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If I
look back at my last post I see that it’s dated March 2014. March bloody 2014.
Where has the time gone? To explain, I decided to take a break from humour
blogging because quite frankly, I just wasn’t feeling funny anymore. No
surprise, but academia will do that to you. It’s a laughter-thief of note. However,
as I’m feeling heartened by the fact that I’m officially on the academic
homestretch, I’ve resurfaced from my blogging sabbatical and will attempt to
relocate my funny.
I
thought a good way to kick off would be to do a series of short posts that I
will be calling “The Embarrassing Moment Series”. I figure it will make readers
laugh as it is the literary equivalent of watching YouTube fail videos. So
without delay, I’ll begin.
After
leaving school I was unsure of “What-I-Wanted-To-Be”, so, I opted to study
something “useful” that would be sure to land me a job and see me on my way to
financial independence. I went to secretarial college. Here, as I tried to
squeeze myself into a pencil skirt (because, as you know, pencil skirts are the
most comfortable things on earth) I got to hone my skills as a speed typist and
well, to tell the truth, I don’t remember much else of what I learned there.
Shortly
after finishing my course, I found myself looking for work. This was not easy
to do in a pencil skirt because as you might rightly suspect, pencil skirts are
not designed for taking big strides in (mmm, I feel this is rather telling).
Anyhow, I was still in touch with a close friend from school (I’ll call her
Dory because she was an excellent swimmer and I often had to “eat-her-bubbles”)
who told me that there was an admin job going at the conveyancing agency where
she worked. I had abso-fucking-lutely no idea what a conveyancer did, but I
went for the interview and got the job. Although the money was fine for a
green-branch with no experience, landing the job was a bit of a hollow triumph
as I soon discovered that my life would turn out to be nothing like Melanie Griffith’s in
“Working Girl”.
My
colleagues were a smorgasbord of savory and unsavory characters. By far the
worst was the head-secretary-honcho who I’ll call MMM which stands for “Marshall-
Mather’s-Mother”. She was a lazy, 50-something trailer-trash type, with peroxided
hair and bright turquoise eye-shadow who pretty spent most of her day thinking up inventive
ways of being a bitch to everyone.
On my third day there I noticed she had an ashtray, which read “Famous
Grouse”. No shit, I thought to myself. (I even asked her if someone had given
it to her, you know, as a joke but not a joke). Remember, this was the early
90’s and smoking was still permitted every-fucking-where so the entire office
spent our days breathing in MMM’s chain smoke.
Other
noteworthy heinous characters included “The Body”, who indeed had the body but little
else (she was MMM’s side-kick and they’d have bitchathons of biblical
proportions) and “No-Smile”, a sour puss of a girl who was personal secretary to
one of the conveyancers. It obviously wasn’t a very fun job because she always
looked as if she had bile in her mouth.
As
for me, my job entailed the riveting task of “opening-files”. This was the
early days of data capture (yes, the days of a black screen with orange typeface)
and in order for the data capturer to do her job, us all-important file-openers
had to match up documents relating to the same transaction. This involved the
tricky task of reading the names on the documents inside the file and writing
the same names on the front cover of the file. As you can imagine, my days
went by in a blur-of-boredom so there was no lack of excitement when I
discovered one day, that the names on the front of a file did not match the names
on inside the file. This, I realised, could be a shit-fest of note
because if we had to locate the documents of, say, Mr Biggs and Mr Chester but
they were filed under Mr Seymore and Mr Winston, it would take an eternity of
dusty years to wade through EVERY file in the back office to find the correct
documents.
Bearing
in mind that I still had no idea and even less interest of what conveyancing
was, I thought I’d better to and check with No-Smile that I was right about
being wrong. She wasn’t at her desk (probably out sharpening her claws and
tongue with MMM and The-Body), so I went directly to the conveyancer himself.
As I
queried the error on the file, he nodded sagely and agreed on the shit-festness
of who-ever opened the file wrong. I felt he had a congratulatory air about him
which I was sure was aimed in my direction (because after all, I was the cunning secretary
who’d discovered the error) so, when he held out his hand to me I did what any
normal person would’ve done. I low-fived him. I may even have said "yeah".
He
gave me a confused look and then said, umm, I was actually just holding my hand
out for your pen.
What
can I say. I only lasted five months at that place and I still shudder when I
see someone wearing turquoise eye-shadow.
