1975
The 1970s can be summed by the oil crisis, the miners’ strike and the three day week, double digit inflation, massive trade deficit and rising debt….. hardly an ideal time to look for a job, let alone your first job!
I spent hours laboriously cutting out job adverts from the local papers, the calibre of which declined as I became more desperate. It was only the thought of another depressing appointment at the Labour Exchange that drove me on.
Interviews were formal, certainly no first name terms, though there was the exception of the solicitor who offered me a sherry at 10.30 in the morning! I was spared today’s competency based interrogations, but on the other hand interviewers were allowed to ask any questions, including what would now be considered irrelevant personal matters such as, “what does your father do for a living?” and “where did you go on holiday last year?”. To finish things off there was the dreaded shorthand and typing test on an unfamiliar noisy clumpy monster in the corner of an often, dingy office.
I wasn’t an academic in any shape or form, but for the sort of jobs I was applying for, this was fairly immaterial. I was good at looking reasonably intelligent, friendly, spoke the Queen’s English, could add and subtract, didn’t have a giant boil on the end of my nose, could drive a car (I kept my bicycle clips hidden!), plus my mother was happy to confirm “I was a well brought up young lady” with good practical and domestic skills! However, ‘my package,’ obviously didn’t include previous work experience and this was a trying fact that ruled me out of many an interview.
A couple of tedious months later I landed the role of Secretary to the Managing Director of a small advertising company.
Mistake No. 1 – Within 10 minutes of arrival on my first day, I realised my desk was opposite the MD’s, in the same, not-big-enough-office and he was very attached to his fat cigars!
Mistake No. 2 – despite the MD being extremely stressed much of the time due to his appalling time-management, he always had time to play golf, discuss golf, think golf, dream golf and have putting sessions between our office and the adjoining one next door!
Mistake No. 3 – Often I didn’t have enough to do but letters were regularly dictated 20 minutes before my departure and great surprise expressed when I explained that ‘No’ I couldn’t stay late….
Mistake No. 4 – The MD turned out to have a fierce uncontrollable temper when anything went wrong, which it often did, due to his incompetence. Pencils and rubbers literally bounced off the walls, but extraordinarily these outbursts would end as rapidly as they’d started, and he’d go to the other extreme of apologising profusely and circling my desk doing very accurate Groucho Marx impresssions… complete with his beloved cigar!
I endured this supposedly vital experience for three years before escaping at great speed to the relative sanity of the local university. On my final day, it was revealed that the MD had a normal ‘turnover’ of at least three secretaries a year, and in the words of one of the Directors, “They’d seen them come and go but I was to be congratulated for having lasted the longest…. ever!”
