I rushed in to Government Buildings via the south door, my spiked heels click-clacking frantically on the muddy-brown lino. Shooting past the embossed glass doors of the building's Post Office, I glanced down to my watch-
It was half a minute to eight. "I'll make it, I'll make it. I'll-make-"
I didn't make it. As I puffed and panted up to Education's ground floor reception desk, Mrs Rose was already ruling a long line across the page of an exercise book.
The woman stood for no nonsense when it came to late arrivals to work. At eight o'clock on the dot, out would come her red pen and she would rule off the sign-in page. I noticed that Francie had signed in just above the line, good for her. (Some time later, Mrs Rowley won possession of the sign-in book, and it sat in the Room 206 pool, a tiny success for the typists as a whole but not for us individually as it often took several minutes past eight to make it into the pool from the ground floor).
By the time I'd signed in and got upstairs to room 206, I owed the department five minutes, to be made up either at lunch-time or after work.
I was greeted by Mrs Rowley waving some pages at me. "Thank goodness, you're here. Quick- take these Questions and Answers. Parliament wants them -
"Immediately!" we both chorused.
Prior to my job in the pool at Education, I had always thought that an elected minister thought up a question in the house as an idea suddenly came to him. A minister on The Other Side would give an ad lib answer.
Nope. It was all plotted and typed out.
A parliamentarian would ask the Minister of Education a question. The Minister of Education would get a minion to rush the Question over to the knowledgeable seat of power (Education Head office, across the road in Govt Bldgs) , and the Question and Answer would end up in the pool where we would always be told something like, "This is ultra-urgent. We got the Question a week or so ago, but it's taken that long to come up with a three paragraph answer. It's going to be read out in one hour...."
I typed the Answer in double spacing. It was done on foolscap paper that would be cut in half so that the Minister of Education could easily read it aloud in the House, and not have trouble losing his place.
As I typed, there was a frantic wail from Francie who was sitting beside me. "I Can't read Mr Pinder's writing," She waved his manuscript at me.
"Let's have a quick look."
It was hard to read the guy's scrawling. As a director, he'd recently come back from a paid business trip to America and we 'girls' in the pool were ordered to take it in turns to type his travel journal. The journal mentioned more about the sights of the country than education. I'd typed the section where he'd waxed lyrical for three typed foolscap pages over the wonders of a sleeping compartment on an inter-state train. He'd washed his shirt in the hand-basin and marvelled over the shirt being completely dry by morning.
No-one else in the pool could read the troublesome sentence either. So Francie left her electric machine (yes, we all had them by now), trudged upstairs, knocked on Mr Pinder's door, stood by the guy for about ten minutes as he tried to figure out what he'd written two months ago, eventually giving up and substituting different words.
It was 1969. I'd been nearly nine years in the Education Head Office pool. I had confidence in my typing and each week as the Public Service Official Circular came around, I leafed through it looking for an upgrade to a Senior Typist position.
Sadly, there were never any such positions.
The senior typing jobs were usually labelled as for "Shorthand-Typists". I didn't do shorthand and I inwardly snarled when friends who could do shorthand had so many jobs to pick from. They could even be promoted to External Affairs and get transferred overseas to some country's High Commission office.
But wait -! I flipped the PSOC back a page. There was a senior typist job being advertised at one of Education's offices. Typist-Typist!-T-Y-P-I-S-T!!!!
Because the senior typing position in Thorndon was so far off the beaten track and every shorthand-typist had snootily turned her nose up at it, it had finally been given the plain old run-of-the mill 'senior typist' designation.
I was in like a shot. And because I was the only applicant, and because Mrs Rowley (my STIC) knew me and my work, I got the job. But not until after it had been advertised twice and still with no other applicants. - Oops, did Mrs Rowley still have doubts about my ability? Probably...
above: Thorndon, Wellington. Curriculum Development Unit.
32 Hobson Street, (corner Hobson Street and Hobson Crescent. This is a side view picture taken from Hobson Crescent).
No comments:
Post a Comment