Everyone has bad days. It’s perfectly normal to be cranky from time to time at work. It’s part of being human and, in fact, anyone in the office who is enthusiastically cheerful every single day is almost definitely harbouring some sort of chronic psychosis.
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Tittle-tattle tension is all in a day’s work
26 April 2009
Everyone has bad days. It’s perfectly normal to be cranky from time to time at work. It’s part of being human and, in fact, anyone in the office who is enthusiastically cheerful every single day is almost definitely harbouring some sort of chronic psychosis.
It was Secretaries’ Day last Wednesday and for my secretary, Minnie, this turned out to be one of her bad days.
The bank I work for has a lot fewer secretaries than it used to. And those who are left are working harder than they ever did thanks to an ingenious cost-cutting idea that some bean counter came up with: an adjustment in the ratio of bankers to secretaries.
Before the lay-offs, each secretary, on average, worked for three bankers. Since the lay-offs, each secretary now has an average of five bankers. This means a disproportionately larger number of secretaries than bankers were given their marching orders.
The secretaries who are still at the bank are now, therefore, working 66 per cent harder than they were last Secretaries’ Day. And they stand to make probably the same - or perhaps less - money this year than last year.
As annoying as this is, it didn’t seem to really get Minnie down. But when I came into work on Secretaries’ Day, she seemed to have a dark cloud hanging over her head. Her e-mails were short one-liners, and she wasn’t looking up from her computer to speak to anyone. Including me.
“Are you OK?” I prodded gently. “You seem a bit down today. Is everything alright?”
Minnie seemed reluctant to say anything at first. “I don’t want to bother you with trivial things,” she said. “It’s just that ... no, I’m sorry, don’t worry about it.”
I suppose I could have said, “Oh, alright then. Could you go get me a cup of coffee?”, but I was pretty sure that she did want to talk about whatever it was that was upsetting her. I assumed that she and her husband had fought, or perhaps one of her several cats had died. I wasn’t quite prepared for what the real problem was.
“Well, I just found out that I’m not invited to the Secretaries’ Day lunch that some of the girls have organised.” She looked as though she was close to tears.
“Really,” I asked, genuinely surprised. “Why on Earth not?”
A couple of months ago, she explained, she took over the responsibilities for maintaining the photocopiers. One of the other secretaries, Kitty, who doesn’t much like Minnie, used this slight increase in Minnie’s responsibilities to tell everyone, “Minnie thinks she is so much better than all of us now”.
Over time, this tactic seemed to have worked and enough of the secretaries had now turned against Minnie that she had begun to be excluded from things, including the Secretaries’ Day lunch.
This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to office politics. My assumption about the support staff being a harmonious group of happy workers was completely misguided. There are rivalries and jealousies, shifting alliances, factional disputes and in-fighting that make the politics that we bankers have to put up with seem like a social club by comparison.
The head of office administration, for example, hates the tea lady because she feels the tea lady does not give her enough respect. Everyone else loves the tea lady, who is probably the most poorly paid - but one of the nicest - people here, so everyone hates the head of administration.
The lady in charge of the mailroom apparently flirted with one of the secretaries’ husbands at some point, so that secretary and her friends can’t stand the lady in charge of the mailroom, although some other staff particularly like her because of this.
The list goes on and on. By the time Minnie had finished explaining it all to me, I was exhausted. I was much happier not knowing all this, but in any case, I didn’t want Minnie moping around for days.
“Well, I’ll take you to lunch,” I said, “and we’ll go somewhere much nicer than where they’re all going.”
I had some meetings later that morning so I arranged to meet Minnie at the restaurant.
Riding down in the lift, I happened to bump into Kitty’s boss.
“Dave, did you know that Kitty and Minnie hate each other?” I asked him.
“No. That’s not true,” he said, “they’re all great friends. All the secretaries, they’re always having lunch and doing stuff together.”
For the rest of the ride down, I tried to summarise what Minnie had told me.
“Nah,” is all he said as the doors opened and we went on our way.
Thankfully, by the time Minnie met me for lunch, she seemed to be in a much better mood. “Order whatever you like,” I said.
Halfway through the appetisers, Minnie’s phone rang. She got up and stepped outside to take the call.
Ten minutes later, I looked up to see her coming back in the door, red-eyed and obviously quite upset.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“Kitty just called me to say that you asked her boss, Dave, to tell her off. All the secretaries now think I asked you to get Kitty in trouble. No-one will talk to me ever again.”
Practically the only other time she spoke during the rest of lunch - most of which she spent in the washroom - was to ask whether she could take the rest of the week off.
“Of course,” I said. “And ... umm ... happy Secretaries’ Day!”
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