Work Culture

One of the great questions about the world, along with Why does Jeremy Clarkson exist? and How do six billion people manage to produce so little television worth watching? is, What are secretarial staff for, exactly?

In Australia, true secretarial staff are becoming increasingly rare. Even where you can identify them, they tend to have titles like Office Manager or Security and Safety Officer, by which they prefer to be known. Here are a few things that such staff will not do for you in an Australian company:

• Type that letter to a client for you;
• Deal with your mail;
• Make coffee for you;
• Make your lunch;
• Wash your dishes after lunch;

and so on. In fact, a cynic might allege that Australian secretaries are only interested in doing jobs that increase their own power base within the company. Australian secretarial staff are generally very adverse to the above list of jobs, but very happy to, for instance, book travel (and approve or reject travel plans), prepare bids in response to tenders (and determine relative client-funded pay-scales for individuals) and so on.

I am a bit bemused to find that this is not the case in Britain, at least, certainly not at GH. All mail is opened by the secretaries, and dealt with as best they can; you only see it if they're not sure what to do with it. GH provides drip-filter coffee and lunch for their staff; the secretarial staff can be seen each morning, setting up the coffee machine (if no early-birds get desperate and beat them to it, which might actually be most of the time, often me), taking the delivery of sandwiches from Sainsbury's, laying out the pickles, mustard, beetroot, fruit, mayonnaise etc, slicing tomato and so on. And it seems to be just normal to dump your dishes on the bench afterwards, and let them load the dishwasher and pack the dishes away afterwards. Most people (including me) will load their own dishes if the dishwasher is not full for the day yet, but with two domestic dishwashers serving more than a hundred people, this inevitably runs out fairly early. So the secretarial staff deal with it.

Those familiar with an Australian office environment will likely notice some differences here. I suspect that, when I get used to it, I will rather enjoy it; for the moment it is quite uncomfortable, and I keep wanting to offer to help. At least once I have been told not to, because my time is too expensive for that (or at least better off billed to a customer).

And to elaborate on an earlier question, we have 43 free-to-air (so long as you pay your TV license fee) channels here; several of them are, admittedly devoted to to sort of infomercial only seen on late-night TV in Australia, or to constant music videos and the like, but there must still be at least 25 channels showing general television which then allege you would like to watch. Why is it that, at any one time, three of them will be showing Top Gear? which, if you do the math, tells you there are a very large number of Top Gear repeats here, and that Top Gear is sensationally popular here. There is also a channel called UKTV History, which sounds really interesting to me, being quite interested in the more popular bits of history; a quick look through to next week's programming shows that it only broadcasts for about eight hours a day (fair enough I guess) and repeats shows about every two days (what?). It perhaps goes to show that the Australian model of four channels with few repeats might be about right.

And let me take this opportunity to plug MythTV; a free software digital video recorder for your TV. With this and a £50 TV receiver card, I can control our TV from the computer. A week ago I told it to record any Top Gear episodes that came on; I now have sixty one and a half episodes recorded, which rather demonstrates the validity of my complaint, I think. Handy bit of software, though.