admin

Although I live in New Zealand now, I was brought up in Britain and enjoyed many of my more outrageous experiences there. The following happened when I was living in London, years ago. I'd been made redundant from the company I worked for (a client had sacked the agency and they laid all of us off), and I was desperate to earn some money. I ended up working in a stationery shop in the City.

It was owned by a friend of a friend who had other interests, and once he realised that I wasn't a complete idiot he was reasonably happy to disappear for large parts of the day and leave me in charge. He was an older bloke and a bit miserable, but I think he enjoyed having me around the place and there isn't too much you can do wrong selling notebooks to secretaries and pencils to schoolkids, after all (and it was that sort of boring old-fashioned place).

Anyway, I found myself there on my own more often than not, and as things were never exactly busy I had plenty of time to read the Situations Vacant columns and type out numerous letters of application on the demonstration typewriter (word processors were a bit advanced for the shop back then).

One morning I'd got out of the wrong side of bed then come in late from a problem on the tube and was met by my boss with 'at last - I've got to go.' He was usually friendlier than that - in London, nobody can ever guarantee to be on time - so maybe he was having a bad day too but it made me feel wretched. All I was doing was standing behind the counter in a grotty old stationers and I couldn't even do that right.

The day got worse. Customers - the few that there were - all seemed grumpy, a shoplifter took an expensive Filofax cover and I didn't notice until too late, and then trade seemed to die altogether. Worst of all, just after lunch the paper delivery arrived and the driver was a bolshie old devil who refused to do what every other driver did for me. Instead of taking the 50 or 60 boxes through to the store-room at the back on his little trolley, he just dumped them inside the door, thrust his clip-board under my nose for a signature and dashed off. Our own trolley had gone missing a couple of weeks before, so I was faced with moving all that lot on my own - and paper is heavy, I can tell you!

'Ah well, Sally, set to it' I groaned to myself. I was on box number eight or so, bending down awkwardly to pick up a box that had fallen off the pile into a particularly awkward place behind the pen