The office was in a building that
You wouldn’t have looked at twice,
In truth, it stood in a part of town
That wasn’t very nice,
The blinds forever were drawn down tight
And were thick with stains and dust,
I wouldn’t have sought a job in there
But I felt that I really must.

I was over a year on welfare, and
I knew that it had to end,
I’d lost all my self-respect, my car,
And I hadn’t a single friend,
When this came up in a tiny ad
On the supermarket board:
‘Be one of the Movers and Shakers,
Then put the Takers to the sword.’

My curiosity peaked, and I
Marched into the office grim,
An insipid girl was behind the desk,
‘You’ll have to talk to him!’
A man in an inner office sat
In a cloak and black cravat,
‘We’re needing another numbers man,
Do you think you’re up to that?’

I said I was up to anything
For I didn’t really see,
That there would be ramifications
And they would apply to me,
He showed me into an office with
A desk and a swivel chair,
Then pulling a ledger off the shelf
He set it before me, there.

‘Your job is to add up the columns
Putting a total to each name,
Remember, you’re only the numbers man
So you’re really not to blame.
Then when you get to five hundred, tear
The page from out of the book,
A man will be round to collect it,
Let’s just say, he’s Dr. Hook.’

I didn’t meet this mysterious man
‘Til I tallied up more than three,
A Johnson, Sands, and an Adamson,
And a man called Jacoby,
They’d totalled just five hundred each
When I tore their pages out,
And Dr. Hook slid them into a book,
I said, ‘What’s it all about?’

‘Never you mind, my lad,’ he said,
‘It’s better you didn’t know,
There are things that shouldn’t bother your head
Until it’s your time to go.’
But those names remained in my mind until
On watching the nightly news,
An Adamson died in a mighty wreck
And a Sands, from a faulty fuse.

I thought it might be a coincidence
And I put my mind at rest,
When the girl from work came visiting,
And she seemed to be distressed,
I’d thought that she was insipid, but
There was fire in her belly too,
‘You know that the guy whose place you took
Is dead…  So I’m warning you!’

She said that I had a page as well
In a book, kept under her desk,
‘If you saw your column, adding up,
I think you’d get little rest.
For every page you give Dr. Hook
I add ten each to your name,
With that score of ten, you’ll be just like Ben,
He lasted a year in the game!’

‘He’d started fudging the figures when
His number was creeping up,
I’d warned him, like I am warning you,
But it wasn’t ever enough,
An audit pushed him over the top
By adding a hundred points,
And the ten he’d skimmed then died with him
In that fire at the Pizza joint.’

My column is stuck, four-eighty-nine
At this moment, as I write,
I still believe I can fend it off
If I’m careful, keep it tight,
I sweat, while adding the figures up
Of a certain Dr. Hook,
His column tops five hundred and one
As I tear his page from the book.

David Lewis Paget