Probably one of the best jobs I ever had.  The girls there were absolutely wonderful, helpful, friendly, really easy to get on with.  I started as a temp but, when the secretary I was covering for decided not to come back after her maternity leave, my boss eventually got round to asking me to stay.  I snatched it up.  The only problem with this job was there wasn’t enough work for me to do, so I used to help out the other secretaries in other departments, which I enjoyed.  Everybody helped each other out, it was a real team effort.

I had some fun times during my two years there.  One time, the computer system kept crashing and freezing everything on screen – usually at the worst possible moment, and usually when you’d forgotten to ‘save’.  One of the bosses, who used to do a lot of his own typing, had spent almost an hour composing a long letter – then the system froze.  Frantic, he grabbed one of the digital cameras and took a photo of it on screen before the system went down completely (ingenious!).  

Another time, one of the graduates was given the title of Superuser for a new piece of software.  I arranged a  whip-round and we ordered a Superman costume off the internet.  It was then formally presented to him and he, game that he was, put the suit on and wore it for the rest of the day.  It was in big demand for fancy dress parties, and became known as the Office Outfit (later changed to The Smelly Revolting Tattered Office Outfit).

My boss had an accident which dislocated his arm (he fell down a flight of stairs after an office 'do', but he wasn't drunk, oh no, he absolutely wasn't drunk).  He had physiotherapy to aid recovery.  He used to do his exercises in the office without warning, so one minute he’d be sitting there normally, the next minute he’d thrust his arm out to his side and raise it several times.  Most alarming.  Especially if you happened to be walking past when the arm was thrust out.  After a while he stopped doing this, and started doing one arm press ups against walls, any wall - you’d turn a corner and there he’d be, pressing against a wall.

The receptionist we had there was nice, but a bit batty.  She used to wear headphones, sometimes forgetting they were there and going home with them still on her head.  We’d walk into reception and she’d be sitting there, apparently talking to herself (the microphone was small).  She also had a bit of a 'power' thing going on and was terribly mean with the stationery she kept in a locked cupboard behind her.  Some secretaries actually bought their own stationery rather than ask her for it.  If you went out and asked for, say, a pen, she’d give you the one she was using and say, “There, that still has some ink left in it?”  Staples were handed out by the strip, and there’d be a serious interrogation if you asked for anything ‘big’, like a ruler (“What happened to the last one I gave you?” "It broke."). 

Once, a group of us went out after work, but one of the secretaries discovered she’d left her mobile phone in the office.  A surveyor took us back and let us into the locked and dark building.  We were somewhat intoxicated, and hit upon a cunning plan. We knew where the receptionist kept the key to the stationery cupboard, and we opened it up.  It was like Aladdin’s cave.  “Let’s take everything out and scatter it all over her reception desk,” I yelled, drunkenly.  We didn’t.  Instead, we took at least three months supply of pens, post it notes and staples, and hoarded them in our desks.  We also took several highlighter pens, which were almost sacred, and the next day we all received an email reading, “Could whoever took the highlighter pens from my stationery cupboard, please return them immediately.”  We didn’t.  It became known as the Midnight Raid.

Then one of my sons progressed to university, and I needed a slightly bigger salary.  I asked for an pay rise (a reasonable amount) and waited.  Two months later when the pay rises were announced, I discovered I didn't get the raise I'd asked for.  I was very disappointed (in fact, I cried my eyes out).  Panic stricken about finances, I found another job offering a much bigger salary, accepted it, and handed in my notice.  It was one of the worst decisions I’d ever made.

I don’t recommend working notices if you can possibly help it – plead insanity or even fake your own death if you have to.  I found it incredibly stressful.  My boss interviewed potential replacements for me in the ‘glass office’ right in front of my desk, and then rang the agencies from his phone, inches from me, to tell them how wonderful the applicant was (all of them!).  I felt it was incredibly insensitive of him.  To add insult to injury, he then asked me to train up the new secretary.  I initially said no because I hadn't been trained up when I started and the job was straightforward enough, but he kept asking and eventually, wimp that I am, I relented. 

The new secretary was lovely, I only had to tell her how to do something once and she caught on fast.  After a couple of hours on her first day, I told her I was just nipping to the basement for a cigarette, and she said, “Oh, can I come?”  She was a smoker too, which annoyed my boss no end as he was fervently anti-smoking.  The look of astonishment on his face as we both trooped off to ‘indulge’ is something that will happily stay with me until the end of time. 

I had two leaving do's to accommodate the people who couldn't attend the first one (sly, eh?).  On my last day, I was presented with the most amazing gifts, including a huge bouquet of flowers and a hug from my boss, and I cried almost continuously.

I forever regretted leaving that job, I missed the other girls and all the people there so much (not realising, at the time, how unique it was for them all to get on so well).  I still regularly see them for lunch.

Incidentally, the company actually paid more to the agency for supplying the new secretary than it would have cost to give me my pay rise.

 

Commercial Property Company No.2 Oh, the trepidation of the first day.  Nervous enough in normal conditions, but the other secretary in the department was on holiday for two weeks so I was left entirely alone.  The first week was okay – they had something called ‘remote typing’ where they could send audio tapes down a telephone line to be typed up by ex-secretaries who were now at home raising families, and emailed back.  They didn’t use this facility during my first week because I was just so keen!  The second week, all of the department except one went on holiday, so there was Absolutely Nothing to do.  I was bored out of my brain, and wondered if I’d made the right decision in accepting this job – they’d promised me it was busy (oh, if only I’d known!).  Then they all came back off holiday and the work began in earnest.  The first three months were fine, I made friends, I learned the job, and it was comfortably busy – I really enjoyed it.  When my probation period was up, I waited an anxious few days to see if they wanted to keep me on or not.  Eventually, when no ‘formal acceptance meeting’ was forthcoming, I said to my boss, “About this probation period … ?”  “Ah yes,” he said, “I meant to speak to you about that.”  He grinned and leaned back earnestly in his chair.  “So, do you want the job?”  I gave it serious consideration for a good 10 seconds, then said, “Yeah, go on then.”  “Good,” he said, and we both went back to work. Just afterwards, a new boss joined the department.  I liked her immediately, but she was totally disorganised and a complete nightmare to work for.  The workload increased tenfold, and deadlines for reports became ridiculous – sometimes I’d have three big reports to get out in one day, and there was no support from other secretaries (it wasn’t encouraged at this company).  Because I’m (naively) conscientious, I came in early, I worked through lunch and, although I didn’t like it, I occasionally worked late to get the work done.  The pressure became unbearable.  Sometimes, I would cry in the toilets, knowing a deadline for a report wasn’t going to be reached, and I’d often get home too tired to even eat. Then, after 17 months of waiting [see Divorce Fiasco for the full story], my divorce finally came through, but my solicitors (who were totally useless throughout the entire episode) had lost the Decree Absolute.  I told my Associate I was taking half an hour off during the morning to go to the law courts myself and get a copy – it was important to me.  She said, “Make up the time during your lunch hour.”  When I pointed out all the extra hours I’d done, she said it was a long time ago (it wasn’t) and that I had to be ‘monitored’ to make sure I made up the time because I left at 5.25pm each day in order to catch the 5.30 bus.  Five minutes!  And this when the other secretary was arriving 10-15 minutes late for work on a daily basis!  I stopped going in early after that, and told my surveyors I would no longer be working through lunch.  I continued to be deluged with work with unrealistic deadlines.  One Friday, the stress of rushing to finish a report in time had me leaving at the end of the day in floods of tears.  I’d had enough.  The following Monday I spoke to my boss and told him of my concerns.  He said all the right things, but didn’t actually do anything.  The workload increased, and the pressure I was under was enough to turn coal into diamonds!  I couldn't take it any more.  Despite having no other job lined up, I handed in my notice.  All the surveyors were disappointed, but the two bosses said absolutely nothing.  At the end of the day I said to my female boss, “I can’t believe I’ve handed in my notice and you’ve not said anything,” to which she replied, “We’ve been busy.”  “That just about says it all,” I said, and walked off.  The other boss barely spoke to me for the entire month of my notice period – it was a very difficult time.  He felt I’d let him down when, in fact, he had let me down by allowing me to become so overwhelmed with work.  The female boss wanted to go out for a coffee with me “to pick my brains” so that things could be improved for the next secretary, which I found incredibly insulting.  I couldn’t wait to leave. On my last week, the other department secretary was on holiday.  They didn’t normally bring in ‘temps’ unless I was on holiday (which says a lot about who did the most work), but because they knew I was on a ‘go slow’ (as in, don’t pressure me with work any more or I might crack), they brought in a temp - Angela.  She was a sassy little thing who, at the end of the second day, said to me, “I’m replacing you until the new secretary starts.”  I thought, you can try!  On my last day, I was still trying to clear my desk when a report that needed finishing appeared – I didn’t have time to do it and asked Angela if she could.  The other boss immediately stepped in and said she couldn’t because she was busy doing his work (Angela later told me that she’d been bored with nothing to do all day).  I didn’t do the report so Angela did it in the end anyway.  It was just another of those ‘petty things’ that I couldn’t be bothered to get involved in. At 12.30, I rounded everyone up (except, of course, the one boss who was coming later, and the female, who was too busy to attend), to celebrate my freedom in a nearby bar.  The other boss later showed his face, nervously bought me a drink to add to the line of farewell drinks on the bar counter, and promptly left – no doubt relieved that, in my intoxicated state, I didn’t regale him with some of my thoughts.  One of the surveyors later had a call from the Partner, telling him to send Angela back – she’d been there with the rest of us for three hours!  I eventually sauntered back with my inebriated colleagues about 4 o’clock, to be met by my ‘presentation’ – the whole office gathered around my desk and gave me my leaving card and gifts.  They lingered, expecting a ‘speech’ (I didn’t trust myself!) and I waved them all away, drunkenly saying, “Okay, you can go now, I’m embarrassed.”  I left immediate afterwards – 4.45pm.  The female boss actually glanced at her watch (hey, its my last day, what can you do, sack me?).  I felt the relief flood through me the minute I left the building.  It took 2-3 weeks to fully recover and realise exactly how much stress I’d been under. I expected a ‘leaving interview’ where I could eventually have my say about what had gone wrong and why I was leaving, but didn’t get one.  So I sent the Company Partner a letter outlining my 'grievances'.  I later received a surprisingly nice letter of apology.