207. Making the best of a bad job
Not bossing the itinerary.
In which Rebecca reflects on some early steps on her employment journey.
Dear Reader,
I’d gone for my interview in a skirt suit that felt too much like school uniform, and hoped that my partly grown-out boot-black hair after a dodgy dye job during my last term at university wouldn’t make too much of an impact.
To his credit, my boss-to-be didn’t bat an eyelid when he stood to greet me. It only struck me on my way out from the interview that his initial visual assessment of me would not have included my brunette roots. Reader, I was a full two inches taller than him.
Having passed the interview I became the new girl in a small company operational in the logistics sector. Its London office – a stone’s throw from both the Ritz Hotel and Fortnum & Mason in swanky Mayfair – was the centre of operations, with three satellite offices in mainland Europe.
Although I had been employed as a bilingual secretary focusing not only on company business but also the CEO’s life admin, I had come on board not long after the office manager had left.
The lines separating these roles were so faint as to be almost invisible. On my first day I was making calls to suppliers in Germany – ‘Do they speak English?’ ‘Rebecca, you got this job because you speak German, so do that’ – writing letters to a dozen of my boss’s cronies inviting them to a shooting party at his country estate, and cleaning out the fridge in the grubby office kitchen.
The only other colleague around my age was a native speaker of German who worked closely with the Financial Controller. Those two crunched their polyglot figures at their end of the office while I shared space with the Operations Manager who, I hate to say, wasn’t terribly operational in any kind of business activity. Taxi receipts made out to large figures in his own handwriting would find their way into the Petty Cash box, and the ensuing squabbles about them between him and the Financial Controller would be frequent and loud.
Lunch would feature large for the Operations Manager and the CEO. At around midday most days the former would pull his money clip ostentatiously out of his pocket and march into the latter’s office – a monstrosity in mahogany – clutching a couple of twenties in fingers which wore more gold than skin. ‘Shall we do lunch?’ he’d ask the boss. ‘It’s my shout’.
It was mostly his ‘shout’. And I’ve seen the receipts to prove it. Yes, he’d always pay himself back out of Petty Cash, because treating the boss to lunch was, in his eyes, a business expense. 🙄
Sometimes they’d head out for a steak, but I hated it when they chose to eat in the office boardroom and would send me out during my own lunchbreak to fetch whatever it was they were wanting to eat.
One day during my first week they told me to go to the large branch of Pret à Manger, just on the other side of Piccadilly, for All Day Breakfasts.
Until this point the only ‘All Day Breakfast’ I knew was a full English – a fry-up of bacon, eggs, sausages etc – served at any time of day. In the office my boss listed what they wanted to eat – ‘two all day breakfasts and two lattes, double shot’ – and off I went.
‘However am I going to carry two stupid plates of greasy breakfast and two cups of coffee back safely?’ I fretted on my way down to the ground floor.
In Pret I marched straight up to the counter. ‘Two All Day Breakfasts, please!’ I asked brightly. ‘They’re over there’, came the reply from the barista, pointing at one of the huge sandwich chillers I’d just passed.
I was confused. ‘Over where?’ All I could see were wall-to-wall sandwiches.
Turns out that ‘Pret à Manger’ means ‘Ready to Eat’. That’s right: Pret is a sandwich shop.
🙄
I’d never warmed to the grumpy Financial Controller who was in post when I started working for the company, but his replacement, Bob, and I hit it off immediately.
Bob was laidback but earnest, with floppy black hair, a tired grey suit and a yellow tie with a blue pattern, which I can remember very well indeed because he wore it every single day of his employment with the firm.
Bob and I got each other right from the off. We’d bat our bonkers conversations back and forth across the office, colleagues turning their heads to and fro between us in their in-vain attempts to follow what on earth we were talking about.
Bob would head out every lunchtime, and be back at his desk an hour later looking revitalised. I wondered what he’d do during these breaks, and liked to think he’d be walking circuits of Green Park to clear his head ready for his afternoon’s work.
Long after five o’clock one day, when yet again I was staying longer to finish something I’d found impossible to accomplish during actual working hours, Bob appeared at my desk. ‘Come on’, he said. ‘I’m taking you out.’
Blimey, this was new. I joined him in the lift with no idea where we were going.
Left out of the building, left again, across the road, left again and then… ‘After you, Rebecca’. Bob was holding open the door of the nearest pub to the office.
We were colleagues, and this wasn’t a date, so when we got to the bar I fished out my purse from my handbag. This girl was going to pay her way.
After a few brief words from Bob the barman was already pulling two pints of London Pride and reaching for the box of Hamlet cigars behind the bar.
‘Your money’s no good here this evening!’ he told me.
Bob winked at him and looked at me, laughing. ‘Well, where do you think I go for an hour every day? Lunch is a pint and a cigar, then back to the office.’
The barman chipped in. ‘Yeah, Bob and I know each other pretty well these days.’
🤣
At work I was responsible for booking not just business travel but also any holiday flights for my boss’s family.
They’d rented a chateau in the south of France with another family during my first summer working there, and it was my job to make their flight arrangements. ‘Ring our nanny!’ I was instructed. ‘You’ll need her full name and passport details. She and the kids will be down the back.’
Whatever did he mean by ‘down the back?’, I wondered.
I rang the nanny at home, who gave me the information I needed.
‘While I’m at it’, I asked. ‘Do you know what ‘down the back’ means?’
She laughed. ‘Economy!’ she said. ‘You need to book economy seats for me and the children, the same for the other nanny and those children, and their parents will travel business class.’
That trip came off without a hitch, but I sometimes wonder how popular I would have been if I’d booked cattle class seats for the whole party? Heaven forbid that the great and the good would have to sit not only with their own children but also their household staff.
🙄
The next year I booked a posh hotel in northern France and a ferry crossing for my boss, his family and their Bentley, and became confused about how dates actually worked when it came to reservations.
Monday 1st until Sunday 8th. I counted on my fingers. Seven nights. Yup.
I booked crossings for the 1st and the 8th, then rang the hotel. ‘What dates are they staying?’ asked the booking clerk.
‘They’re coming for seven nights starting Monday 1st’, I told her.
On Monday 9th my boss didn’t arrive at the office. ‘That’s funny!’ I thought. ‘Must have had too good a time on holiday.’
The phone rang. It was him.
‘Rebecca, who did you speak to at the agency to make our ferry booking?’
‘Crystal, I think. Why?’
‘She’d only gone and booked the ferry for YESTERDAY. We’re at the port now and there’s no space on this morning’s boat. I need to speak to her right now. Give me her number.’
Oh gosh, poor girl. I read out the number of my contact at the travel agents we used for all our bookings, and wondered if I should try to call her myself very quickly to warn her that my boss was on the warpath. No, it was nothing to do with me; I’d leave them to it.
Soon the phone rang again.
‘When I FINALLY get home, Rebecca, you and I are going to have A SERIOUS TALK ABOUT YOUR JOB!’ I could hear children crying in the background.
‘Is everything okay?’
‘Put it this way, I have some VERY upset people in the car, and now I’m driving over a hundred miles to a different port. Crystal had quite rightly booked our ferry for the date you’d given her.’
In the office the next day, and in front of everyone, he explained to me very loudly in very simple language that hotel reservation dates take into account the date of departure, not the date of the last night the room is slept in.
🤦♀️
I got plenty of other things wrong, too. I got into trouble for filing papers that needed to not be filed, and for not filing papers that needed to be filed. I was responsible for three of us getting stuck in the lift one evening by trying to demonstrate how flimsy I felt the lift was by jumping up and down in it. And two years running I sent off our order form for corporate Christmas cards too late for them to be even printed before Christmas, let alone sent.
Bob walked past my desk one morning and noticed I was rather subdued.
‘You okay?’
I sighed. ‘Yeah, just a bit out of sorts, that’s all.’
When I came back from lunch I found a packet of Bassett’s Liquorice Allsorts on my desk.
‘Whose are these sweets?’ I was puzzled.
Bob grinned. ‘Yours, of course. You can’t be out of sorts any more now that you’ve got ALL of them!’
☺️
Ah, well. Not every day at a bad job is a bad job.
Love,
Rebecca
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I loved this Rebecca. You are such a fine writer. Your experience working in that office could easily be made into a movie. This personal history is so very funny - in hind sight, of course. Imagine having to go out and buy your bosses lunch during your own lunch hour! Outrageous. More, please.
I had a boss shout at me in front of everyone and I said "If you want to shout at me, do it in your office, not in public." He was dead friendly after that. It sounds like an interesting though at times nerve-wracking job. Does Jim know about Bob? 😡