Work | Words on the Street

When you first started in local government (and, I suspect, any other similar job), you were the lowest form of life, namely the office junior. You did everyone else’s filing, had to go to the public counter when someone buzzed, answer the telephones and nip out to buy fags for a superior. However, all this administrative drudgery paled into insignificance when compared to the brilliantly conceived but frighteningly simple Refreshment Break Scam. The former junior (promoted to Plan Folding once you had arrived) would instruct you in the finer points of this lucrative process which would supplement your salary of £385 per annum. Oi! I don’t look that old!

It is probably best explained with an actual worked example and, as I recall the details for the purpose of this account, it has just struck me that, of the 16 employees in this particular office, none were female (well, not during normal working hours anyway) – a fact that has never occurred to me before. But that is not part of my tale.

You took orders for tea, coffee, plain buttered rolls and cheese rolls in the morning and only tea in the afternoon, then took a tray with teapot/coffeepot to the canteen across the back yard of the building where your orders were filled by Alice, the cook, who always had a cigarette hanging from her mouth, the ash always at the point where it was about to drop (and frequently did into whatever she was cooking, presumably). I don’t know who was worse, Alice or her successor, Betty. After Alice left, you always knew if suet pudding was going to be on the lunch menu when Betty wore only one elastic stocking. Well, I believed it at the time – I was only a young lad, after all. But I digress.

Suppose you had taken orders for 10 teas, 6 coffees, 5 buttered rolls and 8 cheese rolls. You would actually order 7 teas, 4 coffees (measuring quantities was by no means an exact science), 8 buttered rolls and 5 cheese rolls. On the way back from the canteen, you would redistribute the cheese from the cheese rolls to populate the 3 buttered rolls needed to make up the number of cheese rolls ordered. When you returned, you always had enough tea and coffee to fulfil the number ordered in the office and the right mix of plain and cheese rolls. Thus, you made a tidy profit and the poor fools suspected nothing!

I suppose I ought to have kept quiet about this – or does cheese fall within the statute of limitations?

At the Town Hall where I used to work, I was, for several years, a “designated officer” for the purposes of the Emergency Evacuation Procedure. When the alarm sounded, you had to run down to reception (they never did tell us where to go if reception was on fire) and collect a card with a particular task printed on it and a bright yellow tabard. There were several disadvantages of designation:- if you didn’t time it right and deliberately hang back to get “Task No. 8:- Using fireman’s lift, ensure all female staff under 25 are taken out of the building”, you’d have probably ended up with “Task No.5 – Find all suspicious-looking bombs and defuse them by cutting either the blue or yellow wire (good luck), then station yourself at the south-south-easterly footway access point, reference AP.9, to prevent the public entering the building”. Also, there were never any XL tabards. You actually needed XXXXL in winter when you were wearing a thick overcoat as well and everyone used to laugh while I struggled to don an item of clothing that had probably last been worn by one of the Seven Dwarves, whilst running round trying to borrow some wire-cutters and desperately wondering where south-south-easterly footway access point AP.9 was.

Nobody ever told you when the emergency (most often caused by a workman in the basement lighting a large cigar) was over, so you paced up and down for what seemed like hours trying to placate a growing (or, rather, growling) queue of impatient members of the public. Nor could you do sensible things like vital last-minute shopping while everyone was milling about by the War Memorial. It didn’t seem to matter if you went missing because nobody seemed to have the faintest idea what was going on and who was supposed to report that so-and-so was still in the toilet (“Sorry, they were quite busy from the sound of it and it didn’t seem appropriate to mention the word evacuation”) or out on a site visit or on holiday or standing at another Department’s specified assembly point.

And you didn’t get paid.