TYPIST IN CHARGE

 Hi there

I've decided that, maybe once a month, I'm going to do portions of my biography for you, in regards to my working as a typist (typist, what's that, I hear you say?  Hehehe).   Each portion will be looooong, compared to previous entries.  Here we go - 

TYPIST IN CHARGE

In December 1960 I trotted shyly behind Mum to an interview for the position of Trainee Typist at the Department of Education Head Office, Government Buildings, Wellington. I was sixteen.  Mum did all the talking, and she got the position - oh wait, no!! It was me who got it. The pay was 15 pounds ( $30) per fortnight.

On the day I started work, the elderly Supervising Typist-In-Charge, Miss Dorothy Hopkins - the woman who'd interviewed me - had in the meantime recycled herself and was starting back as a basic typist. The typing pool (Room 305) housed ten of us. 

My first day was not a success.  At Wellington East Girls' College, my manual Imperial typewriter had a short carriage.  At the Department of Education, the carriage (the contraption that holds the roller for the paper) was a long one.  I was bad at sums and to try and do mathematical equations to exactly centre the heading of a letter in the middle of a page, on a long carriage machine, was beyond me.  My waste basket overflowed by 10 am.  By lunch-time I had secreted half the overflow away to be disposed of in the bin of the ladies' room at Kircaldie & Stains Department Store.  The other half was burned in the sanitary disposal unit at work.

How did it go?" Mum asked that evening..."

" Um.. Fred, the liftman is nice," I said. .  "Oh, and Miss Hopkins told me about how there used to be a porter come around every morning to light the fireplace.  And during the war, the typists would sit around the heat holding up used pages of carbon paper so as the carbon would re-melt because it was difficult to buy any more ..."

  Mrs Rowley, Typist-In-Charge of the pool, checked my work.  Most of it was returned as a redo.  I am grateful the woman put up with me.  She nurtured me, stood by me, even when I threw a mini tantrum because I'd spelt the word 'alcohol' wrong on fifteen individually typed copycat letters.  I had followed an officer's spelling.

There were about nine steps on the typing scale of higher positions to aspire to, ranging from Senior Typist, through various levels of typist-in-charge and supervising typist, up to the highest-of-highest: Supervising Typist in Charge. Two things were needed to progress up the ladder: a good work record plus shorthand. I tried learning shorthand at Gilby's Business College evening classes, but couldn't grasp it. 

I temped in various sections. School Publications (School Pubs) was in an old house on Willis street.  One of the editors regardless of chastisements about public servants not taking part in protest marches, was not only a marcher, but usually helped carry the banner in the very front marching row. Another editor, wanting a late morning lie-in, put on his vacuum cleaner to simulate the noise of printing presses. He rang into the department and shouted he'd be in later because he was at the Government Printer. Poet and editor James K Baxter slept in the old house's bathtub when he got in a row with his wife. The young clerk liked to dress up as a cowboy, in chaps, stetson, and gunbelt. He would go down town to collect the mail in that outfit.