Memories
For those who wonder in their idle moments whether their work emails really ARE being read by company hoods, let me regale you with a story from the vault.
In the heady brit-pop soaked days of the late 90s, I was living in London and temping. I was spending my days typing pointless documents and eating from Pret a Manger, spending my nights with mopey foppish flop-dangling English boys with names like Johnny and Andy and idly wondering how a brazen and artsy suburban mallrat had suddenly turned into a secondary character from a badly-written chick lit novel.
I was assigned, through sheer dumb luck, to a prestigious 8 week temping job – secretary of The Sun Sportsdesk. The Sun. Rupert Murdoch’s libellous scandal-mongering baby. Home of the Page Three girl and expose articles on David Beckham’s secret gay lover’s cousin. The paper that was the indignant aunt for the nation while simultaneously being the smutty uncle as well.
So one winter’s morn I arrived for my position as the temp secretary for The Sun Sportsdesk. Now, I don’t quite know how to put this but to say ‘I hate sport’ would be like saying that Israel is not really friends with Lebanon anymore. I am the antichrist of sport. I can’t stand it. I pretended to like it for about 6 months while I shagged a football fan but thank god we broke up and I could go back to drinking in bars that didn’t have Foxtel.
The Sun Sportsdesk is disturbingly like every stereotypical movie sportsdesk you’ve ever seen except with grumpier and more depressed journos. Think of a dozen Charles Bukowskis working in the newsroom of ‘Never Been Kissed’ and you’ve got a pretty accurate picture of the dead-spirited atmosphere I walked into at 10am (ok, more like 10.20am) each morning. This job was a typical temp job as well. Typical in the sense that I was not introduced to anyone at all, that there was no handover sheet, no supervisor and no hint of a vague description of what I was meant to be doing. There was a computer and a phone and a desk. The rest I had to figure out for myself.
After about the 3rd day, I had some kind of routine. I would get in late, faff about for about an hour turning on the computer, reading the papers and making it look like I was doing some kind of obscure research, go down the hall to the po-faced bitchblonde secretary to ask her for the umpteenth time if she had a moment to help me and have her either completely ignore me or say ‘yes, I’ll come down later’, sit and play solitaire – vegas gambling style, then play minesweeper and beat my record of the previous day.
So, given the lack of work and lack of idle conversation, I did what any self-respecting temp would do – I sent hundreds of personal emails from the work computer. The main correspondence was between myself and an australian friend who was in Melbourne. And given that I had been completely and utterly ignored in the flesh, I was in no doubt that my emails would suffer the same fate and so I wrote about EVERYTHING. The topic of EVERYTHING included: what grumpy bastards the journos were, what I thought of the po-faced bitch secretary down the corridor, what I thought of the job, how much I wanted to shag the racing editor who sat opposite me, in-depth descriptions of my sex life, including the current shag who liked to say things like ‘can you feel my cock’ during the height of passion and how much it put me off, how bored I was every single day, how I hoped the g-string beneath my desk would dry in time for the date with Mr ‘Feelmycock’ that night, how much I drank on the weekend, how much I didn’t remember on the weeked…..shall I go on? I think you get the picture.
8 weeks later, my assignment ended.
2 weeks after that, my Melbourne-based friend received an email from the Sun Sportdesk. It read:
‘It has come to our attention that a number of emails were sent to this address from the temp secretary at this desk. While we would like to remind her that sending personal emails is in direct breach of company policy, we haven’t had such a laugh in ages and would like to know when she is coming back.’
Here endeth the lesson.
In the heady brit-pop soaked days of the late 90s, I was living in London and temping. I was spending my days typing pointless documents and eating from Pret a Manger, spending my nights with mopey foppish flop-dangling English boys with names like Johnny and Andy and idly wondering how a brazen and artsy suburban mallrat had suddenly turned into a secondary character from a badly-written chick lit novel.
I was assigned, through sheer dumb luck, to a prestigious 8 week temping job – secretary of The Sun Sportsdesk. The Sun. Rupert Murdoch’s libellous scandal-mongering baby. Home of the Page Three girl and expose articles on David Beckham’s secret gay lover’s cousin. The paper that was the indignant aunt for the nation while simultaneously being the smutty uncle as well.
So one winter’s morn I arrived for my position as the temp secretary for The Sun Sportsdesk. Now, I don’t quite know how to put this but to say ‘I hate sport’ would be like saying that Israel is not really friends with Lebanon anymore. I am the antichrist of sport. I can’t stand it. I pretended to like it for about 6 months while I shagged a football fan but thank god we broke up and I could go back to drinking in bars that didn’t have Foxtel.
The Sun Sportsdesk is disturbingly like every stereotypical movie sportsdesk you’ve ever seen except with grumpier and more depressed journos. Think of a dozen Charles Bukowskis working in the newsroom of ‘Never Been Kissed’ and you’ve got a pretty accurate picture of the dead-spirited atmosphere I walked into at 10am (ok, more like 10.20am) each morning. This job was a typical temp job as well. Typical in the sense that I was not introduced to anyone at all, that there was no handover sheet, no supervisor and no hint of a vague description of what I was meant to be doing. There was a computer and a phone and a desk. The rest I had to figure out for myself.
After about the 3rd day, I had some kind of routine. I would get in late, faff about for about an hour turning on the computer, reading the papers and making it look like I was doing some kind of obscure research, go down the hall to the po-faced bitchblonde secretary to ask her for the umpteenth time if she had a moment to help me and have her either completely ignore me or say ‘yes, I’ll come down later’, sit and play solitaire – vegas gambling style, then play minesweeper and beat my record of the previous day.
So, given the lack of work and lack of idle conversation, I did what any self-respecting temp would do – I sent hundreds of personal emails from the work computer. The main correspondence was between myself and an australian friend who was in Melbourne. And given that I had been completely and utterly ignored in the flesh, I was in no doubt that my emails would suffer the same fate and so I wrote about EVERYTHING. The topic of EVERYTHING included: what grumpy bastards the journos were, what I thought of the po-faced bitch secretary down the corridor, what I thought of the job, how much I wanted to shag the racing editor who sat opposite me, in-depth descriptions of my sex life, including the current shag who liked to say things like ‘can you feel my cock’ during the height of passion and how much it put me off, how bored I was every single day, how I hoped the g-string beneath my desk would dry in time for the date with Mr ‘Feelmycock’ that night, how much I drank on the weekend, how much I didn’t remember on the weeked…..shall I go on? I think you get the picture.
8 weeks later, my assignment ended.
2 weeks after that, my Melbourne-based friend received an email from the Sun Sportdesk. It read:
‘It has come to our attention that a number of emails were sent to this address from the temp secretary at this desk. While we would like to remind her that sending personal emails is in direct breach of company policy, we haven’t had such a laugh in ages and would like to know when she is coming back.’
Here endeth the lesson.
posted by belle de dayjob at 11:36 pm
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