In the early 2000s, my first year out of university, I signed up to a temp agency called Office Angels, which is exactly the kind of company name one would expect to encounter within earshot of the 90s. Perhaps they were thinking of the Christian concept of angels: genderless, supernatural entities who do not eat, excrete, or have sex, and work in service of the supreme deity – arguably the ideal beings for office life. I aspired to be the other kind of office angel: one that looked like Denise van Outen in the pages of FHM, posing on a desk, a pair of spectacles slipping down her nose. I wanted the gleaming handset of a rotary dial phone in one hand, its curly wire twirled round the index finger of the other.
The first job the agency booked me for was at an architecture firm in Mayfair. I was the receptionist there for three months. I loved being a receptionist. What I loved about it was playing the part of being a receptionist. I had a huge steel desk and a phone with many buttons, the uses of which remained largely obscure to me. I would answer the phone with the company name. I would say, ‘Hold the line please.’ I had a stationery catalogue two inches thick and I could order whatever I liked from it. The postman would come into the building in the morning and hand me a stack of mail and I got to open every single envelope no matter who it was addressed to. I had a letter opener – a special knife just for angels – and a self-inking stamp.
At the end of each week I had to fax my verified timesheet to the temp agency’s headquarters so I would be paid; at five o’clock every Friday, office angels all around the country would be folding their wings as they stood at their respective fax machines, feeding their lost hours into it. I spent my first paycheques on flippy skirts and blouses and bright pink shoes with a kitten heel (I bought an identical pair in blue) that click-clacked along the marble floors and up the stairs, all four flights. I was in drag, I suppose, because how else do you demonstrate your aptitude for such a life?
The architecture firm occupied a converted Georgian townhouse. The reception was on the ground floor at the front; to the rear was a separate office occupied by a posh, pinstriped man of advancing years and his similarly ageing secretary – a weathered, world-weary woman, mother of secretaries, archangel of the workplace. I have no idea what manner of business her employer was in. I only ever saw him drinking coffee and shaking out an enormous newspaper.
The architect who had established this branch of his practice on the Monopoly board’s most expensive square was rarely in town. When he was, it was my job to call the Mercedes car hire company and book the latest model for him and his glamorous, much younger wife, who played the part of rich young wife impeccably. One day she appeared in reception wearing skin-tight leather trousers and stilettos, and requested that I accompany her to the Selfridges Foodhall to acquire some high-grade sushi for her husband’s lunch. We took a black cab, though Selfridges was only a five-minute walk away. Afterwards, as if I were trying to learn how to tend to such a husband myself, I watched her lay out the sushi on a platter (with all the complications of her inch-long fingernails), complete with its beautiful garnishes.
The Mayfair office had a concealed apartment attached to it, a kind of annex that would have been good for hiding people. I was unaware of its existence until I was asked to show it to a visiting architect who would be staying there – a confusing undertaking since I was as unfamiliar with it as he. In the hallway a loose photograph had been left lying on a shelf in this otherwise sparsely furnished and unoccupied apartment. It was of a woman’s knicker-clad bottom, taken from the side as she was bending over. The visiting architect picked it up for a closer look and made a small appraising noise, a sort of mmm, as if to say he had not been expecting such amenities. He replaced the photo without comment and we continued with the tour. In the en-suite bathroom there were about fifty bottles of perfume lined up in rows on either side of the sink.
I don’t recall how I felt about finding myself alone in a bedroom that might as well have been a hotel room with a much older man, a nude photo and several litres of perfume. In fact, nothing sexual ever occurred during my time at the architecture firm – only in hindsight has the whole thing begun to take on a distinctly sexual tinge. It’s as if the real work of an office angel was to paradoxically keep sex at bay by adding a few harmless drops of it to the mixture, like an inoculation.
The part of the job I liked best was much more innocent: writing group emails. I often had to write to all the staff to notify them of a meeting. I was also the keeper of the holidays calendar and I knew everybody’s whereabouts, like a spy. One week, after filling in the annual leave dates of an architectural assistant whose name was Per (rhymes with pear), I sent a group email about the upcoming staff meeting. It concluded, ‘Be there or be Per! (Who won’t be there because he’s away that day.)’ I think about this email regularly with the greatest satisfaction.
Image © Europeana
