Margaret Black had not been out of school for long, and basically enjoyed her job as a clerk at the Regal Umbrella Health Fund. The company had a few building premises, including the head office where she worked. It was a skyscraper at Bond Street Junction, with departments on several floors, and a large canteen with dining area at the top.
She started work for the day as usual, and soon came to the point where she needed to collect the template letters from the secretary and collate them with medical forms to be sent out to prospective clients and their medical practitioners.
She made her way over to the typing pool and met the new trainee junior secretary Pierre, who had just started. Rumour had it that he’d finished school a few months earlier, started a university course, found himself out of his depth and dropped out. If secretarial work was his comfort level, then preparing her letters would have been, as the saying goes, right up his Alley.
Or so she thought.
Pierre had excelled at Mathematics and two foreign languages at school, because he followed a simple approach which tended to lead to good marks in assignments and exams. He learned rules of foreign grammar as easily as he learned mathematical formulae, and then had no difficulty doing countless exercises which merely applied the well established rules. He majored in Mathematics and the two languages, and adapted his flair to making up his curriculum with additional units of English and Science, specializing in physics and chemistry, which were to some extent merely applied forms of Mathematics.
Allen Timms, the previous secretary had been promoted to a new role, and had spent the first day of his promotion training Pierre. He covered everything Pierre would routinely do within the typing pool, albeit with some incorrect instructions for a stamp duty task that Pierre would need to be retrained in by another staff member down the track. The other thing that hadn’t come up in Pierre’s training was the part of the task that involved interacting with Margaret’s department.
Pierre had survived ten years of relentless physical and verbal bullying by boys and teachers alike in two private schools, and had spent most of his school years without friends or team interaction of any kind. He had done his French group assignment without teaming up with anyone else.
“I know you can do it,” his teacher had protested.
“These people won’t accept me,” he had proclaimed, stubbornly soldiered on alone, and gotten one of the highest marks.
However, when Margaret’s expectation of his duties with the template letters took him by complete surprise, instead of adapting to the situation, he seemed to blow a fuse right in front of her. His face turned chalk white, and gave the best silent impression of a complete mental breakdown.
She explained what she needed from him and got accustomed, but not satisfied, with her daily round of awkward encounters with him over the next few months.
Pierre himself was finding that simple secretarial work was far more challenging and psychologically draining than the highly demanding requirements of studying in his final year of school had been, for two simple reasons. Firstly, as he discovered over time, Regal Umbrella Health Fund was an organization with by far the worst widespread rank office politics that anyone could ever encounter in one lifetime. Many other staff members were well aware of the problem, yet like himself so deeply entrenched in it, that they had become part of it. Secondly, the demoralizing culture of the company was compounded by his own considerable immaturity, stunted social growth and inflexibility to the expectations of his colleagues.