In Unorthodox1 – Cack Handed we were thinking of Jewess’s.
There was a woman I could have got keen on at the department after I’d arrived in Tasmania.
She was the PA to the boss. We bantered across desks over the five-foot beige woollen covered room dividers. She was a real whizz at MS Word too.
Working in the same open space was Lorraine. God, I can’t remember her name for the life of me, and Lorraine was PA to the 2IC. Lorraine was as dumb as dogshit. When MSWord failed her as it often did, the whole office knew that it was bloody Bill Gates himself who had orchestrated whatever calumny had befallen her. Apparently, she had organised the figure skating at a State level in Western Australia, which was something there was little use for in Tasmania. Being a nurse, or was it nurse’s aide before her daughter’s birth some twenty years previous her nursing endorsements had long since lapsed.
Department and office codes on dalliances twixt colleagues were unwritten, unclear, murky, position-dependent and subject to review by gossip. Generally, gossip could only extend to a job grade above, but to any number of job grades below. The reasons were clear. Any gossip about a job grade above could always be used to scandalise a boss or their rival. Chatting about colleagues was fair game and about inferiors, a sense of smug self-satisfaction gained, if not disciplinary processes invoked. When a CEO got it on with the canteen supervisor though shibboleths went crashing.
I spent my time seeking company outside of work oblivious to the meat at my table. These efforts were generally unsuccessful. I didn’t read the signs. though what the signs were I’m still buggered if I could see them. They were pointed out to me when it was all too late. My murky understanding of the colleague rules, plus the ever-present shifty eye glances of the office aunties kept us in check.
I needed to adopt a more unorthodox style.
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The Hobart Chinaman 