Go easy on the receptionist

So, this too is a part of the job description, she remembers thinking on her first day at work all those years ago. Twenty-six, to be precise. It was the Eighties. Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, Wham! Hairstyles that reached for the skies asymmetrical waves, side ponytails. Mullets for the guys. Roger Davidson, in Accounts, wore an outrageous more-salt-than-pepper mullet. Locked away somewhere safe she has albums containing pictures of herself in skin-tight Gloria Vanderbilts, her body sandwiched precariously between her six-inch stilettos and the half-foot high head of hair teased and tortured until it behaved.

She casts a humorous glance down at her current rotund shape, feet nestling cosily in a pair of mules. "They never told me at the interview I would be working with so many whiners and moaners," she says, laughing and adding, "They don't ever tell you that." The very first day at reception, Michael, the head honcho, called down from his ivory tower on the third floor, to complain that the milk in the fridge may have ‘gone off'! "Gone off where?" she asked innocently, her first day nerves heightened by the fact that this was the boss on the line to her. "Gone bad, you cretin. Spoiled, curdled, past its use-by date," he bellowed down the line.

Everybody got called cretin by Michael at some time in their career, she was told later. She had managed this on her very first day.

Frantic, she rang the nearest grocery and paid out of her pocket for a fresh can of milk. A few minutes later, three employees came pounding down the stairs, out of breath and agitated to complain that the water in the blue filtered bottle had run out. This time she wisely refrained from enquiring, "Run out where?" She sorted that out too, somehow.

Within a week she realised that she was the ‘go-to girl'. Her job was not merely fielding telephone calls and connecting people. She was also the designated repository for all complaints about office shortcomings. Bulbs that didn't burn brightly enough, toilets that hissed when flushed (scaring one employee into thinking a viper lay hidden in waiting under the inside rim), floor that had just a little too much polish and shine (causing the same employee to imagine water had spilled and almost slip and fall).

Testing times

This incessant litany of woes added so much stress initially that she very nearly tossed in the towel and quit. Being a young woman of grit, however, she dug deep and found a reservoir of hidden resources.

The most common complaint was the shortage of milk. Upon investigating, she found that six employees were using unusually large amounts to make their breakfast cereal. The budget simply didn't allow for more milk cans to be bought. So, being the efficient all-seeing receptionist, she kept a vigilant eye on the milk levels, and when they dropped to the half-way mark, she simply topped them up once more with water from the tap. She did the same with the filtered water that always seemed to ‘run out', mysteriously, very quickly. She couldn't, of course, check if any of the employees was using it to take a bath! But there, too, when the level fell below the half-way line, she took the blue bottle to the tap and ‘gave it the hose', as she says, with much mirth.

"In all the 26 years, nobody noticed that the milk was diluted and nobody drinking the water ever fell ill," she said, "And it certainly put a stop once and for all to the incessant whining. What a pack of whingers they were."

Now comfortably retired, she has one final swipe at the overbearing employee: "The receptionist shouldn't be seen as somebody on the lowest rung of an office class system. Instead, she's often the oil that keeps the system greased and functioning smoothly." A fair-enough assessment, I would imagine. But I take my own milk to work now.

Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney.