being a secretary
January 18, 2008 by elberry
A female Speech Therapy undergraduate rang up this afternoon. She and a friend were due to assess a patient as part of their studies, but two textbooks had disappeared from their department. She asked if they could come over and look at ours for half an hour. i’m sure there are all kinds of legal reasons why not, so i said, “sure, why not?”
They came over from the nearby campus. My MILF manager had a rummage around for the textbooks, and gave them permission to read them in the team room. The girls were both very pretty, and very grateful for whatever rule-bending or just rule-not-inquiring had taken place. They were, i think, surprised that neither i or nor my MILF boss saw any reason they shouldn’t browse through our library. i imagine if the senior management were apprised of this small incident, the next torrent of official bullshit would have included a section forbidding staff to help anyone in any way not specified in his or her ’remit’.
After they left i reflected on all the bitter old secretarial hags i’ve met, horrible useless, self-important harpies who exercise the only power they have, to refuse, to deny, to turn people away. i can’t see why one would prefer to exercise that power, rather than the power to help and encourage people. Is it, in some strange way, pleasurable to be rude and unhelpful? And if so, how could that compare to the pleasure of giving assistance?
If they’d stayed any longer i would have given them the addresses of some websites to further their studies. i’m helpful like that.
A touching post, Elberry. Those who exercise power to thwart others, not to achieve something, but merely to enjoy the frustration this causes, lead lives that are painfully, cripplingly circumscribed and dull. They are not stupid enough to be oblivious to this fact, but they are, nonetheless, so limited in their mental faculties that they are unable to imagine any other possible way to satisfy their need for recognition, for self-expression. Negative attention is better than no attention at all for these wretches. I come across them quite often, as we all do. But let’s not be too harsh, they are not always thoroughly unpleasant. In fact, I can think of one who does have some redeeming qualities, but I just can’t think of what they are right now. My own way of dealing with this type, if I must, is to smile, be courteous (sometimes overly so) and to wallow in the delicious absurdity of the moment.
Having visited former Soviet-Union, where the communist regime was crushingly suppresive, and despite the end of the communist era, the same authorities and same system exists, run by the same people, you will find those “bitter old secretarial hags” only in far worse attitude, miserable fuckers who go out of their way to frustrate anyone whom they should be serving, I won’t go into details, but there were numerous occassions when I had to use great restraint not to punch the lights out of such individuals, but I saw the locals were immune to such hostile treatment, because they were used to being treated like shit from anyone in any kind of authority, however menial the position they held.
I don’t think they get pleasure from it, but they get satisfaction for sure (if there is a difference between the two, I guess you will understand what I mean), partly the sad pricks are minions of a wider system that is designed to frustrate the public, and partly some people are just miserable fuckers who have no vision of what humanity really should be about