petite anglaise

“Come on mum,” I say in a wheedling voice. “I’m going to have some cinnamon toast. Don’t you fancy a bite to eat? My treat…”

Mum frowns at the menu. “Well,” she says hesitantly. “A toasted scone might be nice. With some raspberry jam…”

When the uniformed waitress has scribbled down our order, my mother slips off to the ladies room and I rest my elbows on the cool pane of glass which protects the tablecloth from tea and coffee stains and stray dollops of whipped cream, and look around me. The flock wallpaper, which used to be a claret red, is now deep racing green. The carpet looks different too, although I can’t recall how it was before. If I crane my neck, I can see along a narrow corridor into the tiny kitchen, which appears to have had an extreme makeover in gleaming aluminium.

At the tender age of fifteen, I began working in a local newsagent’s to top up my pocket money. My memory of my first day in that job is crystal clear.

“20 Park Drive,” barked an elderly customer as he stepped up to the shop counter, under which the penny sweets were laid out in their cardboard boxes. I swallowed the white chocolate mouse I had just popped into my mouth and reached for the paper rounds ledger, scanning the pages for a mention of Park Drive, assuming the gentleman had come to settle his bill. “What on earth are you looking in there for, you daft cow,” the man said impatiently, “the fags are behind you…”

My face glowed an attractive shade of beetroot as I turned to face the wall of cigarettes behind me and scanned the unfamiliar packets. Legally, I wasn’t old enough to buy any myself, but within a few weekends I would know every price off by heart, and soon when particular customers shuffled through the door, I would reach instincively for their smokes of choice. In that neck of the woods back in 1987 by far the most popular brand were Lambert & Butler, which came in gold and silver coloured matt-finish packets not dissimilar from those they are sold in today.

My second weekend job, at the age of sixteen, was in a tearooms in York city centre. The main attraction of that job was the generous tips left by the well-to-do ladies who stopped by for breakfast, elevenses, lunch and afternoon tea. I scurried around, hot and flustered in the wool skirt and heavy blouse of that season’s uniform, and served cream teas and triangle sandwiches (“would you like the crusts on or off, madam?”) in this very room.

I do a swift calculation in my head, put a shocked hand to my mouth, then remove it so that I can repeat the sum on my fingers, twice, to make sure there can be no mistake.

I worked here NINETEEN years ago? Can that be possible? I mean, the waitress hastening towards our table with two large cups of coffee and a jug of single cream is probably not even nineteen years old. I worked here before she was even born?

I send an incredulous text message to my Boy to the effect that I am having an attack of age vertigo.

“Tu m’excites plus qu’une fille de 20 ans,” he retorts immediately.

I set down my phone with a smile. This boy, I think to myself, is most definitely a keeper.

My lawyer confirmed to me yesterday that my ex-employer not only does not intend to appeal, but has already paid up.

What a relief to see good sense finally prevailing, albeit later, rather than sooner…

NB: Me Eolas has written about his interpretation of events here, with useful links back to his previous posts about the case, as an impartial legal expert.

I read it here first, because no-one is faster than Maître Eolas.

I won. A year’s salary, plus costs. I will only get this compensation if my ex-employer does not lodge an appeal (they will have one month in which to do so once the written version of the decision is published in about a fortnight’s time). But right now, the principle is enough for me. Round one to petite anglaise!

What a relief.

Anyone fancy babysitting for Tadpole tonight so I can go out and paint the town red?

A French industrial tribunal hearing is, in some respects, a surprisingly informal affair. Four Prud’hommes, two employers and two employees who have been elected to hold this position (all salaried employees are eligible to go and vote in these elections, I’ve yet to meet anyone who has) preside over a small salle d’audience in civilian clothing, with the addition of a medal worn proudly around their necks on a red and blue ribbon. The lawyers representing the employees and employers whose cases are being heard wear black gowns with a white ruffle at the neck.

After a roll call at 1pm, the cases are heard one by one, and lawyers, employees, journalists, even members of the general public are free to come and go as they please as long – as they do so discreetly – and to report on the content of the proceedings. In sixth place, my turn didn’t come until 5.30pm. I read, I paced, I chatted to my lawyer. I paced some more. I drank too much coffee.

Lawyers have explained to me that the prud’hommes don’t necessarily have any legal background, and make their decisions based on their combined experience and common sense, decisions which are therefore often open to challenge and taken to the appeals court, where a more traditional, rigorous legal debate can take place. After hearing the arguments put forward orally by both parties’ lawyers the prud’hommes review the supporting documents and written arguments and deliver their decision. Sometimes this is immediate, but in my case the result will be announced in a week’s time. I think this had as much to do with the fact that the session was running late and there were several cases to be heard after mine, as it did with the complexity of the subject up for debate.

How did I feel when the hearing was over? Frustrated.

Because after all that waiting, when the time came, our lawyers were asked to be brief. It seemed to be over in the blink of an eye. I didn’t speak, except to confirm a couple of minor details. I was being spoken for, criticised, but able to do little more than wince or grimace when I disagreed with what was said. And most importantly, I realised that this case is based on words, not actions. My words. Commenters’ words.

And oh how they can be twisted.

No-one is saying that I did a bad job. No-one is saying I was guilty of absenteeism or slacked off or exhibited any sort of disloyal behaviour in the office. My actual performance in my job as secretary to a partner seems to be a moot point. I was fired because when my blog was discovered (or rather its existence reported to my boss by someone who worked with me) my employer read that I sometimes blogged from work, when I had nothing better to do. That a passage about meeting my lover in a hotel implied that I might have lied about my whereabouts on two half days, a year previously. That by blogging about work at all (however rarely I actually did this, and regardless of the fact that I did so under the cloak of anonymity) I was being disloyal to my employer and putting the reputation of the firm at risk.

In addition to making this point – and I think his exact words were “if she’d confessed to murder on her blog, even if there was no actual proof of any wrongdoing, should she go to prison?” – my lawyer used jurisprudence to argue that an employee is not some sort of robot whose time is not their own. The internet has broken down the barriers between the personal and the professional, and previous rulings have shown that workers do have the right to send the odd personal email or use the internet for non work-related surfing, as long as they are doing their job. He argued that freedom of speech permits a worker to discuss what goes on in the workplace, as long as the line is not crossed into libel. Although I was told that the firm objected to certain passages on my blog, I only discovered what these were when the supporting documents for the tribunal case were sent to us a little over a month ago and I saw which extracts they had translated into to French. Clearly if there had been anything libellous, I’d have been sued by now. But either they’re not, or it’s impossible to demonstrate that the people I described were identifiable.

So far, so good.

Predictably, it’s the arguments made by my former employer’s lawyer which I found objectionable. True, they had nothing to support their allegations that I had damaged the firm’s reputation, or even caused any distress to any members of staff prior to my dismissal. The two or three colleagues who had signed a short statement were simply confirming that they knew of the blog’s existence and that they had seen me consult it at work. So in the absence of any hard facts, my words were used against me. Translated into French, taken out of context, a couple of lines from a post, a comment written by me, a comment written by a reader. No clarification about who wrote what, or when. Taken in isolation you can pretty much make words mean whatever you want them to.

So I had to sit there, seething, while my own words were made to lie.

“The subject which is preying on my mind, to the exclusion of all else, is the fraught atmosphere at work. However, I’ve come to the conclusion that I need to exercise caution about what I say.”

“Now, when I have a discussion with my colleagues over lunch, I no longer even know myself whether I’m picking their brains for material for a future post or just having a normal friendly conversation. Unwittingly they have become guinea pigs…”

These two little snippets, taken out of context and wrenched from their rightful place in my blog’s history (September 05 and October 04) were used to imply that just before I left, in April 2006, my blog CAUSED an awkward atmosphere at work. That colleagues had started to be aware of it and now lived in constant fear of what I might say about them. That this made my continued presence in the company impossible. I was pleased when one of the prud’hommes piped up and asked whether there was any evidence to support this, such as written complaints by employees, which of course there weren’t, because hardly anyone knew about the blog, and aside from a couple of descriptions of my superiors, and this isolated example from July 2004, no-one had actually been written about. Ever. But this only mollified me a little.

Because in fact, in the first instance, I was explaining that things were tense with my boss but I realised I should be careful not to talk about that on the blog, in a post where I then went on to provide my readers with a quiz. In the second, I was talking about the effect of blogging on my life, and saying that I sometimes tested my stories out on my friends in conversation to see if they were funny before I wrote them up on the blog.

Anyone who has read petite anglaise knows that I didn’t make a habit of writing character assassinations of my colleagues and friends. But I can’t expect the prud’hommes to read an entire blog in a foreign language to convince them of this fact. Or to know that the words which followed “guinea pigs” were “even though they know nothing about petite anglaise”. Context is all.

The masterstroke at the end was when my ex-employer’s lawyer congratulated me on my book deal, prompting raised eyebrows from all present. The implication being that because I haven’t suffered enough as a result of my sacking, that makes everything alright. Let’s just gloss over those five months which intervened between my sacking and the deal, shall we? The ten kilos I lost through worry. The sleepless nights and constant crying. The apartment purchase which almost fell through. It doesn’t matter if I was wrongfully dismissed or not. Who needs principles when they have something else to fall back on?

Which rather begs the question: if I’d been burgled, but won the lottery the following day, should the thief have been let off scott free because I could afford to replace everything?

I am going to the prud’hommes (French industrial tribunal thingy) today to contest my dismissal. This is rather unexpected, but my lawyer informed me late on Friday evening that contrary to everything we had been led to believe, my ex-employer’s lawyers had changed their minds about asking for the hearing to be deferred to a later date (and had forgotten to let us know).

Given that I’d been told precisely the opposite a matter of days earlier, it’s somewhat miraculous that I’m back from the UK, have childcare for the day and can attend at all. I suppose, to look on the bright side, at least I haven’t spent the last week feeling apprehensive, which might have put a dampener on my trip to England with Tadpole.

More later…

Update: lawyer obtained a deferral and the case now will be heard on 21 March, which should give me time to actually read the substance of the arguments being made against me and make sure all the facts are straight.

I think it might be the light-hearted banter I miss most.

In the mornings, as the coffee machine screeched and growled, grinding beans (or cockroaches) to make a near perfect espresso, we yawned, stretched and gossiped. On a good day, someone might have baked a cake, or some brownies, or brought in a huge bar of imported Cadbury’s chocolate. It was nine a.m. and I’d only eaten breakfast half an hour previously, but I learnt that it’s never to early for the first chocolate fix of the day.

Around one, a crowd of girlfriends fetched sandwiches and salads together and we picnicked while we moaned about the boss, or our boyfriends, or discussed the latest episode of whichever series was flavour of the month. On bad days, our collective silence was punctuated only by the occasional sigh; on better days we made each other giggle uncontrollably, and I wobbled dangerously on my high stool, tears streaming down my cheeks, secretly giving thanks to the French God of post-natal re-education, without whom I would have undoubtedly been in trouble.

The office was my main source of adult conversation; my lifeline. I don’t think I ever woke up looking forward to working – or that a single day went by when I didn’t swear at the sound of my alarm clock – but once I was there, my office friendships sustained me.

There are many things I don’t miss, of course. The distinctive rattle of a cassette being inserted into a dictation machine, especially ten minutes before I was due to knock off for the day and fetch my Tadpole. The constantly trilling telephone, which could not be left unanswered. Not only having to drag myself to the office in the mornings, but the need to look presentable, which meant tights, make-up and uncomfortable shoes. The tray used for taking coffee and tea into meetings, which was just too wide to comfortably negotiate the meeting room doorway. Photocopying; binding; typing accounts. The ducking, diving, bowing and scraping of office politics. Living at the mercy of mercurial temperaments and blood alcohol levels. Long periods of idle time which crawled by at a snail’s pace while at home, piles of ironing, dusty floors, washing up in the sink all waited patiently for my return.

As I sit in front of my computer, barefoot, clad in jeans, a mug of tea by my side, I decide that a little bit of loneliness is a very small sacrifice to make, in the grand scheme of things. Besides, I can get my banter from gmail, and bake my own brownies if the desire should grab me.

And when an email pops into my inbox from my new accountant, the irony of the situation in which I find myself is definitely not lost on me.

We take a seat at an outdoor table in front of Le Panier – a quirky little café on the Place St Marthe – and a contented sigh escapes me. What bliss to take some time away from the computer, which dominates my living room, my bedroom, my life. The Place St Marthe is a perfect place for playing “spot the bobo” and basking in the last rays of the summer.

The proprietor sets down a carafe of water, two glasses and a menu, taking a seat by my side. My mouth twitches with suppressed mirth. I have been here before and I know from experience that he is a rather larger than life character, who often pauses to sit by his bemused patrons talking surreal nonsense until he gets bored, moves on in search of new prey. Today he is dressed in white and blue striped cotton pyjama bottoms and a scruffy t-shirt. I wonder idly whether he is going commando and peer discreetly down to see what footwear he has chosen to accessorise this charming ensemble.

“The specials today are blanquette de veau with mascarpone, sauté d’agneau and a mushroom tart,” he says, giving me an odd sidelong glance which I find impossible to read. “Personally I don’t recommend the mushroom tart, it’s not up to much…” I wonder whether this is a skillful reverse advertising strategy. If not, my overwhelming desire to order the tart is simply a reflection of my own perverse nature. In the end though, I decide against it, as I scan down the menu and something else takes my fancy.

My friend – so traumatised by our last near miss that he insisted upon picking me up today on his scooter to avoid a repeat performance – quizzes me about all the surreal things which have been going on of late and then we fall silent for a while, savouring the tender souris d’agneau (I’m very vague about cuts of meat, in French, but I’m reliably informed that no mice were involved in the preparation of this meal) which falls away from the bone and melts in my mouth.

We order dessert, coffee, a beer, whiling away the afternoon until it is time for me to collect Tadpole from school. As I draw close to the throng of waiting mothers around the doorway, I reflect on how privileged I feel, right now. If things had been different, I would still be scurrying to the office every morning, never sure what kind of atmosphere would reign. A stranger would pick up Tadpole from school in the afternoons, and mind her until I got home. I would brave the rush hour métro twice a day.

Instead, I pad through my apartment barefoot, clad in my favourite jeans and power up the computer. I take a break when I feel I’ve earned one, or when my head becomes dull and heavy and words no longer flow. Grabbing a book from the pile, I head for the Parc de Belleville, sit cross-legged in the grass, my hair ruffled by a gentle breeze.

Every day I pass the steps where a plaque reads:

“Sur les marches de cette maison, naquit dans le plus grand dénuement celle dont la voix, plus tard, allait bouleverser le monde”

A song echoes in my head. I regret nothing.

It is a Tuesday morning in early May, four days after my dismissal interview. An interminable bank holiday weekend alone, fretting about the future, has left me drained and exhausted. Luckily Tadpole is with Mr Frog’s parents for two whole weeks, a stay which was organised long ago to coincide with the childminder’s holidays.

Fortunate timing, I will admit, as I am in no fit state to care for anyone else right now. This logic does little, however, to take away the dull ache that her absence provokes.

I fire off a short email to my soon-to-be-ex-boss, enquiring as to whether my dismissal letter is ready. I have a deadline to respect for my apartment purchase, meaning that I must pull out or confirm the loan within the next five days. The very last thing I need is to wait for the postman deliver a letter sent by recorded delivery snail mail.

Rather than spend the next few hours on tenterhooks, pacing and willing the phone to ring, I watch several episodes of “Lost” back to back, still clad in my Miffy pyjamas. Focusing on suspenseful television is a helpful displacement strategy: my own stress is put on hold, temporarily, while I worry about mysterious monsters in the jungle instead.

The phone trills at 2.30pm.

“Allô?” I answer, pretending I do not know to whom I am speaking, despite the fact that the caller ID is clearly displayed on my handset.

“Catherine? How are you?” my boss stammers awkwardly.

It is a shame it has come to this, because despite our differences and occasional fallings out, we did get on pretty well, as a rule. And now we don’t quite know how to speak to one another.

“Oh, you know, I’ve been better,” I reply breezily, making a supreme effort not to betray my nervousness.

“I think I should be in a position to give you a copy of your dismissal letter this afternoon,” he continues cautiously.

I sense a “but”, and am not proved wrong. “It really depends on whether you agree to write a letter asking to be excused from serving your notice period…”

Notice period? My mind races ahead. If there is a notice period, that means that I am no longer being dismissed for “faute grave”. My suspension will be transformed into paid leave, I will get my holiday pay, and a small amount of severance money. This is all good news.

But, if my suspicions are correct, writing the letter he is asking for would mean waiving my right to a paid two month notice period. Not good.

I mumble something about mulling things over and arrange to drop by the office at the end of the afternoon. I replace the receiver, and when I look down, realise that my hands are visibly shaking.

A rapid telephone consultation with a union juriste confirms beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is out of the question for me to write any such letter.

It occurs to me that my ex-boss seems to be playing the role of the good cop, who has, against all odds, negotiated the best possible deal he can on my behalf, whereas, in fact, the real aim might be to make me feel so pathetically grateful that I will willingly sign away my rights.

This impression is confirmed when I arrive at the office.

I sit, opposite my ex-boss, in his glass walled office, only a few metres from the desk where I once worked. He seems dismayed when I decline to write the letter, and makes a great show of consulting fellow partners (running up and down the stairs, taking calls from a nearby meeting room) while I wait, trying to keep a lid on my panic, and, through a supreme act of will, refraining from taking a peek at the letter of dismissal left tantalisingly on his desk every time he vacates the room.

At one juncture he returns to tear up a copy of the letter with a theatrical flourish. A dramatic gesture; but I note, with an inward amusement I take pains not to display, that the original copy remains intact on his desk.

“Well,” he says, “I don’t know what to do now… I’m going to be away for a few days … and it doesn’t look like we can resolve this today…”

I say nothing, motioning as if to pick up my bag.

“Wait, stay there, I’ll just try one last time,” he says, and heads down the stairs once more. When he returns, he picks up the letter, and takes it to the photocopier.

I appear to have won a small victory.

He walks me to the lift, a manila envelope clutched in my clammy palms, my legs decidedly wobbly.

“Of course, I can’t promise that I won’t take my case to the prud’hommes.” I say, as the lift doors begin to slide closed.

Because this is far from over, as far as I’m concerned.

My phone rings: it is Old-School Boss. I am nervous, but no more than usual. His formal, headmasterly tone always manages to unnerve me, and when I replace the receiver after one of our exchanges I often feel I have slipped back into the skin of the painfully shy and inarticulate schoolgirl I thought I had left far behind.

“Can you come down to my office for five minutes please?”

Something in his voice, coupled with the way in which my boss averts his eyes when I mutter that I have been summoned, alerts me to the fact that something is very wrong.

Old School Boss motions for me to close the door behind me. He doesn’t wait until I am seated to deliver the first line of his speech.

“I’m afraid I have called you here to tell you that I am obliged to terminate your employment with the firm.”

I sit.

My mouth forms a perfect “O” of astonishment.

“This is because of your internet site.”

Somehow he manages to make “internet” sound like an unspeakably filthy word.

He doesn’t care to disclose how it is that the existence of petite anglaise has suddenly come to light, but I suspect the high number of page views I happened to notice last weekend by someone living in my boss’s town were not coincidental. The statistic had made me mildly nervous, but when nothing was said on Monday morning, I dismissed my fears as nothing more than a nasty bout of sitemeter-induced paranoia; an occupational hazard.

I am barely capable of forming sentences, so great is my shock, managing only to stammer: “b…but I hardly ever mentioned work…”

He begs to disagree. “You mentioned work rather a lot in my opinion, and in so doing, you have brought the firm into disrepute.”

With hindsight, I realise this would have been a good time to say “but how can the firm be identified?” However at that precise moment my synapses probably resemble a game of join the dots.

He adds, almost as an afterthought, that he also has reason to believe I had accessed my blog during working hours.

I am handed a letter to read and sign, which invites me to attend a dismissal interview the following week. There is a phrase I do not understand, “mise à pied conservatoire”, the horrible significance of which only becomes clear once I get hold of a dictionary, at home. I have been suspended without pay, pending my dismissal interview for gross misconduct*. The kind of grizzly fate usually reserved for people who endanger the lives of other employees, turn up to work under the influence or embezzle funds.

“I’m going to have to ask you to collect your belongings, and you will then leave immediately.”

I take a few moments to gather my wits. Cheeks flaming, I slowly make my way back upstairs.

Curiously, when I return to my desk to start gathering up my personal effects, my boss is nowhere to be seen.

*This was revised ten days later to “licenciement pour cause réelle et sérieuse – perte de confiance” – (dismissal for real and serious cause – breakdown of trust). Something of a relief as gross misconduct involves immediate dismissal, whereas “cause réelle” involved a paid notice period during which my presence in the office was not deemed necessary.

I have hinted, in recent weeks, at events which were unfolding in the background. Sinister events. Events I was not at liberty to discuss on my blog, just yet.

In the meantime I stuck to the safest anecdotes, seething with frustation at not being able to write about that One Single Horrible Thing which was preying on my mind, night and day, causing dramatic (and not entirely unwelcome) weight loss, panic attacks and sleepless nights, in the beginning.

The waiting is over, and I will begin by turning back the clock to my unexplained two week hiatus at the end of April this year. Starting with a post originally written on Wednesday 26 April 2006.

Here goes.

I step into the lift, inspecting my face in the mirror for tell-tale streaks. As I make my way across the park, I wonder whether the nanny will notice that I have arrived from the direction of home, wearing jeans.

I take a few deep breaths as I approach, hoping that my facial expression does not betray my inner turmoil. I very much want to hold things together, for Tadpole’s sake.

Tadpole greets me with indifference, which is not unusual. She is far more engrossed in trying to wrestle a very large Noddy doll off one of her playmates. Her own – a more pocket sized version – lies abandoned on the floor, a grass stain across his cheek.

It would appear to be high time for us to have a mother-daughter conversation about how size isn’t (always) everything.

“Come on sweetie,” I begin, brightly, “you can’t take the big Noddy. It’s not yours. Yours is much better, because he fits in your bag, and you can take him everywhere.”

“NOOOO! I want the big Noddy!” Tadpole rages, face set in a stubborn expression which reminds me, suddenly, of her father.

“Well, that’s a shame,” I continue, with a sudden flash of inspiration, “because it’s little Noddy’s birthday today, and he wanted to invite you to his birthday party… but if you don’t want to come…”

“Can we get a birthday cake?” Tadpole enquires, playing into my hands as I knew she would. “And some candles?”

On the way home we discuss how old Noddy is today (definitely 3) and what kind of cake he would prefer. I realise the boulangerie is closed, and we settle for a chocolate swiss roll from Franprix, the only thing which looks remotely festive.

Once the candles are lit, Tadpole looks at me, suddenly anxious. She points at Noddy’s embroidered smile.

“Noddy can’t blow the candles. Look, he hasn’t got any mouth, mummy,” she says, sounding genuinely sorry for her little doll.

“Well, maybe you can do it?” I venture, trying not to dwell on the parallels between Noddy’s mouth and my self-enforced silence in the days to come. Tadpole obliges, with great enthusiasm.

I look at my daughter, her beautiful chocolate-icing coated cheeks, and wonder how on earth I have managed to make such a mess of things. Here I am, holding a fantasy birthday party, while our whole world is literally crashing down around our ears.

I was “dooced” today.

Suspended without pay, pending a dismissal meeting in ten day’s time.

Asked to collect my belongings together and leave the building immediately.

The words “faute grave” were used. Translated into English: gross misconduct.

Petite Anglaise: the blog that got me fired. Call me naïve, but I really didn’t see that coming.

Please note that due to the rather unexpected levels of traffic (most doocelike) today my host has had to redirect the blog address, create static entry page and all sorts of other tomfoolery, so we don’t bring down the shared server and disrupt other people’s service. In the meantime you may not be able to leave a comment. Hopefully things will calm down shortly, and I will still be able to post in the meantime.

“Now, about Monday…” my boss continues.

I have no idea what is supposed to be happening on Monday. What haven’t I organised? Whose hotel haven’t I booked?

“Monday… Now, let me see…” I reply, in the calmest, most in control super secretary voice I can muster, while hastily opening his calendar in Outlook to see what I’ve missed.

The computer responds at a leisurely pace, mired in the middle of some pesky spysweeper scan.

“Oh, you’re breaking up, can you hear me? Hello? Hello?” I improvise, praying that he is not, in fact, calling from a landline.

And then the window pops up and I notice “[PETITE] OFF” on Monday 27 March 2006.

“Ooh! I’m on holiday! I’d forgotten! What a lovely surprise!” I cry, unable to curb my enthusiasm.

Miss Moneypenny would never have lost her composure like that. I have a lot to learn.

I can almost hear in my boss’s silence his chagrin at having reminded me of my forgotten holiday. There is a good chance that had he not, I would have appeared at 9.07 am sharp, none the wiser, and done a full day’s work.

So. My question is, what shall I do with this day of freedom, which has fallen unexpectedly out of the sky and into my lap?

Suggestions in my comments box please. Preferably inexpensive ones, as the end of the month is approaching.

As we left the office to take the métro to the Marais location of our annual office Christmas lunch, the bombshell was dropped that some, if not all, staff would be expected to return to the office afterwards. Yours truly numbered among the unfortunate few, as the boss had some work he needed to finish off and made it clear that my services would be required. Inwardly fuming, I resolved to ensure that sufficient alcohol was consumed to render my presence entirely futile. It being lunchtime, the quantities required need not be vast.

First up, a champagne apéro had been laid on, to encourage us to mingle with the guests from our London office. The serveur on duty filled our glasses and then busied himself cruising around the vaulted rooms of the wine cellar where the festivities were being held, bearing a tray of appetisers. My glass soon empty, I waited five minutes before discreetly catching his eye and enquiring whether the remaining bottles of champagne in the cooler were “for decorative purposes only”. My comment was greeted with a raised eyebrow, but did ultimately have the desired effect: corks were duly popped, and for the duration of the apéro I was gratified to see that my glass was filled twice as often as everyone else’s.

Swaying slightly, I was well on the way to achieving my goal, and we hadn’t yet moved to take our seats at the Christmas cracker strewn tables. In accordance with long standing company tradition, the senior partner’s wife provides luxury crackers each year for our Christmas “do”. This year’s vintage looked particularly elegant, tied with irridescent ribbons, and, upon closer inspection, with promisingly weighty contents.

Unfortunately, throughout our meal of cream of chestnut soup with a garnish of sot-l’y-laisse (which I’m reliably informed is the part of a chicken known as the “oyster”, the best bit, hence you would be a fool to leave it) and duck leg stuffed with cèpe mushrooms, the waiters served only one glass of wine with each course, taking the bottle away with them each time. After an auspicious start, I was now beginning to feel worryingly sober.

Suddenly there was a volley of popping noises from the neighbouring table, headed up by my boss, as crackers were pulled. A shocked silence instantly fell over the rest of the room, and I put my hand to my mouth in horror.

It is an unwritten rule in our office that crackers may not be pulled until the senior partner and his wife have given us all the cue, by pulling theirs. My boss, not a great fan of tradition, had just committed an unforgiveable faux pas, probably on purpose.

I swivelled around in my chair to monitor the reaction of the senior partner, whose face was, predictably, stormy. Not a word of rebuke was uttered, but the tension in the air was palpable.

In an attempt to diffuse the frosty atmosphere, our IT technician went to put on the party CD which he had created, made up of tracks requested by various members of staff. But even with Bruce Hornsby and the Range coming to our rescue, it was touch and go as to whether our good spirits could be restored.

And one had to wonder whether the French secretary who chose Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Relax” was aware that the lyrics constitute a hymn to fellatio?

At 5pm, feeling replete, sleepy and just a little tipsy, I staggered back to the office, while my colleagues headed for a local bar.

Naturally, I was called upon to do no work whatsoever.

My boss managed to reduce me to tears twice yesterday.

The main culprits were hormones. It was one of those days where I knew instinctively that any harsh word might provoke an extreme reaction. Either I would end up in tears, or I would fly off the handle. Or both. From the moment I arrived at work, and gauged my Boss’s irritable mood, it was like driving towards a brick wall in slow motion. The collision was inevitable, only the timing remained uncertain.

The accusations that were levelled at me during our heated exchanges did give me some food for thought. Apparently I am ‘detached’ and ‘disengaged’ from my job. I countered that I felt I had come in for far too much unjustified criticism of late, and resented being used as a metaphorical punching bag every time my boss’s stress levels started to rise. My solution is generally to pull back, keep my head down, and try to make myself into as small a target as possible. A vicious circle: the more I withdraw, the more he resents my detachment and snipes at me. We seemed to have reached a deadlock, and I was rather afraid that we had said some things which would be difficult to unsay.

And so it was that I left work in a sorry state, drafting a letter of resignation in my head as the métro rattled through the tunnels, panicking as to how on earth I could afford the life of single parenthood I had chosen without my overpaid secretarial job. Leaving Paris is something I have been considering for some time now, but I want that to be a positive choice, timed to suit my needs, and those of my daughter. I don’t want it to be about running away from a situation which has gone sour.

Thankfully, things have a way of looking better in the morning. After a poor night’s sleep, turning arguments over and over in my head, I agreed to do everything I could to reverse the damage, and my boss, also looking tired, conceded that he had overreacted somewhat and let things get out of proportion. I resigned myself to putting on my most convincing Miss Moneypenny act in the coming weeks, until my boss’s confidence has been fully restored.

Of course what I was really beating myself up about all evening, was my guilt about working on my blog on company time. I have no idea why I allow something which will never pay my bills or feed my daughter to take up so much space in my head, however unfulfilling my day job might be. I know without a doubt that if its existence is discovered, and my boss finally understands just why it is that I have been so detached, I will be unceremoniously fired. Not for having a blog per se, or even for neglecting my work – because I only work on the blog when I have nothing else to do – but because the pieces of the jigsaw will fall into place and he will finally understand what it is about me that has changed. And feel aggrieved that I have kept secrets from him.

Here’s hoping that none of that ever comes to pass.

If I was a cartoon character, there would have been animated steam pouring out of my ears.

“I have a problem with the holiday request form you submitted.”

I groaned inwardly. His slightly petulant tone of voice did not bode at all well.

I had returned to work, after two weeks off (which I hesitate to call a holiday, having only glimpsed the sea, briefly, from the vantage point of an aeroplane), hoping that my boss had seen the light and decided to to stick to his side of the bargain. I would make an effort to work more closely with him, and he would stop sniping at me when work pressures got the better of him.

“I have a problem with Friday 9th. I’m travelling at the beginning of the week, and I’m going to be horribly busy…” he tailed off, patently aware that his excuses were sounding exceedingly feeble.

It hadn’t occurred to me for a second that this might be his response. Not one other member of support staff was due to be absent that day, and my holidays officially take into account only other secretaries’ absences. Not the whims of my boss. Who, incidentally, goes away once a week pretty much all year round, so following through this twisted logic, I’ll never be able to go on holiday ever again.

“I see,” I said slowly. “The thing is, the 9th is my birthday, and I was hoping to go away for the weekend.”

I banked on the the word “birthday” tapping into some well concealed vein of sentimentality and bringing about a change of heart. In fact, with hindsight, I suspect the significance of the date had not been lost on him. This was a power game, pure and simple.

“Can’t you go away in the evening?” my boss countered, trying to sound as though he was being entirely reasonable.

“No. I’m afraid I can’t,” I replied, trying now to appeal to the father in him, and elicit some sympathy by playing on my single mother status. “If I work until 6pm, and then collect Tadpole, so the earliest train we could make leaves after her bedtime. Unless I could leave a little earlier? Or work a half day?”

Two can play at sounding reasonable. Perhaps compromise was the way forward.

He mumbled something unintelligible and pretended to give this idea some thought, before dismissing it on the grounds that he might be too busy to let me go early. He then made a great show of signing my other request for a long weekend in November. To show me how generous he could be. Let that be a lesson to me: never put in for multiple holiday requests on the same form.

So on my birthday, I will be mostly sitting at my desk, bristling with resentment.

And plotting an elaborate revenge.

I have been puzzling recently over the best way to describe the situation in which I find myself at work. The French have a phrase which fits perfectly – “harcèlement moral” – but the naming of this phenomenon is relatively recent and I could find no translation in my university French/English dictionary.

Yesterday afternoon saw me in floods of tears, curled up in a foetal position in our work kitchen. After being the focus of a barrage of insulting remarks throughout the morning, for which I could find no rational explanation or justification, it was a phone call from departing boss which was the final straw.

“Well, I won’t list all the ways in which you could have been more helpful this morning…” was the stinging rebuke. Given that I had done everything in my power to be just that, the remark really stung. I was speechless.

By the time he called back however, the hurt had turned to anger and I was ready to riposte. “Perhaps you could list the things I ought to have done to be more helpful this morning, I’d be very interested to hear what they are.”

The explanation, when it came, was so preposterous that I will probably laugh about it, one day. One of the accusations levelled at me, in all seriousness, was that I had had the gall to offer him a slice of someone’s birthday chocolate cake when he hadn’t yet had a cup of coffee.

I must remember to add coffee and tea making to my job description when I next have an appraisal form to fill in.

Some of his other criticisms were more sweeping statements. I “operate in a vaccuum”. I “don’t talk to him enough”. I fail to see how it falls to me and me only to initiate contact with him and wonder if a word like “enough” can be quantified, for the avoidance of doubt. More importantly though, I feel that his reproaches make it sound more like we are in a personal relationship than an empoyer/employee situation, and that is wrong on so many levels.

The insults continued to fly until I finally cracked, and told him, in a wobbly voice, that I needed to excuse myself to go to the bathroom, and was there anything he required before I put the phone down?

Leaving the office that evening, I felt sure that the only way out of the situation was to resign – even if, financially, it is the last thing I want or need to do right now – and made a mental note to dig out a copy of my CV.

Today, however, I woke up seeing things in a very different light.

Somewhat peversely, the instant I decided to label what is happening to me “workplace bullying”, I started to feel much better.

I called the HR director in London for a chat, in confidence. I explained my situation: both that I had a problem, which I was trying to deal with in my own way, but that I felt there was no-one to turn to in this office who doesn’t report directly to my boss. She was supportive, and said I had done the right thing in talking to her, and suggested I keep a record of significant events going forward. We decided that the chat which my boss is proposing, to “clear the air” before he leaves on holiday next week (which, interestingly, he wished to hold outside the office), should definitely take place in the office, preferably with a neutral third party sitting in.

I will not be beaten by a bully.

W, the IT manager from the London mothership calls just as I arrive at my desk, almost on time. I still have my mac on, and fumble to switch off the ipod, still attached to one ear, while cradling the phone between my head and shoulder. Male readers: this is called multi-tasking. Women are very good at this, especially secretaries like myself. If you don’t believe me, ask Paris Hilton.

“I’ve got a problem [petite], there’s a videoconference scheduled to start in five minutes and there’s no-one around at your end to set up the kit. Can you do it for me?”

“Yep, sure, if you can talk me through it. I’ll transfer you to the meeting room phone, hang on a tick…”

Coat hastily deposited on chair, bag hurled under desk, I race through the office to the meeting room to intercept the call. Not quite the start to the day I had in mind. My version involved a double espresso, a wedge of brioche and a leisurely trawl through the online Guardian. But it was not to be.

The person taking part in the meeting from Paris enters the room just as I am heaving the large, flat screen monitor onto the table.

“Ah, [petite], so you’re setting this up for me, are you?” he says, somehow managing to convey in those few words that he doesn’t believe for a second that I’ll be able to do it. Which is preposterous, but makes me flustered all the same.

He and my boss are like chalk and cheese. My boss gets rather stressed and is occasionally moody, but I get on well with him because he treats me like an equal. He knows full well that I am hopelessly overqualified to type his dictations, but I think at the end of the day he just wants someone around that he respects and can hold an intelligent conversation with. That’s my theory anyway.

This other boss is very old school. He wears braces and sock suspenders (although I don’t have any firsthand experience of those), stays in gentlemen’s clubs when in London, and calls secretaries ‘typists’. When I speak to him, I can’t prevent myself from mirroring his plummy Oxbridge accent. His presence at this precise moment is both unhelpful and potentially embarrassing. Not least because W is on the speakerphone, and is an outrageous flirt. I pray that he has heard Old School Boss arriving and busy myself with connecting cables.

“Right love, see the white cable with the socket like a telephone? Is that connected?”

I roll my eyes. “The RJ45 is in, yes.”

“Lovely. You’re not just a pretty face, are you?”

Now I’m blushing. Webcam in place, remote control in hand, I press the buttons on the front of the monitor, somewhat randomly, until it fires up. The menu comes into focus on the screen, a large, empty square where the London boardroom will appear. There is a smaller inset box where Paris will show up, so that we know what image is being transmitted to London. So far so good.

I press the button to “connect”, as instructed, and an image appears.

“Holy shit!” I yelp, before I can censor myself.

On the monitor, I can clearly see W in London, hair receding, looking quite like Minty from Eastenders. I’ve never seen his face before. I missed the office party held in London a couple of years ago – as I was in labour at the time – so I mostly have to make do with imagining the person I am talking to.

But seeing W’s face is not the reason for my outburst.

The image of Paris, which is simultaneously being broadcast onto a large screen in our London boardroom, is of me. Or, to be precise, is of my cleavage. Clearly I hadn’t got the webcam angle quite right, and there I am, in my full glory, leaning across the table with the remote, my V-necked jumper revealing a little more than I would have liked.

So, a full five minutes after arriving at work, I have managed not only to show my breasts to “Minty”, but also to swear in front of Old School Boss. I can’t imagine how things could get any worse. Except they can and do. Because as W adjusts the position of the London webcam and twiddles with the focus, a sea of smurking faces swim into view. It would appear that their meeting room was already occupied too, with a full complement of London board members. I flee, face an attractive beetroot colour, unable to look Old School Boss in the eye.

I think I may have just become superstitious. I won’t be working on Friday 13th again in a hurry.

I feel a bit naughty now. I’ve had so many sympathetic comments, and long, concerned emails, that now I realise that if I do actually get dooced one day, now that I have cried wolf, no one will believe me…

Let’s hope that never happens!

(In France, for some reason, April fools day involves fishes. Children try to pin paper fishes on each other’s backs, allegedly, although I have never actually seen it done.)

As I trudged up the stairs to our office this morning at 9.07 am, wearing my habitual pre-espresso blank expression and grunting at colleagues who unwisely attempted to engage me in conversation, for some reason I was reminded of My Most Embarassing Office Moment.

Rewind to a couple of years ago, when I had been working for my current employer for six months or so. Our office is in an old Haussmannien building in an historic, chic part of town close to the Louvre and the old Opéra Garnier. It consists of two floors which were originally separate offices, linked by a staircase which was added by our company. The staircase looks perfectly normal: carpeted stairs with a metal lip (a nez de marche in French, although I am unclear about what noses have to do with anything), with a 180° turn at the halfway point and some triangular steps around the corners.

Despite their innocuous appearance I have watched and heard many people fall up and down these stairs. Most just stumble noisily, often as they run up too fast. Quite how anyone can muster enough enthusiasm to run anywhere whilst at work is beyond me. Unless an announcement has just been made that there is cake or chocolate to be found in the upstairs kitchen. My desk looks directly onto the staircase, so I am often to be found trying (and failing) to supress a snigger as yet another colleague falls flat on his/her face.

One fateful day, when I was wearing rather high heels and was asked to take some documents down to a meeting on the floor below, I too fell victim to the curse of the stairs. I think I missed one step altogether, and I found myself plunging forwards in slow motion. For some reason my instincts were not all about self preservation, because instead of dropping the papers and using my hands to grab a bannister, I hung onto the papers for dear life and just fell headlong. The documents, unsurprisingly, did not break my fall. Result: two shins gashed open on the metal stair edges before I came to a halt on a wide triangular stair. Although I don’t remember hitting my head, I fainted and was out cold for a couple of minutes. In the meantime, a gallant colleague had rushed to my aid and it was his face I saw as I came to my senses and started pulled at my skirt, my first thought being that I might be flashing my knickers. And I couldn’t remember which pair I had on.

I was half carried downstairs to the kitchen where sweet tea was administered and a doctor called to take a look at my legs. The senior partner popped in to see me, but whilst he was talking to me I became I aware that his gaze was drifting under the table. Apparently it wasn’t the gash on my leg he was inspecting, it was my frivolous choice of footwear. Just in case I might be contemplating suing the firm on account of their dodgy staircase, he was assessing the unsuitableness of my shoes. I was on the verge of asking him if he wanted a photograph, but decided against it.

The next month was spent filling in forms and bouncing back letters from the French Sécurité Sociale, because even though I was only signed off work for a measly half day, the fact that it was an accident de travail meant that a particular protocol had to be followed. I was supposed to see a doctor just after the event, and another to pronounce that I was fit to work again. Which clearly I didn’t do, as I could hardly summon over two doctors in the space of one afternoon.

It’s not difficult to see why the French social security system is billions of euros in the red. I was bombarded with letters from an over-zealous fonctionnaire (civil servant) for six months because that missing piece of paper from the doctor’s visit I didn’t make was preventing her from closing her file.

You may be wondering why this episode qualifies for the prestigious title of Most Embarassing Office Moment. Well, the following day, upon returning to the office, it became apparent that my knight in shining armour was not so gallant after all.

He had kindly made public the fact that for the entire duration of the two minutes I was out for the count, I was snoring. Rather loudly.

My morning ritual has been turned upside down.

Hitherto:

I woke to the sound of a French news channel. Starting the day with words like ‘Saddam Hussein’ and ‘Nicholas Sarkozy’ is not something I do out of choice, but somewhere down the line Mr Frog got custody of the alarm clock. As it’s on his side of the bed and I’m woefully short-sighted, I am entirely at his mercy. I don’t even know what time it is. The aural assault from the radio does not even wake the Frog from his slumber. But a well-placed prod and a loud groan of protest does the trick. Mr Frog eventually hits ’snooze’ (if I’m lucky and he doesn’t turn it off altogether by mistake) and the ritual is repeated another four or five times. By then I’m cutting it really fine.

In the next 30 minutes I proceed to:

• prepare Tadpole’s favourite blend of imported Reddy Brek and Rice Krispies in the microwave;
• have the world’s shortest shower;
• endeavour to rouse the Tadpole whilst grabbing some non-matching clothes in the semi-darkness;
• dress Tadpole and brave her frantically pedalling legs to change her nappy;
• supervise eating of breakfast, just in case Tadpole chokes on aforementioned Rice Krispies; scrape off the quick drying concrete-like residue from her face;
• mummify Tadpole and self in various coats, mittens, hats and scarves;
• hastily apply lipstick in the mirror inside the lift;
• push screaming Tadpole (who currently hates the pushchair but walks really slowly) to the childminder’s.

Meanwhile Mr Frog languishes in the bath tub, eyes closed.

A word of warning: if you are planning to start a family and your partner assures you that of course he will share the responsibility and do his fair share of tasks around the house, ensure that he puts that IN WRITING. Preferably in blood.

Twenty minutes of metro madness later, I arrive late, breathless and apologetic at the office, clutching a paper bag containing a hastily purchased, patently unhealthy breakfast snack. I crank up my computer to prepare the day’s post, sipping a triple espresso. The boss won’t be arriving until, say, 10 or 10.30 am, so I’m secure in the knowledge that I have a little uninterrupted blogging time ahead of me…

Except I DON’T. Not any more. The boss has decided to change his routine and has arrived at the office at 7.30am every day this week.

Which means that when I arrive four days in a row at 9.09 am, clutching a Starbucks orange and cinnamon scone I shouldn’t really have stopped to buy, given my degree of tardiness, the boss glances pointedly at his watch. It also means that my in-tray is piled 30 centimetres high with things he thoughtfully prepared earlier. Enough to keep me busy all morning.

So please excuse the sporadic posting this week, it is due to events beyond my control. I am confident that it won’t last (just like all the other short-lived lifestyle changes the Boss has implemented in the past), but if it does, I will have no alternative but to look for a more blog-friendly job.

I made a flippant remark in my comments box yesterday about this story reported by the BBC. A blogging air hostess known as Queen of the Sky has been fired by the airline who employed her after publishing saucy pictures of herself posing in the cabin wearing her uniform on her blog. And letting her skirt ride up a bit. Given the media attention this has generated, she’ll probably end up in the pages of Playboy, so I’m not too worried about her future employment prospects, but it has got me thinking about the issues involved. And feeling just a little bit paranoid.

The reason I decided to blog as petite anglaise has a lot to do with wanting to prevent people I work with from discovering I am the author of this blog. Even though at the moment most of them wouldn’t have a clue who Belle de Jour is or what the word ‘blog’ means. My family and close friends are in the know, and some even read regularly, but I’d rather my co-workers remained blissfully unaware of the fact that the Frog won’t marry me or that he owns a baaing sheep thong, unless I choose to tell them myself. Similarly, I believe I have a duty to protect the identity of the Frog and Tadpole. It’s only fair. They don’t have any control over what I write and the Frog’s co-workers might conceivably read it one day.

As for my own boss reading this blog? It is my worst fear. He’s an expat in the land of the Frogs, as is his wife, so you never know whether one day their internet surfing might wash them up on these shores. I imagine the main issue my employer would have with my blogging would be to establish whether I post on company time. Mostly I blog at lunctime or in the evening (the time of posting being irrelevant and events not necessarily occurring on the day I say they do), but of course I do surf other people’s blogs and write my own during slack periods at work. Pre petite anglaise I used to openly read the Guardian when my in tray was empty, and the response this elicited from my boss was usually along the lines of ‘oh yes, I read that story too this morning on my palm pilot, what do you think about it?’, but you never know for sure how people will react, do you? So, as a precaution, you won’t find me moaning about my boss here.

Anyway, *coughs*, he is the best boss I’ve ever had, and it would be difficult to fault him.

I am regretting my rant about hypochondriacs somewhat, as I have a sore, ‘grated’ throat and swollen glands today and am feeling particularly sorry for myself (although I’m told my husky voice is quite sexy). I really fancied a day in bed, but my Britishness dictated that I must turn up to work drugged up to the eyeballs instead, blow my nose ostentatiously, generally cough and splutter over my colleagues and propagate my germs more efficiently through the air conditioning system.

Plus it’s bonus/evaluation time of year, so a bit of conspicuous martyrdom can’t hurt.

I have posted in the past about my place of work and some of my colleagues. I was initially reluctant to say what I do for a living, but I have decided to ‘come out’ today.

I’m a secretary. There, I said it. Or Personal Assistant if you prefer. Quite frankly I don’t give a damn what you call it: I’ve had roles where I virtually ran the office where I was a ’secretary’ and others where I did mind-numblingly tedious work as a ‘PA’. The title in itself doesn’t mean a great deal.

In my various incarnations I have worked for a team of investment bankers (fast moving, lots of arrogant people, well-paid), for a start-up (don’t talk to me about stock options), in the office of the president of a luxury goods empire (free perfume, good Christmas presents, rather stifling atmosphere) and now for a small English firm (Cadbury’s chocolate, Tetley tea, beers after work).

After university my only goal was to live in Paris and learn to speak French like a native. First I taught, and once my time on the exchange programme was up, I decided to do a bilingual secretarial diploma. What I first saw as a well-paid, stop-gap job while I worked out what I really wanted has become what I do and who I am. And I enjoy it: organising things/people appeals to the bossy, obsessive side of my nature. The fact that I have to work in French keeps me on my toes. But while I’m not ashamed of being a secretary, I can’t help feeling that I was supposed to have more ambition, that I owed it to myself to aim higher, that I haven’t done myself justice.

The downside to this job is that my longevity often depends on that of my boss. I have left more than one company because my boss did, and I had no desire to be ‘inherited’ by someone I had no affinity with. Affinity is also a problem – it is important to get on well with one’s boss, but not too well or else the rumour mill will crank into action and before you know it the entire office assumes you are having a torrid affair.

I recently watched the film ‘The Secretary’ (odd but intriguing), which has left me with some rather disturbing mental images.

I don’t see any parallels with my job. But please excuse me while I just go and pick up a fax with my teeth…

I tuned into the French girls’ bitchy conversation in the office kitchen at lunchtime today, while pretending to read my book (Stella Descending – Linn Ullmann, brilliant). It went something along the lines of:

“And I told him (boyf) that if he couldn’t be bothered to come over (I gather he was on the other side of Paris at a friend’s appartment and it was midnight) and get the keys, then he shouldn’t have offered to stay in to wait for the plumber in the first place….we argued and I hung up…”

“…and then the next day he wouldn’t come ’round and pick me up for tennis and I had to carry all my stuff there myself so we had another fight and I slammed the phone down on him again…”

“..then he told me that he didn’t have the kids next weekend after all and so we could have gone away and now I’ve made other plans and he is just sooo inconsiderate and I always come last in his list of priorities….”

I don’t know how French blokes cope. They are not allowed to see their friends, have to provide a chauffeur service, deal with tradesmen and take their girlfriends away for the weekend on a regular basis and in return, they get nothing but grief . High maintenance doesn’t begin to cover it.

So engrossed in the conversation was I (usually their discussions are conducted at a not quite audible whisper which is quite frustrating) that I took a plastic cup and microwaved it for a minute instead of putting it in the coffee machine and pressing the button.

I pray they didn’t notice.

Extract from an article in the guardian about a new French book called Bonjour Paresse – The Art and the Importance of Doing the Least Possible at the Workplace by Corinne Maier, “an anarchic anti-business bible”:

“…employees should shake off their shackles of loyalty and start footling around during office hours…”

I’m not sure what loyalty footling is, but am wondering whether an alternative translation could be “blogging”?

Note to my boss: please do not fire me. I have been a little distracted lately, but I’m not doing anyone any harm and I (nearly) always suspend all blog-related activities when something lands in my in-tray.

The French females (FF’s) in my workplace are a very different breed to the Brits and need to be ‘handled’ with extreme care. The following tips are based on personal experience, and may not be applicable to all FF’s.  Let no-one accuse me of making generalisations…

• If you want an FF to do something for you (which incidentally is part of her job description and therefore by definition what she is paid for) don’t forget to prefix your request with the immortal phrase “I’m sorry to bother you, but could you possibly…”. Acknowledge the fact that she is doing you a favour by merely breathing, and don’t be afraid to resort to (c)overt flattery. If you follow these steps, the work should get done. FF does reserve the right to moan about you behind your back to other FF’s. This is unfortunate, but sadly unavoidable.
• Be very careful when communicating in French to FF’s, verbally or by email. You cannot assume that sarcasm and irony will translate or be understood. Nor can you assume that FF has a sense of humour/can relate to yours. You are playing a very dangerous game if you adopt a tone which implies criticism. The punishment is generally being “sent to Coventry” by every French female in the office. Voices will drop to a whisper every time you enter the room and the atmosphere will be glacial. For months.
• If you choose to communicate in English, which generally gives you the advantage, obviously you must be prepared for FF to claim to have misunderstood you when she misses the deadline/f***s up. Note that although FF has chosen to work in a British environment and said in her interview that she welcomed the opportunity to improve her English, it was all lies. She resents having to make the extra effort and will make you pay (see above). This tactic is therefore to be used sparingly.
• Avoid using the bathroom after a thin FF, especially after lunch. She has invariably been using the two-finger technique to prevent the grated carrot salad she had for lunch from making thigh contact. Similarly if random foodstuffs go missing from the communal fridge, particularly items that no-one in their right mind would pilfer, like the two crabsticks and one soft cheese square which went AWOL last Tuesday, then look no further for your culprit.

To be continued…

My workplace is an oasis of Britishness in Paris. Like in the British embassy, all French rules are suspended upon entering the building and you have to set your watch to GMT.

There is a framed portrait of Her Majesty QE2 in the entrance hall. We got a day off for the golden jubilee. We have Tetley tea and fresh milk in the kitchen (as opposed to nasty French UHT, which makes a terrible cuppa).

When writing to clients we have to address them as “Esq”, e.g. Percival Goldman Esq. The dictionary tells me this is “a title of respect for a member of the English gentry ranking just below a knight”.

It’s a bit tricky to know who ranks just below a knight these days and who doesn’t. The only explanation anyone could venture when I asked for clarification was “it’s a class thing”.

Makes one proud to be British.