A few years before my retirement from full-time work, I hired Sarah as an office assistant. To this day, though we aren’t very often in touch, I recall her more as a lovable and quite eccentric friend rather than an employee. Sarah is the person to whom “things happen” – she often good-naturedly pokes fun at herself and says that she was born with butter fingers and that the “gawky teenage” phase is a permanent state of existence with her. She was a cheerful young thing, and it was always a pleasure to have her around.

I vividly remember her first day at work. I showed her to her new desk just as McPherson, a guy from our IT department turned up – late as usual, he was just coming in to configure her network wiring and PC setup. McPherson is a nice guy, though I can’t say he is too efficient, and his outstanding characteristic is that he suffers from an almost crippling shyness, especially around strangers. While he was setting up Sarah’s computer, I took her on a walkthrough of the different departments she would have to interact with and gave her brief introductions to her new colleagues.

We came back to her desk and there her PC was, seemingly all setup and ready to go. Her desk, I should mention, wasn’t one of those small dinky typical office ones but a relic from the old days, rather a large and broad affair, the front end of it up against the wall. Leaving her to it, I walked over to my own cubicle and started on the day’s work.

A short while later I saw Peter, another guy from the IT department, pass by my seat and over to hers. He gave an exclamation of surprise when he saw Sarah sitting pulled up at her desk and busily using her PC.

“But the setup isn’t finished yet! There’s a problem with the internet wiring and McPherson is still trying to fix it!” he exclaimed.

“But he’s not here,” said Sarah

“Well he was here a minute ago, I just left him working here,” he insisted

“Working where?” Sarah asked.

I got up from my cubicle and walked over just as Peter gestured under Sarah’s table and said, “Working here.”

Sarah leapt from her seat with a small shriek and moved away from the desk. And from the dark space under her desk, like a shy tortoise poking its head out of its shell into the bright sunlight, emerged the head of McPherson, complete with glasses almost falling off his face and a generous spattering of cobwebs on his hair!

Sarah turned a beetroot red and nearly had hysterics! It turned out that McPherson had been fixing her wiring when she had unwittingly pulled up her chair and started working, leaving him to several minutes of acute and agonizingly embarrassed silence (and staring at her legs no doubt - she told me later she was thankful she had worn trousers that day!) as he had mentally tried to draw up the courage to show his presence. It was an unforgettable first day for Sarah, that’s for sure, and for several days afterwards she would take a peek under her desk looking for stray IT personnel before sitting down!