TYPIST-IN-CHARGE, Episode 15

 EDUCATION DEPARTMENT, HEAD OFFICE, GOVERNMENT BUILDINGS, 1975-ish

above:  ground floor typing room was north (left) side of the building, out of vision.

I was back!  Back in Govt Bldgs on Lambton Quay, back under the guiding arm of Mrs Rowley, the supervising typist who had mentored me since I joined this department in 1960.  I had truly loved working at Health Regional Office, not-so-much the Curriculum Development Unit, but all of that was in the past .... I was home!!

But not in Room 305 typing pool.  Or even Room 206.  I was in a new pool on the ground floor.  The department was expanding and, here I was, pride-of-place, Typist-in-Charge of seven (count 'em, seven).  Was I scared?  On that first day, you bet I was.  I girded my loins and pushed open the door -

The typists in this pool worked for sections on the ground and first floors (first and second floors, if you're American).  Maori Education Foundation and UNESCO were our main customers.

Mr Joliffe ( many years later he was fifty-percent of the first couple to get an official civil union pairing in New Zealand) was a head honcho at Maori Education Foundation.  The Foundation was responsible for giving grants and bursaries to students.  Often we typists saw applicants as they came in for interviews.

"Guess what-?" said Maureen as she burst into the room.  Maureen was in her forties.  Her children had now left the house so she had come back to typing, and finding it a little difficult getting the hang of a basic electric machine rather than an old manual one.  This woman did love her gossip.   "I was introduced to a new applicant.  She's blonde and blue-eyed."

" Going for a job in UNESCO?" asked Megan, a young British immigrant, working her two year stint, and only been in the country a few months.  Megan was the best typist in the room.  Heck, she was the best typist I'd ever come across.  She was so perfect, she could have apprenticed Mary Poppins.  Only have I ever come across two absolutely perfect typists in my entire typist career, and Megan was one of them.  Never a typo brought back for this girl.  It was the bosses who made the mistakes, changing their minds again and again and again.  With a sigh we would have to retype what had been a perfect page, trying desperately to jam in the extra sentence an officer had added.  We could do this by raising, dropping or widening margins or - here's a serious no-no -  the squashing of some letters together (the lower-case 'l' was probably the only alphabet letter a typist could get away with squashing).  Otherwise it could be many pages that would have to be retyped, just for that one sentence. 

"No, no-"  Maureen was all agog:   "The girl's here for a grant from MAORI EDUCATION FOUNDATION."

Mmmmm....  We pondered the fact that a blonde blue-eyed young woman was applying for a grant from MEF.

"She speaks fluid Maori," said Maureen.  "She can trace her roots back a century.  A great grand-father was a chief...."

After a time, an Islands Education Foundation also opened up on the ground floor.  Many young polynesian teens were brought over to New Zealand for schooling.  They were given some money to buy clothes.  However, as these young people had never come across cold, windy, wild New Zealand winters, the clothes they ended up buying were terribly inappropriate for that season.  Soon remedied though, and the students were given snuggly-warm winter coats.  Lesson learned by our officers.

In the pool, we also dealt with Pitcairn Island, the place where the historic mutineeers of 'The  Bounty' ended up.   I loved reading the newsy information sheet about the island.  It was a wee bit reminiscent of the writings by my Medical Officer of Health at Health RO: gossip galore.  A teacher had been sent over to the island.

The head of our UNESCO office was a lovely person, vibrant and intelligent.  She went over to India on a business trip, and brought me back a ring that she'd picked up at the markets.  She'd known I liked rings, the gaudier the better -

One day she came bursting into the typing room with two prints of etchings in her arms.  They had been signed and dated by the artist.  She whispered the price to us. We were horrified by how expensive they were.   Maybe about $80 each.

Megan raised her eyebrows to me.  "Prints?" she mouthed.  "For that price?"  And I remembered the time when Miss Hopkins from room 305  (and now truly retired)  had brought in a framed print of Van Gogh's Starry Night from the gallery on Lambton Quay, and she hanged it on the typing room wall.

"The man in the gallery said I could bring it here and see if it suited our wall," she proclaimed.   "I'll buy it for us, if we all like it."   We typists huddled around her, ooohing and ahhhing over the picture. Yes, we'd have it!  But then the Admin Officer walked into the room and said no way could Miss Hopkins buy the print.  Tch, tch, it was not allowed.  Sadly, Miss H took it back to the shop.  We would have to stick to our boring faded prints of early Victorian New Zealand.

We mostly delivered our typing, giving a curt knock on the door, and placing a completed typing job right in the middle of a desk if the officer wasn't present.

I liked to walk along the wide lengthy corridor that went from the north entrance of Government Buildings through the building to the south entrance. I imagined I was in some english country mansion swanning along a long gallery.  Halfway along the corridor, beside the post office, there was the building's elegant foyer and main entrance.  This area had not been used in years, but painters were now working on the walls in preparation for a re-opening.  They were hurriedly packing up their gear - 

"What's up?" I asked.

"Asbestos," said the foreman.

"What's that?"

I went back to the typing room and told the others.  We'd never heard of asbestos, and when I relayed everything that the painter had told me, the typists were horrified.

Especially Maureen.   Like me, she was a bit of a scaredy-cat.  One day I said to her, with a shudder,  "Is there still a mouse problem in the walls?"

"What?"  She leapt out of her typing chair so fast that the chair's castors spun her chair halfway across the room.  Good thing she had not tried to stand on it.

I told her that a few years' back mice were often found in waste-paper baskets, fat and helpless to get out again once they'd gorged themselves on peanut-butter sandwiches and the like.

"Mr Ivers from Records pulled them out by their tails and flushed them down the toilets."

Maureen vowed to always look down into the Government Buildings' toilets from then on.  I think she was scared of the appearance of some weird mutant-like monster mouse peering back up at her.

Poisons were brought in.  Some mice died in the walls.  The smell had been awful.

But now ... 

... there came a typing shake-up.  Our typing style was changed.  It was decreed from the State Services Commission (all bow down!) that typists would save a high percentage of typing time by not indenting paragraphs.  Or including much punctuation.  Or capitals.  On the day of changeover, an officer raced into the pool-

"Who's the left-handed typist?" he demanded to know.

We tried to keep straight faces, but he waved a typed letter at us.  The block paragraphs flummoxed him, but it was the signing-off that shook him -

Yours sincerely

J D Brown
Director-General of Education
per 

Gone were the full stops after the initials, the comma after each line and the colon after 'per'.  We still kept 'Yours sincerely' if it started with 'Dear Mr Smith' and 'Yours faithfully' if it started with 'Dear Sir'.  However the addressee's name and address, along with the date, were moved across to the left too.

Oh dear, the officer was so confused.  In the body of a letter we would previously type phrases such as "The Commission said...".  This would now be "The commission said...", unless you were typing "The State Services Commission said...".  He just couldn't get his head around the new style.  Neither could most of the officers or, at least, the ones who hadn't read Mrs Rowley's memo advising about change-over day. And this was most of the staff.

Probably, the new way of typing was a direct result to the time-testing all govt department typists had been doing for several years.  Each morning we had been given a scrap of paper and every job we typed - be it short, long, or even an envelope - necessitated us crossing off strokes of five (like a prisoner crossing off days on a cell wall). What a rumpus this caused -

"I've typed 50 envelopes.  Hoorah, I've put down fifty strokes.  I win today - !"

"Oh, no, I've just finished a job of 90 pages.  It's taken two days.  I have one stroke to put down-"

"Mr Evans has brought back his ministerial.  Yet again!  He's changed his mind so many times.  Why aren't we allowed to rub out on letters signed by the minister (side-note:  notice the small 'm').  I can only class this as one job-"

Thankfully, with the advent of the new typing style, filling out the daily forms became a thing of the past...

Mrs Rowley had amended her "Typists' Guidebook" to include all the new changes.  The 'book'  included any typing problem that could ever arise for her 'girls'.  We even knew how to address the mayoralty, members of parliament (all parties), how to correctly spell "milage" (not "mileage") - the daily newspaper somehow picked up this mileage/milage decision and gleefully mentioned it in a column).  

The "Typists' Guidebook" was handed out to all the officers.

It didn't make their handwriting any better...