly, and I only did it because I am the sort of person who cannot relax in a room where something is unfinished. What I found was not chaos exactly. It was worse than chaos. It was a very sincere attempt at order made by four different people over about eighteen years, none of whom had agreed on what order meant.

There was a supplier agreement from 2009 folded in half inside an envelope with a birthday card. There were two copies of the same maintenance contract, one signed and one not, and no way to tell which had been sent. There was a lease for a generator that we did not own anymore. There was a page that said "IMPORTANT" in red koki on a sticky note, stuck to a document that was, as far as I could tell, an invoice for sandwiches.

And there was a photocopier lease.

I remember reading it on the floor with my back against the wall because my legs had gone dead from squatting. Five years. Automatic renewal unless cancelled in writing not less than ninety days before the end of the initial term. Escalation clause. A clause about consumables that I read four times and still did not fully understand. It had been signed by a man who had left the company in 2019 and now, I believe, farms macadamias.

I made a note. I put the note on my desk. I was going to deal with it.

March

My mother got sick in the February and died in the March, and everything I had been going to deal with stayed exactly where it was, on my desk, under a layer of the kind of dust that only settles when nobody is sitting in a chair.

I was gone for six weeks. Compassionate leave, and then leave I had saved up, and then some days that I think one of the brothers simply did not record anywhere, which was a kindness I have never mentioned to him because I do not know how to without embarrassing us both.

When I came back, the photocopier lease had renewed. The ninety day window had opened and closed while I was sitting in my mother's kitchen in Howick going through her cutlery drawer with my sister and arguing about who got the wooden spoon with the burnt handle. Another five years, at a monthly rate that had escalated, on a machine that jammed if you gave it anything heavier than eighty gram paper.

Nobody blamed me. That was almost the hardest part. One of the brothers said, "Ag, it's just a copier," and went to the back, and I sat at my desk and cried about a photocopier for a solid ten minutes, which as everybody knows was not about the photocopier at all.

The spreadsheet, and why it did not save me

My first fix was a spreadsheet, because a spreadsheet is what people like me reach for the way other people reach for a cigarette. Columns for counterparty, start date, end date, notice period, value, owner. I coloured the cells. I set myself Outlook reminders. I was very pleased with it for about four months.

Then the reminders started going off while I was on a call, and I would swipe them away and mean to come back. Then a supplier changed their terms and I updated the wrong row. Then one of the brothers signed something at a site visit and told me about it eleven days later in the parking lot, and I typed it in from memory, and I got the date wrong by a month.

The spreadsheet did not fail because spreadsheets are bad. It failed because it only knew what I told it, and I was one tired woman with a switchboard and a kettle and a mother I was still grieving. A spreadsheet has no opinion about whether you have forgotten something. It sits there being neat while the thing you forgot walks quietly out the back door.

The word I had been avoiding

I want to be careful here, because I am suspicious of the moment in any story where the person discovers a product and the clouds part. That is not what happened.

What happened is that I complained about all of this to my cousin at a braai in November. She does something with procurement at a bigger company in Durban, and she listened to me the way you listen to someone who is enjoying their own misery a little bit, and then she said the thing that irritated me at the time and turned out to be right.

She said, "You know this is a solved problem, hey. You are hand knitting something that other people just buy."

I said something rude. She sent me a link the next day anyway, and over that December, in that dead week when the office is empty and the aircon is off and you can hear the traffic on the other side of town, I sat and actually read about how contract management software works, mostly out of spite, expecting to be able to tell her it was overkill for eleven people and a filing cabinet.

I could not tell her that. What I found instead was that most of what I was doing badly with colour coded cells was the ordinary boring middle of what these systems do: they hold the document, they know the dates, they nag someone specific rather than nagging the room in general. The bit that got me was the notice period logic. My spreadsheet knew when a contract ended. It did not know that the decision had to be made ninety days before that, and that ninety days before that I would be somewhere else, being a daughter instead of an office manager.

What I actually asked for

I did not walk in and demand a system. I am not that person, and the brothers are not those brothers.

What I did was put a single page in front of them in the January. On it I wrote the photocopier number, the escalation, the four years and two months still to run, and then I wrote what it would cost to have something that watched the dates for us. I did not use the word "solution" because I knew one of them would make a face.

He made a face anyway. Then he asked the only question that mattered, which was, "If you get hit by a bus, does the next person know what we've signed?"

And I said no. And that was the end of the argument.

It took us most of a year to get everything in. I scanned documents until my wrist ached. I chased two suppliers for copies of agreements that neither of us could find, which was humbling for everybody. Somewhere in the middle of it I stopped thinking of the whole business as filing and started thinking of it as a life cycle, because that is genuinely how it behaves: a thing gets drafted, it gets argued about, it gets signed, it lives for years quietly costing money, and then it either ends properly or it renews itself in the dark while you are away. Reading about how the contract management lifecycle software approach frames those stages was the first time anyone had drawn me a picture of the thing I had been fumbling at with my hands.

The part I did not expect

The change I felt was not efficiency. I want to be honest about that, because I think people oversell efficiency.

The change was that I stopped carrying it.

There is a particular tiredness that comes from being the only person who knows something. You feel it at eleven at night when you are lying in bed and you suddenly think, the insurance renewal. You feel it on holiday. You feel it when you are standing in your dead mother's kitchen holding a wooden spoon and some part of your brain is quietly saying, the copier, the copier.

Once the dates lived somewhere other than my head, I slept. That is the whole benefit, as far as I am concerned. It is not a very exciting sentence to put on a poster.

I have since been asked twice by friends in small businesses what we use, and I always give the same unhelpful answer, which is that it matters much less which one you pick than that you pick one and then actually put the old paper into it. The looking around part is not hard. There is more choice in contract management software in South Africa than there was when those brothers' father was running the place with a cabinet and a good memory. The hard part is the afternoon you spend on the floor with a scanner and a cup of tea going cold next to you, admitting how much you did not know about your own company.

The cabinet is still there

We kept it. One of the brothers refuses to let it go, and I have stopped fighting him about it, partly because I have developed an affection for the thing.

It holds stationery now. Envelopes, a stapler that jams, three staplers that work, a roll of Sellotape, some Christmas decorations from a year nobody can identify.

Sometimes, when a new person starts, he still walks them past it, and I see him put his hand flat on top of it out of pure habit, and then remember, and take his hand off.

The photocopier is still with us too. It has one year and four months to run. I have known that date the way you know your own ID number for a while now, and this time, when the window opens, I will not be the only one who knows. That is really all I wanted.