Confessions of an Office Confidant

By Samantha Fase

Sam joins the workforce as an administration clerk in the heady days before the Wall Street crash of 1987. Being an extremely private person and an A-grade prude, Sam is surprised one day when a colleague asks advice on a particularly sensitive personal matter. Sam is soon the recipient of several such confessions and unwittingly becomes known as the office confidant. Follow Sam over the next decade in which despite several career changes, the confessions keep coming. Sexy, funning, moving, and sometimes sad, Confessions of an Office Confidant is a tribute to my colleagues of Generation X women who began their clerical careers back in the days of big hair and shoulder pads, when Madonna ruled the airwaves and MTV was new to our screens. We called ourselves girlfriends long before the Spice Girls gave us girl power. We knew each other at a time when the Bangles sang about manic Monday and Dolly Parton switched from singer to secretary in 9 to 5. We worked hard and played hard. We fought each other for promotions and cheered when the other girl won. We knew each others secrets but gossiped like crazy. The tales we shared were sexy, sleazy, and salacious. So come! Grab a Chardy or Sav Blanc, find your Barry White on the iPod, and join Sam in a saucy trip down memory lane.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris AU
• Release date: Dec 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781514442715

Samantha Fase

Fans of Samantha’s first book, Homecoming and Other Short Stories, will love her second foray into the world of chick lit with her feisty novella, Confessions of an Office Confidant. Like Homecoming, Confessions has been a long time coming and is somewhat of a labour of love for this Cairns-based author. When Samantha is not helping her husband with house renovations, sewing dolls’ clothes, or meeting the demands of Jesse James the Wonder Cat, she spends time honing her writing skills in her newly refurbished study. Stay tuned for Samantha’s next great read!

Book preview

Copyright © 2015 by Samantha Fase.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2015918687

ISBN:      Hardcover      978-1-5144-4269-2

                Softcover        978-1-5144-4270-8

                eBook            978-1-5144-4271-5

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 11/19/2015

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CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

SIOBHAN

MAZ

MARYANNE

LIZ

TRACEY

HEIDI

GAIL

VANESSA

DENISE

BECKY

SAM

To my Darling husband Len – as always my Rock!

To my cousin Rebecca, for never doubting I had it in me!

To Lesley for getting me where I am now!

To Lita, for driving it home!

INTRODUCTION

T his little anthology, whilst it can be enjoyed by all working women, is dedicated to my fellow Admin. Staff of the 1980’s. We knew ourselves, and still do as Clerical Assistants, Administrators, Customer Service Officers, Receptionists, Secretaries, PA’s, Data Entry Operators, Mail Girls and Typists. Yes, the latter still existed back then – as did the merits of touch typing with speed and accuracy. Can you imagine? For those of you who can remember when employers even asked for experience in shorthand – that cryptic cursive invented by Pitman – not the ciphers used in today’s SMS texts, this collection is dedicated to you.

We spent our days writing applications, answering phones, typing, filing, processing cheques, gossiping in the tearoom and generally administering. This was an era when staying on at High School really did open doors of opportunity. Even if you left school at sixteen you were almost certainly guaranteed an apprenticeship in a trade or gained a foothold as a Junior in the workplace. Likewise, if you completed Year 12 and obtained the appropriate entry score, you were assured of your rightful place in tertiary education (mercifully HECS free back then). Either way, it was our lot to seek a place in the cut-and-thrust professional empires our parents had built. We watched Wall Street and subscribed to Gordon Gecko’s creed that greed is good. We lived the self-gratifying lifestyle of conspicuous consumption. Supposedly, depending on whose version you believe, we took our opportunities for granted. In reality, our generation was not as narcissistic, nor as apathetic as our naysayers would have us believe. We grew up protesting. Many of our protests were against many of the mistakes made by our parents. In Australia, Gen Xers from across the nation protested against the damming of the Franklin River and were arrested for chaining ourselves to bulldozers. In China, students protested for democracy in Tiananmen Square and were killed by National army tanks. We lived in the era of the superpowers with a very real fear of atomic warfare between the USSR and the USA. We marched against nuclear-powered ships docking in Australian ports and wore badges reading Radioactivity Fades Your Genes. Our protests may not have been as earth-shattering as those of our Builder Generation grandparents, or our Baby Boomer parents’, but despite what today’s youth think they know of us, we did have some purpose to our teenage and young adult years.

Was life simpler then? I don’t think so. We are maybe the last generation who still believed in the great Australian dream of saving up and buying a house, not to mention the de rigour travel before settling down. In the halcyon days of the 1980s, terrorism attacks only occurred somewhere we vaguely knew of as the Middle East, or in the far-off skies over Lockerby, a little-known town in Scotland. Ironic now to think that one of the first, if not the ubiquitous, destination for a generation of bronzed Aussie backpackers was none other than Bali. Such memories may seem naïve but these aspirations were not considered shallow back then. In fact most of us managed to achieve both of these goals, and look forward to raising a family to boot. Quite a feat for a time when interest rates regularly hit eighteen percent and most of us liked nothing better (pre-baby days of course), than an expensive piss-up on a Friday night after work.

INXS ruled. Michael Hutchence smouldered. We wore legwarmers in high school and drank Island Coolers. On Saturdays we would come home from a pub, club, or – God-forbid – a disco, and watch the then-new MTV until the wee hours of the morning. Red Bull wasn’t invented and neither was email. Even mobile phones hadn’t hit the streets back then. So why do I remember those dim dark ages so fondly? Because my friends, I am now surpassed by Generation Y; a group of up-and-comers who weren’t even born the year I passed my Higher School Certificate. So here’s to you girls; bottoms up!

SIOBHAN

P eople who know me know that I am an A-grade prude. As flamboyant as I have become in my public persona, I do not like getting my gear off in front of others, and ditto to the idea of having it off in public. I shun stripper-grams and porn, and still recall my discomfort at attending my one and only Loverware party. As for television or movie ratings, forget M or R rated sex scenes; even kissing scenes rated PG make me squirm in embarrassment. And whilst I admit to a reasonable body and a certain flirtatiousness in my personal style, even my underwear is of the Bridget Jones Bombay-bloomer-style; there are no sexy G-strings lurking in my top drawer. Sensible undies and white cotton tees are the foundations of my underwear wardrobe.

Needless to say then, when I first joined the workforce, I did not regale my friends with tales of my sexual exploits. Nor do I now. However, in deferring an unfulfilling Arts Degree for the grandiose title of Upgrades Clerk, I paid an unexpected price. In swapping tutorials for a weekly pay packet my mind was no longer elevated by the lofty heights of undergrad studies. I had traded intellectual debate for the humdrum of office gossip.

With this somewhat naïve entry into the working world, you’ll probably be as surprised as I am to learn that I was to become the privileged holder of many of my workmates sexy secrets. Far from being deterred by my personification of prim and proper, my own reticence to share my stories from under the sheets seemed to convince the girls further, (even those I scarcely knew), that I would not divulge what they felt compelled to tell. It was as if my personal discretion would ensure them a confessional-like silence on their behalf. They trusted in the sanctity of my confidentiality.