Will’s View

After almost four weeks of university, I have started reflecting on the differences between the working life and the student life, and thought I’d share some anecdotes from my time in the corporate world over summer.

Valentine’s Day

This was an interesting time to be in the office. My desk was near the secretaries on my floor, and so of course there was a lot of gossip about who was doing what, and who had received what on this romantic day of days. I remember several ‘romantic’ things being mentioned: dinners out; chocolates; roses, the usual stuff. But then one of the women mentioned that their partner of the time had actually given them an entire branch. Not just a rose, this fellow had gone over and above that, a whole branch! It had me in stitches for the entire day, thinking of a guy saying “Happy Valentine’s Day honey, I got you a branch”. Romantic.

Liquid Lunches

It is well known that many corporate types enjoy a couple of alcoholic beverages with lunch. I don’t deplore this practice, many of us have had days where it seems fitting to have a drink with lunch, either for celebration or as a stress relief. Whilst talking to one of the secretaries, I was told a humorous story with it’s roots in one of these lunches:

One of the higher-up employees (let’s call him Luke for argument’s sake) of one of the businesses near us had enjoyed quite a boozey lunch with important clients. Luke then called his secretary to ask her to cancel or reschedule his appointments for the rest of the afternoon. After hanging up from this call, the secretary decided that her charge had had a little too much to drink, and therefore he shouldn’t be driving home.

So what was she to do? Why, hide her his car keys of course!

She took them off his desk, and hid them in her drawer, and then left for home. What happened to Luke when he got into the office to look for his keys, I don’t know, but apparently he turned up to work the next day with no recollection of the treachery, and found his keys placed on his desk exactly where he thought he’d left them. None the wiser. That’s corporate responsibility for you!

Moisturiser

A lot of the people who read this blog have heard me talk at length on this, so I shall keep this brief. As I said earlier, I was placed in the midst of quite a few secretaries, and as most people know, secretaries tend to gossip. I have no problem with this, but it just so happened that the topic of conversation for at least two weeks of my time in the office was tanning moisturisers. I cannot for the life of me remember the different brands, but there was heated debates as to which was better. For two weeks! It really did almost drive me mad.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 22nd, 2007 at 6:33 pm and is filed under Humorous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.