Shine on

In summer 1988, at the end of my first year at Glasgow University, my boyfriend at the time, who was a medical student, got me a job at Glasgow Royal Infirmary as a domestic assistant (AKA cleaner). "The Royal" was a forbidding, time-blackened Victorian building between the M8 motorway and Alexandra Parade, complete with turrets and long dusty corridors; through the open windows you could see the beautiful, mysterious Necropolis in the distance and could sometimes hear the faint triumphalist piping sounds of Orange marches in the east end streets. A private company had the contract; the domestics, who were almost all women, had to wear a pale purple A-line uniform with white piping. Many of them were hard-bitten women in their forties who instinctively distrusted outsiders; unfortunately I ticked a lot of the wrong boxes, being a student, "English", studying for a law degree, and taking their jobs; I overheard one younger woman hissing to another "I hate that lassie!" as I left the locker room, and another took great pains to tell me that she couldn't afford Christmas presents for the weans this year. Most of them, though, were decent enough towards me under the circumstances; you'd be assigned to a more experienced domestic on each ward, and though a lot of them would set me to Herculean tasks such as cleaning the metal framework under patients' beds, a job clearly done so rarely that it looked like no one had ever attempted it before, and then sneak off to the "domestic services office" (mop cupboard) to stretch out the windows for an illicit fag, I had fun with some of them too and they taught me a lot.

That summer, I learned how popular Neighbours and Home and Away were: they were shown back to back on the BBC and ITV respectively, at lunchtime and just before dinner, and in every ward, even the terrible sweet-smelling burns ward where there were people in pretty bad shape, those who could walk walked, and those in wheelchairs were wheeled, along to the TV room at the end of the ward to watch every single episode, repeats and all. I enjoyed wheeling around the "maxpax machine" and asking patients if they wanted a cup of tea, coffee, hot chocolate or Bovril (a surprising number opted for the latter). I liked talking to the patients. But most of all I loved the glorious moment of clocking myself off at the end of a shift because I really didn't enjoy the atmosphere of fear and distrust, and in some cases bullying from senior managers, that seemed to be endemic within that company. Domestics were regarded by all other hospital workers as being right at the bottom of the food chain and in many cases treated accordingly. Also, the pay was pretty terrible; small wonder that the domestics seemed unhappy. They were doing a pretty important job, but being screwed by the company that employed them and looked down upon by everyone else.

I was pretty glad when the summer ended and I went back to university; I never worked there again, though they offered me a job the following summer. Some skills have stayed with me from that time, though: I can mop like a professional, make a floor shine with the unwieldiest of buffing machines, and leave a sink as clean as new. I also learned to appreciate the unseen, low paid workers who make things clean for everyone else.

Vo Vo voom

At work this week, I attended a meeting of the managers of one of our government contracts. It took place in a drab government office with awkward chairs and yellowing sellotape still stuck to the wall from long-gone admonitory posters. The managers, who'd moved from Castlereagh Street bringing their giant desks with them, were apparently much more well behaved than usual because I was there; and to top it all off, someone had very thoughtfully bought a packet of Iced VoVos which were served on chipped plates. The Iced VoVo is an old-fashioned kind of biscuit, which was described to me as being "the kind of biscuit that old ladies have when you go round to see them". I'd never come across one before and was quite delighted with them - so much so that I ate four. It's a thin biscuit topped with a stripe of jam, banked by two strips of sprinkled coconut. Colourful, tasty, and satisfyingly old fashioned: coupled with the surroundings, I could have been in a meeting in 1975.

My castle is my home

I had a brief, inglorious period in charge of the Australian division of the company I work for, prior to a big acquisition which increased the size of the business from 10 employees to 200 and required a full-time manager to be stationed there. While I was in charge I found it something of a struggle to get anything done, not being Australian, and being female and relatively young compared to staff who had been in the industry for 25 years and had no compunction about actively, passively and/or aggressively resisting any ideas I came up with, usually on the logic that this is the way we’ve always done things.

The nadir of the entire business, but the jewel in the crown to its denizens, was the office in Castlereagh Street in Sydney. It was about twice the size of the office in Hong Kong, but inhabited by a third of the staff, each person located (in splendid isolation and king of all they surveyed) behind a mega-desk which seemed to be consist of its own idiosyncratic add-ons, extensions, shelves and cubbyholes salvaged triumphantly from office renovations over the years; the walls were painted a revolting shade of green reminiscent of municipal sewage works or pre-glasnost Polish supermarkets; the anterooms were stuffed with receipts and invoices all clearly labelled with dates ranging from 1978 to 1992, long beyond their useful life; and piled up in mounds, everywhere, the stock in trade of our business, now long obsolete: ancient tape recorders, spare parts and audio equipment from manufacturers whose factories closed their doors in 1964. At the back, a grubby kitchen with a damaged kettle and lopsided tables which always seemed to be hosting half-eaten pipes of stale Pringles and the remains of someone’s birthday cake. The only thing the office needed to complete the look was a large sign saying ABANDON HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE.

I hope I am not maligning them too much by suggesting that the eyes of the staff stationed there were habitually dull; they certainly gleamed with native cunning when I made suggestions: “Let’s paint the walls white!” was met with the retort “But we chose this colour”. Unbelievably, despite the gargantuan desks, their chief complaint was lack of space.

I got an email this morning from N, who now looks after the business in Sydney, saying that the office is closing and staff are being relocated elsewhere. In my own small way I am feeling extremely happy about this; but presumably a whole new set of problems will present themselves as they try to find a removal agency willing to transport 14 garganto-desks with associated accessories to their new location.

Eat drink man woman

I spend some of my time at work doing presentations for lawyers. The law firm arranges for me to come in to their office to do the presentation which lasts an hour and earns attendees the princely sum of one point towards an annual requirement for continuous legal education. The presentations usually take place over the lunch hour so sandwiches are served, almost always in trays from Pret a Manger. I've done probably about 50 of them in the last few years. It's a great way to get in front of clients (usually between 10 and 20 litigators attend, sometimes more) and I really enjoy doing them: I have fun, make people laugh, tell what I hope are interesting anecdotes, know my subject well - or at least better than my audience (except when I was in front of 50 Melbourne barristers, but that's another story), which is what really matters - and we get business out of it because they remember where to come if they need our services.

I never usually talk about work on my blog but I had to break my own rule for this: yesterday's attendees behaved so shockingly rudely that I stumbled in my presentation. When I started my introduction, the only thing the more junior attendees (who were all young Chinese women, as a statement of fact, and there was a gang of about 10 of them seated round the table, ie more than half the people in the room) were focused on was the food on the table: rustling their paper bags, unwrapping them, discarding the contents, picking up another paper bag, swapping with each other, getting the right spoon, asking someone else to pass a Coke can, and eating with heads down and utter concentration on the task at hand.

After about five minutes of this, the most senior person there stood up and said loudly and pointedly that as a matter of courtsey they should immediately stop rustling and fussing about with the food and listen to their guest speaker (me). I said I'd give them two minutes to sort themselves out, did so, and then continued, to hardly rapt, but at least slightly chastened, silence.

Fifty presentations, at least, and that was the first time anything so unnerving had ever happened to me.

They're after my body

There’s a solicitors’ firm on the same floor as my office, named after the senior partner, a woman who is apparently very wealthy – and the reason we know this, apart from her general reputation, is that she has a bodyguard, a Gurkha. When she’s in the office he is usually stationed in reception, where there is nothing whatsoever to do, staring disconsolately out at passers-by; and he doesn’t get any activity unless she leaves the office or goes to the toilets on the same floor, at which point he follows her and stands outside. There is a ladies’ toilet and an “executive toilet”, for which only “executives” (including me) have the key; if she’s gone to the ladies, you can expect a stand-off outside as you try to get in while insisting to the embarrassed looking bodyguard that he can’t prevent entry to a public toilet, even if there may, in an extremely unlikely twist of fate, be armed-to-the-teeth mainlanders waiting inside to seize his employer. Standing outside, how can he protect her anyway?

This may seem an absurd over-reaction to an unlikely threat, but since poor old Teddy Wang was whacked in the eighties in an apparent kidnap-attempt-gone-wrong, the denizens of Hong Kong’s wealthier families have all been paranoid about being kidnapped for ransom and bodyguards are de rigeur. It’s also a very effective status symbol, signifying as it does both wealth and importance. I feel very sorry for the poor man, who has obviously never had to combat anything more dangerous than our meek and frankly puny office manager (albeit unusually irate on this occasion) trying to wash her hands.

Another country

Perhaps I'm toughening up - hallelujah! - or maybe I'm already as hard as nails without even realising it. I'm pleased to report that the work disasters of the last few weeks have passed by me on the waters. The advice I give to anyone in trouble - "just step over it" - which in turn I was once given by one David Beaumont in the hallowed, and drug-steeped, environs of a bar called La Sorbonne in the Grassmarket in Edinburgh in, good grief, 1985 - seems to have worked for me, too.

It does seem hugely self-indulgent of me to complain about work, in any case. I wanted responsibility? I got it. Now shut up and get on with it.

I could say the aforesaid David Beaumont - a rakish, good looking individual who must, I admit, take some of the blame for the fact that I decided to do a law degree, as he'd just completed one at Aberdeen - meant well, but clearly he didn't, and the insouciance and quasi-contempt with which he delivered the lines really stuck with me. Yes - I kind of liked it.

No need to talk about why he gave me this advice, at least not this time.

The past is another country. They do things differently there.
L.P. Hartley

Hard times

I had the worst ever day at work yesterday. Things went wrong; we made a mistake, which was my responsibility, and I ended up offering my resignation. It wasn't accepted, but I've spent yesterday and today putting myself through hell.

I feel that I really only have the thinnest layer protecting me from blows: I take things like this intensely personally and excoriate myself for everything I didn't do or should have done. I have hardly slept, I can't eat, I feel completely devastated by what has happened. I realise that it's an emotional reaction akin to the way I feel if things go wrong in my personal life, and this may not be appropriate for work: for one thing mistakes do happen, and if I can't cope with that, perhaps I shouldn't be in that job. But one of the things that makes me good at my job is that I care about the business, and care about the people I work with, and it makes it very difficult for me to cope with disasters like yesterday. I lack perspective and forget how lucky I am.

I know the measure of the individual is the way he or she reacts to things going wrong, and I just have to grit my teeth and get through this. It feels pretty damn hard right now, though.

Why should I let the toad "work" squat on my life?*

It's my birthday today, and I'm off work and wandering the streets seeing again, as if for the first time, what people who don't work do all day. When I was looking for work in Edinburgh in 1993, I remember walking along Princes Street looking at people in suits and feeling permanently excluded from their club.

Someone asked me the other day where I get my confidence from and I answered straight away "professional success" (half-quoting from the maxim "professional success is the revenge of the nerd"). Work is extremely important to me: what I do is a major contributor to how I feel about myself. I still suffer from crises of confidence about work, and whether or not I'm competent; but on the whole I feel confident about myself because I have a good job.

I've been feeling a bit disillusioned about work lately but walking around today reminds me that I need to work. I couldn't bear to be a tai tai, wafting around Lane Crawford and spending money on expensive bags to no end.

Amongst other things, today I noticed that a significant proportion of people are boldly walking around with a small flannel tucked into their clothes at the back of the neck. While practical (in the humidity of Hong Kong it absorbs the sweat), it's also frankly a bit disgusting. Do you rinse out the flannel by hand at the end of the day? Perhaps someone should suggest to Commes des Garcons that they should be incorporating this as a style feature in their workwear.

*Philip Larkin