I saw one advertized in the local paper for a ‘Fellows Secretary’
in an Oxford College. The duties, as
stated in the advertisement, sounded within the realms of my
possibilities (although audio typing had not yet come my way) and I
applied for it. I was asked for an interview on a Friday afternoon, just
after lunch. Most Oxford Colleges are beautiful and awe-inspiring,
and this one was no exception. Ever since I had read Jude the
Obscure I felt complete empathy with him over his desire to be at
Oxford University. Now, I felt, too, that being part of a College, in any
capacity would be an incomparable experience.
The interview was short. (At the time I didn’t know that most
academics have absolutely no notion of how to converse or
communicate easily with their non-academic fellow men, and that
they even seem to have some difficulty with each other). I was asked
why I had applied for the job and explained my Jude feelings. The
Bursar explained the salary scale. My empty secretarial record for
the past twenty years apparently put me on a Scale 2 basis, a salary
which is somewhere comparable, I discovered, to that obtained
working on the sweet counter at Woolworths four days a week. The
College Secretary, a woman, was also present at the interview, and
she seemed to be on my side. I did hear afterwards that she had
described the said post as a job which a trained monkey could well
do, and perhaps in me she saw such a one. The following day I had a
letter offering me the job. I accepted, then had ever increasing
anxiety about it all.
My first OU exam was in October, involving hours
of study, and the thought of that and learning the names of twenty
seven Fellows, and the office routine, in addition, seemed all too
much. I panicked and cancelled the acceptance. But this was not to
be. I was persuaded that I would manage very well (remember the
monkey) and on the last day of August 1982, I started. The Fellow’s
Secretary’s office was a large cupboard off the Principal’s Secretary’s
office, and that is where I spent my days for the next year.
I had forgotten during my years as a housewife about office life –
its trivialities, its jealousies, and its absurdities. In this College these
took place in exactly the same way as they do everywhere else.
Everyone, in whatever pecking order, worries about their own
prestige and importance, to themselves and to everyone else. The
largest worry is, it seems, that the boss/master/chief/bigwig might
not appreciate the sacrifices, hard work and late hours put in by
subordinates who recognize their own worth, but who are frantic
that it might not be recognized by high-ups or at any rate those
higher up than themselves. And it was from this particular worry that
the tension in my office arose. The College Secretary, instrumental in
hiring me, had been at the College for many years. She felt herself,
I’m sure, to be absolutely everything the academic staff could wish
for – an agony aunt, a confidential friend, a nanny, a dining
companion and primarily, of course, an efficient and reliable College
Secretary. In short, indispensable.
Throughout history many wars
have fought and lives lost over territorial rights and in offices, if
territories are not clearly defined, although lives are not actually lost,
tempers frequently are. The above College Secretary would not, or
could not, delegate any interesting or responsible work. Underlings,
viz me, were left therefore with copy typing, checking lists, or filing
student application forms, all which could have been done by the
aforementioned monkey, as she rightly observed. She was also a
woman given to dramatics. She swirled a lot, rushing hither and
thither tearing at her hair and making pronouncements of a vaguely
threatening nature about what she was going to say to this or that
don when next encountered. When faced with him however, she
never did, as far as I know, say anything of the sort.
One of my duties was to type letters from an audio machine. My
previous secretarial work had not included this skill but after several
attempts to coordinate the taped message with the foot pedal, and
then to type correctly what the voice dictated, I mastered the art.
The Fellow who dictated these letters was delightful, with a luxurious
voice, pleasing to the ear. In fact, this Fellow was altogether most
pleasing and I believe most of the female staff ( I can’t say for the
one female don) were secretly in love with him. He behaved in a way
that was Christian and altruistic. He was always polite, always kind
and helpful wherever he could be, to anyone, regardless of where
they came in the hierarchy. If I sound over-enthusiastic about this
man, perhaps it is because these qualities were so apparent in him,
whereas in others they were remarkably lacking.
It was difficult to resume a secretarial role again after the very
different one as the lady of the manor in the intervening years. The
secretary’s role, I declare, is both humble, subservient and
indiscriminate. A secretary can be anyone from seventeen to
seventy-one. She should be able to type, take shorthand, and make
the tea. She can have no previous experience or many years
experience. She can be efficient or inefficient. But basically, she is
just the secretary, and when she leaves someone as good or bad will
fill her place. She has as little personal identity as a forgotten wife.
The optimum hope, I suppose, for a single (or married) secretary
could be to marry the boss. Otherwise, having come to grips with the
particular office she is in and its own routines, Shangri-la has been
reached.
She is also the butt of many a smutty joke. An American man,
working in an Oxford University, told me what he thought to be a
hilarious story of how he came by his secretary. Sorting through
hundreds of applicants applying for the job, he short-listed five. After
interviewing them all he had no notion of which one to choose. They
all had good references and, apparently, equally good secretarial
skills. So, he enlisted the help of a male colleague. “Which one do
you think I should choose?” he asked. “Well, if it were me,” said his
friend “I would choose the one with the biggest tits.” That was the
way his present secretary got the job, which obviously proves skill
and hard work doesn’t always gain just rewards. Not if you are flat-
chested anyway.
The job itself was dull and routine, as I suspect most jobs are
where responsibility or initiative are unnecessary. But I dreaded the
moments when the routine was altered, and I was summoned to
take down letters in shorthand. These were dictated by dons who
specialized in obscure subjects with pertinent, obscure vocabularies.
As my shorthand was never strong and flowing, words like
macroeconomics, renaissance, rigorous, trenchant, staunch and
many others, completely flummoxed me. Returning to my office I
knew that transcribing my scribbles would be much more than I
could manage. Sometimes I took the shorthand home and tried to
decipher it at the kitchen table. I would in desperation ring my friend
Judy, who works in another college office, and ask her what she
thought my outlines could possibly be. Or did she, by any chance,
know anything significant that had happened in Venice or Florence
circa 1300? She valiantly gave me support but at the end of the
evening, after hours of trying to make sense of it all, the result was
usually totally incomprehensible. With this particular, precise prose,
so familiar to academics and less so to the rest of us, there was
absolutely no chance of substituting in my own words what I could
not decipher. In my youth I worked for an advertising executive
whose downfall was drink. I tumbled to the notion that if I persuaded
him to dictate his letters after lunch when he had consumed large
quantities of alcohol, he became both incoherent and forgetful. I was
then free to type his letters as I wanted to, since he could not admit,
sober the next morning, that he couldn’t remember what he had
dictated the day before.
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