Hi there
I decided to put in for a new typing job, any public service typing job. I just wanted to get away from Rossmore House, at the top of Molesworth Street, Thorndon. Education's regional office in Wellington was too far away from the city for a town bunny like me.
There were no non-shorthand jobs for in-charge positions being advertised in the Public Service Official Circular but there were several Senior Typist positions up for grabs. I applied for one in a different government department. It was a senior typist (dictaphone) position. I was called for an interview.
The 'girls' in the typing pool fluffed around me, advising what to wear to the interview, how to conduct myself and how to answer questions. Mrs Brown, the Typist-in-Charge wished me luck as she shoo-ed me out the door. The wonderful thing about applying for jobs in the government family was that everybody was happy for you to go to interview. An applicant was given time off, best wishes were thrown at you like confetti, there was no skulking out of the room and pretending you were going to the dentist...
At the interview, my first real interview ever, I completely failed at impressing the three interviewers -
"...and why do you want this job," I was asked.
"It's closer to the bus stop," I said.
I lost out on the job.
But ... the next interview I went to was for the position of - wait for it! - 'Typist-in-Charge' at the Wellington Regional Office of the Health Department. And ... there was no shorthand involved. Score!
I got the job. Somehow.
There were four of us in the typing room at Education House, Willis Street, in Wellington -
Roxy, Elizabeth, and Tracey each had the title of Staff Typist. I was two rungs above them on the typing scale. I was so happy with my new position.
There was one fly-in-the-ointment: Elisabeth was overseas when I joined the department and had been away for quite some time. She had taken leave-without-pay to travel the world with her boyfriend.
She had previously held my position of TIC in this very same pool but when she returned a month after I started she would be just a plain old ordinary Staff Typist. Her in-charge position hadn't been able to be held over past a certain date.
To me, Elisabeth was my Ghost of Christmas Past. The Shadow Over My Shoulder. My nemesis. I was sure that everything I did was being scrutinised by her. We were the same age but to me, she seemed more mature, more with-it, more aware of the goings-on of the department because of her past knowledge of the ins and outs of the place. She was tall and beautiful. She wore stiletto shoes every day to work and didn't even hide them under her desk and turn to flatties to run up and down between floors. Her boyfriend was god-like in looks and taller than her. The two together would have won charisma contests.
My administration director sent me on a course (during work-time, wow) to learn how to be a great leader. Well, I learnt to hang a wad of paper beside the room's one telephone so that people could take down messages. I also learnt to check up occasionally on how 'my' staff were progressing.
One lunch-hour period, I wandered around the three empty desks in the room. Elisabeth had been typing a letter to her boyfriend who was out of Wellington -
"The bitch got me to do some urgent typing..."
Tracey was the junior typist, a happy breezy young lady, thrilled to be in a job straight from school. Roxy, typist no 3, was a different kettle of fish. She was accurate to a fault, the trouble being that she was incredibly slow. A complicated one page table that the other typists could complete inside a morning, took Roxy two or three days. She checked every figure, letter, paragraph, sentence, over and over again, many times.
Roxy also had an obsession with cleanliness. After visiting the loo she would spend twenty minutes washing her hands. She would don white gloves to open the loo door to get herself back to the typing room. Eating a snack bag of peanuts at lunchtime, would necessitate Roxy using a spoon to get the peanuts out from the bag, yet again wearing her gloves.
In 1972 we didn't know about OCD. We were in the Health Department, and yet nobody picked up on Roxy's behaviour. In the pool, we just shrugged, thinking "Oh, well, that's just Roxy...".
Every morning we four took turns typing cheques on a special machine that was hell to learn how to use. The cheques were to reimburse doctors, so had to be sent out with alacrity and accuracy.
I wasnt very fast on the cheque machine. Figures were always my downfall.
"You're not very good at it, are you?" said Roxy smugly. She could do her portion in two hours.
The next day I broke her record by half-an-hour. Goodness, I was such a revengeful person.
I liked typing at Health Regional Office. There was an ordinary in-tray in front of me, as well as an urgent in-tray. Of course, most of the officers put their work in the urgent basket. Or, if I wasn't in the room, they set their manuscripts right slap-dab across the keys of my electric typewriter. Or on my chair. Or they hovered around my desk until my return. It was pain of death, of course, if an officer tried to jump the queue by approaching a staff typist.
One officer was The Visiting Medical Practitioner. He would make appointments at various doctors' surgeries up and down the country, pretending he was 'just a patient'. Then ... he would announce he was there to do a spot review.
All his work came in by dictaphone tape. He was hilarious with his reports on the shenannigans the staff at different surgeries got up to...
