The Way It Never Was
Read The Way It Never Was Online
Authors: Lucy Austin
Copyright © Lucy Austin 2015
The right of Lucy Austin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
Published in 2015 by Endeavour Press Ltd.
For Al, thank you for your belief in me – and for being the kind of man who can fix a coffee machine.
And for Joseph and Sophie, who knew how to spell the word ‘cappuccino’ from an early age.
Table of Contents
CHAPTER 1- 45 WORDS-PER-MINUTE
CHAPTER 3 - MINE’S A FLAT WHITE
CHAPTER 8 - THE WAY IT NEVER WAS
CHAPTER 14 - ORANGE-MOCHA-FRAPPUCINO
CHAPTER 17 - WASH ON, WASH OFF
CHAPTER 28 - THEN SOMETHING BENDS
CHAPTER 1
- 45 WORDS-PER-MINUTE
I would love to say it was all part of my master plan to quit my job, but it really wasn’t. There was no time to rip all my sticky notes off my computer, send a cheerful farewell email or discreetly steal my stapler – the things you do to leave on a high. It was like having only half drunk a cup of tea that I’d left somewhere that I would quite like to have finished.
The day started out like every other; sitting at my desk for a good ten minutes and failing to log onto the internal system, because it required remembering about five passwords that needed to contain upper and lower case letters. When you have a CV that runs onto five pages of A4, this is a big deal – there are a lot of possible words flying around the brain.
I was Senior Executive Assistant to a Vice President at Jam Jam Records, Barbara Pine. Originally, I had been hired to look after someone else, but when he ended up getting the sack for being ‘inefficient’ (having told HR his entire department needed time management training), I then inherited Barbara and was given a higher profile Executive Assistant position, another ‘blink and you might miss me’ secretarial role but with a more fancy title.
Ever since I achieved 45 words-per-minute on my typing test, I had been defined by it, making sideways moves in administration, effectively going nowhere fast. Worse still, being ‘45 WPM’ has made me see what I might not have noticed if I’d enjoyed a job with career progression, namely that wherever you work it’s all the same. Dress it up, throw money at it, or give perks from dawn ‘til dusk, 45 WPM means you see the underbelly of the workplace. You notice the bitchy gossiping and playground antics, the precocious graduates with notions of grandeur, the bad tempered bosses that never apologise, the filing cabinets that no-one goes near despite your carefully constructed system, and Word documents that never format properly and probably never will. 45 WPM means that when you leave, someone else will fill your shoes as though you were never there.
Stifling a yawn, I nodded as respectfully as I could muster in the direction of Mabel Bunce, self-appointed ‘senior’ Executive Assistant who was doing the rounds as though she were the Queen.
‘You okay Kate?’ she asked, her face studying me closely. ‘You and I need to get together. Diary for me is chocker this week. My brother has moved back to the UK after living abroad for years and I’m spending every second I can, helping him to climatise. We’re so close.’
Okay
,
no
need
to
overshare
. ‘But perhaps we can do a ramen together next week?’ I wasn’t totally sure I knew what a ‘ramen’ was, but nevertheless I gave her an eager smile and promised I’d accept her pending ‘friend’ request on Facebook. I then fired across a quick email to my actual boss about absolutely nothing to show that I was early.
In the time I’d been working for Barbara, this is what my day consisted of:
Organising important meetings with big wigs with busy diaries and excessive catering demands.
Patting self on back for good diary management and feeling momentarily smug.
Day before meeting, getting email informing me a key bigwig is pulling out.
Checking with Barbara that meeting can still go ahead without said bigwig.
Getting confirmation from her that it can’t.
Finding out that diaries for all other bigwigs are busy until two weeks Friday.
Telling Barbara the bad news, only to be told I’m not very efficient.
Two weeks Friday, another bigwig pulls out.
Tell Barbara the bad news again, only to be told to get her a sandwich.
For the rest of the time, Barbara assigned me random tasks guised as projects that trickled into my inbox throughout the day, only for a supposedly ‘urgent’ deadline to arrive just as I was about to leave. I tried to clock off without so much as a backwards glance, so I could make my train back to the seaside town of Broadstairs, but when you have yet to accrue a whole calendar year in a place, you are obliged to go through every ‘urgent’ admin task as though it is the most important thing in the world.
Quite early on, I realised that my boss didn’t really do anything very much. In fact, in all the time I had been working for Barbara, there seemed to be an awful lot of nothing and more corporate marketing jargon than I knew what to do with. Perhaps she made all the big decisions when I was having a silent scream in the toilets, but from where I sat, when she wasn’t deciding which free CD to order from the back catalogue, she was losing sleep as to the wording of a three sentence email. And when she wasn’t making the likes of me put together a fairly basic presentation for her to pass off as her own, she was having these meetings about meetings – meetings where conveniently no-one could actually quantify the work being done.
A couple of hours later, there I was, stifling a yawn, feeling rattled by just being there. As usual, the annoyance I felt was like white noise in my brain, always there and difficult to tune out. Now I can multi-task with the best of them – you know, apply mascara and talk at the same time, or drink a cappuccino while reading a book over someone’s shoulder on the Tube. So, I should have been able to sit in a meeting while despairing at my life. Except that I was starting to trip up.
The room was full and all eyes were on Barbara who was wearing an ill-fitting suit with very snug trousers that gave her camel toe and were a teensy bit too short.
‘I see that this singer isn’t so popular in Sweden,’ she says. ‘Why is that so?’ As though she had an audience all enthralled and waiting in anticipation for her findings, she slowly opened up her laptop and plugged into the main plasma screen, only to destroy the suspense by summoning me to help her find the right document. I then tuned out for the next hour while she said her script, which happened to be word-for-word what was on the slide show that I had created for her.
Slowly losing the will to live, I excused myself after slide 38 to go over to the cafe opposite to pick up a platter of sandwiches I had ordered earlier on. You would have thought ordering a few sandwiches would take a few minutes right? Wrong! Even a relatively simple task such as this was the culmination of hard work, having painstakingly sifted through about twenty emails of filling requests, complete with a bar chart from Mabel based on previous years of sandwich filling data. But as ridiculous as it sounds, in a meeting like this, lunch was the one and only highlight, so as far as all the attendees were concerned my role was as important as the CEO’s.
‘Hi Bob, I’m here for the sandwich platter.’ I was feeling a little flustered as I’d been cornered for the best part of six minutes in the foyer by Elaine, our chatty receptionist, who was having a personal crisis over the discovery that her teenage daughter was caught offering sexual favours for 95p at school. While trying to edge my way out of the revolving doors backwards to get on with the task at hand, I adopted the appropriate sympathetic expression, all the while inwardly questioning why slutty daughter wouldn’t just round it up to the next significant figure – you know, save having to root around for change.
‘She’s got you doing highbrow stuff again hey?’ Bob grinned and handed over the cling-filmed trays. I did an exaggerated wink at him. I loved our exchanges for although they weren’t long, they were absolutely perfect and essential to my day.
‘This is why I went to university Bob,’ I replied. Yes, all that education, the essays, the non-existent books at the university library, the degree was worth every minute for this – creating presentations for time-consuming meetings and buying rounds of sandwiches to distract from having to listen to them. ‘See you later Bob. Have a good one.’
‘You too,’ came the reply. He then shouted after me. ‘Don’t let her get you down Kate! You are better than a tuna baguette you know.’ Good old Bob, profound as ever.
Back at the office, feeling horribly self-conscious, I wheeled in a tea trolley backwards piled high with drinks and sandwiches, pushing the door open with my bottom.
Trying not to establish eye contact with anyone, I found myself speaking with a nasal ‘doors to manual’ voice that only came out at times like this. ‘Teas, coffees, sandwiches anyone?’ All was going well and dignity was (mainly) intact, until the Queen of EA’s herself asked me to go out and make her a skinny decaf soy cappuccino with three sugars. All of a sudden, my eyes started to well up. ‘Sure, I’ll be back in a minute,’ I whispered and walked out the door.
This was getting harder and harder to do. In fact, I had been doing it so long I wasn’t sure how to measure my tolerance levels anymore as I had long passed the point of no return. Worse still, the only benchmark I had to compare my happiness index with was a job that I had had 10,000 miles away that I didn’t dare admit I had loved. All I knew was that these kinds of meetings only served to show how wrong my career aspirations had gone. This was never part of the original plan. Surely, I could do something different? I was miserable!
I don’t know for how long I sat at my desk with my head in my hands breathing in and out, but it was long enough that Mabel’s shadow loomed over me asking me where her coffee was. Out of nowhere, I found it in me to tell her to back off and give me a minute, which was met with a growling noise and her stomping off into the meeting again.
I decided then and there I wasn’t going to go back with a coffee for Mabel: In fact, I wasn’t going back to the meeting at all. So, instead, I sat and logged onto Facebook and said yes to a couple of ‘friends’ I couldn’t recall (no to Mabel’s request), before idly surfing showbiz websites for important news on D-list celebrities. Before too long, I started to feel guilty and started checking through my work emails. Work – work – boring – boring – nope – nope – work – work – work – funny one from office manager Frankie asking us to be mindful of the environment when we flush the toilet (where is she going to go with that one?) – an earlier email from Mabel asking if someone would mind getting her lunch tomorrow as she was doing a really big mail merge which was all consuming – could we let her know of our availability – more administration rubbish – yet another email from Frankie asking us to use magnets on the floor to suck up paper clips – an invitation to Mabel’s Friday EA evening out (no thanks) – and a zillion requests for meetings with Barbara that she had no intention of attending.
And then I saw it – an email from my brother Dan.
To: Kate Harrington
Date: April 19th 2015
From: Daniel Harrington
Re: Holiday Photos
We still on for dinner later? I’ll send you the address of the restaurant. Sorry it’s so early. I have to go on somewhere. Besides, it means you can get your train back at civilised hour no? I’ve got a low-key place in mind. Anyway, found some photos – came across some of the Californian Westerner 4 trip you and Stan did. Shit, I was brilliant at that job wasn’t I? Anyway, it’s a good photo. Photogenic – well Stan is anyhow. I don’t have his email address but no doubt, that girlfriend of his will be monitoring his every bowel movement anyhow so I won’t bother ;) D x
Oh not the Westerner 4! Did he need to bring that up? Argh! What a disastrous holiday that turned out to be! Just thinking about it made me need to surgically unclench my buttocks. But before I had time to respond accordingly, the computer beeped at me with a new email.
Kate,
Will not ignore the fact you have walked out of meeting you organised and failed to come back! Then you had the impertinence to tell me to go away! Where’s my coffee? Can I make sure that you can attend our meeting this pm? Am aware that you might have a heavy workload (I have a bigger one I assure you!) but it is so important to all get together. Our roles as Executive Assistants are more demanding than that of Personal Assistants and we need to acknowledge that. If you can’t make it, you better have a really good excuse.
Mabel
Mabel Bunce
Head of the Senior Executive Assistants at Jam Jam Records
I don’t know whether it was the Comic Sans or the fact that Mabel had pestered me for a fancy coffee she had no intention of drinking, but with a rush of blood to the head I emailed back in the most flowery font I could find:
Hi Mabel, I have no time to attend your EA meeting later. I don’t care about voting on which floor’s got the best photocopier or what kind of sound the fire alarm should make in a pretend drill. I really just want to do my job and go home. Thanks, Kate
A little while later, Barbara called me into her office. ‘Kate, it has come to my attention that you disappeared halfway through my meeting.’ I said nothing by way of response and just looked down at the floor and quietly waited for the punishment. ‘Look, you have been working for me for eleven months now, but you are still not getting me the right bloomer at lunchtime.’ Like Bob, was she too using a sandwich as a metaphor to dumb it down to a level I understood, or did she really mean I didn’t order the right tuna mayo bloomer at lunch? I had a horrible feeling it was the latter. ‘What is the matter with you?’ she exclaims. ‘You are so lucky to be in this position. So many assistants would kill to work for me.’ Thinking of Mabel’s ruthless expression standing over me earlier, I had no doubt that this was true.