Chapter 5

Just before I got into bed, I logged in to the app again and messaged her ‘sleep well’, she quickly replied ‘and you’. Actually, I didn’t get to sleep for a while; I was trying to pin down the word that best described how I felt. I’d almost given up going through my vocabulary when it came to me. I’d felt completely at ease with Mel, immediately comfortable with someone I’d only just met. It wasn’t a sudden infatuation or mere lust, it was something deeper than that. A natural closeness. That settled, I was fast asleep within moments.

I found myself grinning into the mirror as I thought about Mel while I shaved the next morning; I did manage to resist messaging her again until lunch time. She sent one back a couple of minutes later. Guess she was indeed looking out for my messages.

Helga, my secretary / personal assistant / general lifesaver, came into my office and caught me smiling as I read Mel’s reply. “You’re looking unusually happy, Mike?”

I grinned at her. Helga is a grandmother herself, and sometimes she likes to ‘mother’ me. She’s a jewel of a secretary who has saved me from countless mistakes; it’s either that she has an awesome intelligence service working for her, or has a sixth sense, but she’s given me a ‘heads-up’ in good time on many occasions; she’s the main reason I seem so effective at fighting problems while they are still small enough to kill.

I read something once, I forget where, but the message struck home. The article was bemoaning the lack of appreciation of true old-fashioned secretaries, in the original sense of the word, secret-holders who could be trusted to understand your primary motives and second-guess the necessary actions to achieve your objectives. A cute young piece of desk-candy seconded from the typing pool – and they are also dying out since people got their own PCs – just wouldn’t have the real life experience to genuinely assist her boss. That piece had made me both laugh and think – the author had highlighted the existence and importance of ‘informal knowledge networks’ at the best-managed companies, and he wasn’t talking about the photocopier or water cooler gossip gatherings. Yeah, now I’d seen it in action, I finally understood what he was talking about. You can insist on Key Performance Indicators and daily reports until you’re blue in the face, but to keep a real finger on the pulse, you will always need the HUMINT input, with its ability to shine a full-color light on monochrome facts and figures.

My musing reminded me just how incredibly lucky I’d been to find Helga. She’s married to one of our psychiatric consultants, Clifford Szymanski, and once their children were at school, she’d retrained as a medical secretary and come to work transcribing his notes. In the review of policies and procedures after my predecessor’s abrupt departure, someone in HR finally cottoned on to the fact that she was in effect reporting to her husband, and he was the one writing her annual performance reviews. (To be brutally honest here, my impression is that she was drafting them and he was just signing his name at the bottom, but neither of them will ever admit anything on that subject.) Obviously that was now a big no-no, but it was a grandfathered arrangement that needed sorting out amicably. My own secretary was starting a family, so I was looking for someone to replace her, and an unusually perceptive person in HR suggested that Helga could work for me and transcribe Clifford’s consultation notes when I wasn’t keeping her busy myself. We gave that arrangement a go; I got myself a great secretary, Helga was delighted to be kept occupied all the time, Clifford didn’t lose anything, and HR were off of the hook. Wins all around.

We’d actually become great friends. Clifford and Helga had sorta taken me under their wing; in fact it had been their New Year’s Eve party that I’d attended, and Helga who’d taken my profile photograph and emailed it to me, not that she knew the purpose I’d put it to.

“I ... might be.”

She shot me her ‘look’. I know better than to tease her once I’ve had that.

“Okay, ‘Mom’, I met a real nice lady yesterday while walking Max, and we’re going out on a date Friday.”

I got a BIG smile from my secretary. “About time too! You want me to book you a table somewhere fancy?”

“Thanks, Helga, but no, not yet. I’m taking this slow; I want to get to know her rather than just impress her. Besides, it’s her choice of place this time. I’m sure she would easily fit in at one of the power restaurants, but I want to talk to her, not spend our time seeing who else is there.”

“Okay, but don’t forget, you ever need flowers sent or anything like that, I’m happy to organize them.”

“That’s real kind of you. Thanks. I’ll keep that in mind. Okay, what have you got for me this afternoon? You aren’t going to ruin March for me already?”

“No, boss, all going smoothly at the moment, looking good.”

We grinned at each other. She’d introduced me to a saying that whenever you see a swan gliding serenely across a still lake, actually there are two legs hidden underneath the water, just paddling away like crazy. The same held true for our hospital; it only seemed calm and organized because there were a whole load of people running around behind the scenes to make it that way.

Okay, so Helga hadn’t quite been speaking the truth when she told me it was all looking good, but she wasn’t to know. My three o’clock with HR was to run through our diversity profile...

I had to have some of the latest categories explained to me. I don’t get this at all. If you can do the job satisfactorily, you’re hired. If you have obstacles or handicaps, tell us, and we’ll do our best to find a work-around that suits us all – like providing an on-site childcare facility. That paid for itself immediately in the reduction of absent staff because their child minder had let them down.

But seriously, what has sexual orientation and identity got to do with how good you are at your job? The rules are quite clear, any sexual activity at work and you’re gone. Outside work, as long as it’s legal and consensual, we don’t care what you do. So why should we gather statistics, why should we intrude further on the privacy of our staff?