Hi there
When I was last passing through Levin, which is a couple of hours up the line from Wellington, I was intrigued by the below notice.
A Funeral Expo? How crass. Such poor taste.
Am I supposed to go to a Funeral Expo looking for my own coffin (multi-coloured likenesses of a young Elvis imprinted on pink satin lining please). Or do I hold off my loved one's funeral until the Expo comes around in the hope that I can get a bargain burial plot?
TYPIST-IN-CHARGE
Episode 5
Typing Room 305, Head Office, Department of Education, Government Buildings, Wellington, NZ, 1960s
Along the corridor, next to the typing room was the small teleprinter room, with two operators. There were two big machines that allowed us to type memos and drafts to officers at the Auckland and Christchurch offices who, in turn, could send work to us at Head Office. A roll of paper was in each machine. A teleprinter operator couldn't change anything in her typing, so accuracy was essential. Incoming memos arrived in red type. Our outgoing ones were black
I was often sent to relieve when one or other teleprinter operator was away. The good thing about the machines was that we could talk, via typing, to real live operators at the other end. I was typing away happily one day in the teleprinter room when the other operator, Gwen, said, "Oh, the woman on the machine in Auckland has told me that she's been sent home with the measles - "
Gwen looked down at her own chest. It was summer and she had a low neckline. "Noooo, I think I've got measles too!"
She was off work immediately. We kidded her about catching measles over the teleprinter.
Another time, after I had confessed my love for The Beatles who were touring New Zealand, one of the teleprinter relievers from the Christchurch office somehow managed to get into a press conference as a photographer, and he sent me a glorious photo. I still cherish it.
An education inspector in the Christchurch office who had some time back been relieving in Wellington sent a teleprint message congratulating me on winning a cruise. This was Bill Renwick. My boss, Mrs Rowley, pointed him out when he was a young whippersnapper and said to me, "You keep an eye on that young man, he'll be director-general one day-" And he was.
Whilst talking to the typists, Mrs Rowley often balanced backward on her chair, with one hand on the ancient water radiator under the window (the radiator had old-fashioned embossed Victorian-like curly twirls and scrolls on it, and over the years had been painted to match the wall colour). Mrs Rowley's other hand would rest lightly on her electric typewriter.
"-owww!" Mrs Rowley disliked the little electric shocks that went through her body when she regularly did this action. With a sigh, she would try to remember not to touch the radiator and her typewriter simultaneously.
Opposite the teleprinter room was a door marked 'ladies'. Once through the door, the ladies' toilets were accessed by way of a steep wooden staircase to a narrow attic-type area. Under the staircase was the kitchen in which the tea lady bustled around making up our morning and afternoon teas. A discreet knock on our door at 9 45 am and 2 45 pm, and one of the typists would rush away from her machine to help manoeuvre the heavy tea trolley into the typing room.
Often we typists would go to the basins in a room beside the kitchen and get a drink of water. For weeks we complained about the water looking brown (we still drank it). Eventually when feathers started to turn up in the water Admin Section called in a plumber.
"The wire netting over the roof's water tank is torn," said the plumber. "There's a dead seagull in the tank..."
Hi there
Way back in the 1960's, my friend and I were absolutely pop music fans. We knew all the music played weekly on radio's Lever Hit Parade (all 7 songs plus a 'suggeston').
Television was new to New Zealand, and we had our own tv series - "Let's Go - with NZ singers. My friend and I managed, after a lot of sly wrangling, to secure entry tickets for the show which ran from Wellington.
The audience's job was to stand around the individual podium singers and bop along to the music. My mum pointed out to me that the entire time I was standing beside singer Herma Keil, I was mouthing the words with him. I was mortified by this. It wasn't cool at all.
above: ticket to get in to the NZ tv show "Let's Go"
Hi there
I don't like dentists. Never have, I know I never will. It all started when I was a child and had to go to The Dental Clinic in Upper Willis Street, Wellington. I cried and carried on, and ducked and swerved away from the dental nurses (no male dentists). They threatened to put me in "the blue room". I never did find out what "the blue room" was about but I visualised a locked room that was completely dark with one blue light bulb glowing from the ceiling. All the good kids who behaved in the rows of dental chairs got little rolls of wadding made up into figures. I always wanted one, never got one.
Today I went to the dentists. I had to fill in a form. One of the questions was something like "do you have anxiety issues at the dentist?" I ticked 'yes'. and circled it, and put a square around the circle, and added an extra tick.
It was just a check-up appointment....
