Women's work of all kinds

Bad office days

Work is always on my mind. It must be guilt, but it's time it went and I started to feel relaxed and Andalucian. Not yet, though: I keep thinking about it, even when I try not to.

You can't win. When I worked, I used to get annoyed by Daily Telegraph “research shows” articles proving that children of working mothers grow up weird. My mother worked, and I don’t feel that weird. Or if I do, it’s for different reasons. What about if a woman works part-time – are the kids only part weird? Anyway, I had to defend my lifestyle. Therefore, I used to believe in the right to work, and probably even the dignity of work because I worked. Now I don’t, I have to defend not working.

But the fact is, work wasn’t that dignified, and I ended up with the right to too much of it: at least a 12-hour day including the commute - plus the finances, nanny and child management and weekend housework. Secondly, the work itself was not exactly a mission you could be proud of, like being the first woman in space. Or even the first dog.

Worse than that, my recent working life made me so unhappy I used to cry in the toilets at work on a regular basis. I would be inclined to think this was just me being pathetically un-adapted to the workplace, but Teresa in my team, plus my friend the company lawyer, admitted when I left that they thought I had been constantly bullied: for being a woman, younger, and different from the rest of the management team. Well, I can’t prove it, and I wouldn’t try, which is sad. Some poor woman has succeeded me, and if she gets the same shit, I won’t have warned her. If she’s meek and mild, she’ll be fine, but if she tries sitting in the wrong chair in a meeting, woe betide her. “That was a bit assertive, sitting in that chair,” the commercial director told me in my second week. “What do you mean – it was free, and the closest, ” I said. “Opposite the boss – obviously you’re sending a message. You’re a bit aggressive,” he told me. In the end, I think I was the one on the receiving end of the aggression. This commercial director is a man who was known to leave his wife locked in the car on occasions, with the window rolled down an inch, the way you do for a dog. He also used to boast that he travelled third-class on the train, or took the coach. This was supposed to save company money, except that it used to take him so long to get to places that he arrived late for meetings, sometimes so late they had finished.

“Why didn’t you do something about it?” someone asked me, probably a journalist. Well, nobody would believe it, for a start. This was an apparently respectable FTSE company, but in a board meeting about recruiting female engineers, a director said “that’s half the student population we’d like to penetrate, ha-ha! And everyone laughed, or smirked. The same director spread a rumour that I was having an affair with my boss – presumably the only reason I could have done well at work. This was followed by speculation that I was having sex with every male I was friendly with – which in a company that was 90 per cent men meant I was very promiscuous, allegedly.

When I joined, the HR director personally came up with a tape measure to measure the size my office could be. He said there were rules about the maximum size. I protested weakly that I would like a table and chairs for meetings, but gave in when he went bright red and shouted at me that this would mean my office was as big as the Chairman’s! (The Chairman, in fact, never turned up to work, so his office was pretty spacious under the circumstances.)
Later, I realised my office was the smallest management office, bar that of poor old Neil, whom everyone ignored. All this is without the anonymous letter, and so on. Allegedly. I couldn’t prove any of it, because I didn’t tape my time there. I wish I had, except that I couldn’t bear to watch the tapes.

So now, I am doing housework. Broadly defined, that is, since it includes the land, and the admin. There’s more of that than I expected: balancing the huge, dusty house, with the huge, neglected fields, and the endless washing, ironing, with the administration of our Spanish life, with teaching the children Spanish. “You’ll never get any credit for anything you do in the house,” Jasmine told me bitterly. True, but as I’m not being paid, I don’t really want credit. It’s better to be without credit than to be at the mercy of a lot of middle-aged men that bully you, something I never, ever want to go through again. I said before that Jasmine had objected to my stopping work, because she thought I was giving away power. But when I explained the work experiences I’d had to Jasmine, she said: “Oh, I see. You didn’t stop working because you didn’t like the work – you stopped because you were being bullied. Well, I understand that. Men are all bullies, I’ve found that out. It’s why I wanted the boob job – to have more power over them.” The logic is she needs to be able to warn her husband that, if he doesn’t appreciate her work, she can go elsewhere. Sadly, this wouldn’t work in the office: boobs only get held against you, as proof that you are either a) stupid b) available or c) having an affair with the boss. I thought things had moved on, but they haven’t, or at least not in some parts of the working world. The same director used to comment on my clothes, as in “I can’t sit opposite you when you’re wearing that blouse,” even though I was always meticulously prim at work, and never showed an inch of flesh or gave an inch of encouragement. I think that was what galled him: if I’d been a jolly barmaid type, or snogged him at the office party, he’d probably have been my biggest supporter.

People say I’d have had a better experience in a more female environment, like the media. But hey, I worked in the media, and in PR and I still didn’t see women owning any shares, or making any money, except the lucky one or two who were in at the beginning, or made it as someone’s PA. So I guess I’m bitter and bruised. I wonder how to advise my daughter? Be a journalist? A housewife? Start your own business and get rich? Marry a rich man, then kill him? Be an astronaut? Go into space?


Magazines and junk mail

Moving house has been one of the hardest jobs I have ever done. There is an endless daily grind of tasks that never seem to let up; I am still moving house, even though I have been here for nearly 3 months. In particular there is the job of dealing with junk mail which arrives in large batches from the town post office, weighing down the poor Spanish post lady.

I would advise anyone moving house to start thinking about junk mail about a year in advance. There is a lot of it, and if you forward it, you will get car insurance flyers for the rest of your life. It takes about 3 goes (annoying, from Spain) to get the companies to cancel the mail, and even then, they warn you it will take another 3 months before it stops coming. When you call the car insurance people, they often say it wasn’t them that sent you the mailing, but someone else – that is, once you have got through their call centre and listened to their recorded messages about how they record the calls for training (what training?) and how they may pass your details to third parties (yes, right, tell me about it already). I thought I was being efficient setting up a mail forward system for a year, but in retrospect, the best thing is not to forward any mail from the UK – after all, the important people will always find you and this is a once in a lifetime opportunity to escape the clutches of the junk mailers, which I visualise as large vulture like creatures cackling evilly crouched over heaps of Boden and Past Times catalogues.

Home news from abroad

Much nicer to get the Sainsbury magazine, which I never read at home but now seems pleasantly nostalgic, with recipes for things I couldn’t or wouldn’t cook here. I called them to ask them to take my new address: they were happy to keep sending me them magazine and the lady told me that someone in Texas had written in to say how she likes reading the recipes when she feels homesick. I can see myself, before long, writing in letters whining about how I can’t get proper seedless grapes or icing sugar in Spain (you can’t).

I also read a Marie-Claire which one of our visitors left; it has already begun to feel strange, like a foreign magazine so that I feel a bit like an anthropologist reading it. Yet again, this was the “green” issue – and the editor had written something like: “It just isn’t cool to be seen with a plastic shopping bag any more.” Well, maybe not in Soho, or wherever media ladies hang out, but let me tell you, lady, in Almeria, carrier bags are still in. They are used to carry your shopping, and then you use them as a bin liners afterwards. It’s another world, and there wouldn’t be many takers for that not very nice Anya Hindmarch recyclable bag: it isn’t shiny or made of nice colourful plastic, so who wants it?

As an anthropologist manqué, I can view UK environmental hand-wringing dispassionately. Maybe it’s a weird cleansing ritual, because people are guilty about being so rich and wasting so much stuff. But what gets me is it’s so parochial: it’s as if nowhere outside the SE of England exists – as if there aren’t places where people are too poor to worry about whether it’s ok to carry a plastic bag. The word “global” appears all over the place, but maybe that means smiling, cocoa farmers that supply Starbucks, not trailer trash in Alabama or only-recently lower-middle people in Almería.

Holidays

The electrician came round to do the rest of the light fittings in the house. He is like a farm boy, very nice and almost unintelligible, though I am getting better at the Andaluz accent. His mother has almonds, and he spent most of the holiday harvesting and shelling them, he said, rather pitifully. I don’t think people here have holidays, much, although Pablo told me his son and Maria, with a couple of others, have rented a house somewhere not that far away. They don’t go abroad, anyway. Even the rich people in IBM Madrid just seem to go to smart Cadiz, and Sylvia, who is cosmopolitan, goes to chic Agua Amarga, not far from here. Why go away when you have sunshine and beaches on your doorstep? It’s hard being an almond farmer here. But it’s also hard being British: you might be a professional but you live in the rain and if you want to go away, you have to pay up hard-earned cash for two weeks trying to get enough sun to last the rest of the year.