Dear Janie,
I have declared spring! My winter coat has been abandoned in favour of my 1960s style black mackintosh. I was planning to walk in to work today looking poised and professional but that’s hard to do when your hair is hanging in rats tails because you were caught in a ‘spring shower’. Thank goodness for hand dryers! I would have had a hard job trying to dry my hair with paper towels. Have you even seen rain in the last six months, you lucky thing?

I’m really looking forward to your coming back. I’ve started counting in weeks instead of months. I met Sam for lunch on Monday and I think he’s looking forward to your coming back as well. We went to the pub on the corner for a sandwich and he told me all about his new job. His new company sounds a crazy place. Never thought I'd say it, but I think I prefer the quiet life here!

Having said that about the quiet life, I did find myself in the travel agent looking through brochures about jungle tours and expeditions trekking up the Himalayas. I’m not sure I’m quite ready for that level of travel though. At least in Britain the spiders are mostly only a couple of inches big and harmless - although you wouldn’t have thought so when Amy came in last Tuesday and found a little tiny money spider on her keyboard. She screamed so loud I thought she’d caught her fingers in the shredder. Everyone within earshot came running, but they all seemed to melt away when they found out the problem was a spider, even though it was about the size of a five pence piece. I wasn’t too keen on picking it up myself but Perry saved the day with an inspired solution - he threw the keyboard out the window and provided Amy with a new one.

Thinking about trekking made me realise how my new year’s ‘get fitter’ campaign hasn’t gone anywhere - apart from to the newsagents in the next street. If I walk the extra three hundred yards there and back it must counter some of the effects of the chocolate I buy there. Or am I kidding myself?

Anyway, in light of the fact that I am hardly any less unfit now than I was before Christmas, I let Amy persuade me to go with her to the company gym at lunchtime. She introduced me to a personal trainer called Paul who was really sweet - for the first five minutes. After that it was like being at boot camp. I’ve had to start using the side entrance so that Paul doesn’t keep stopping me to ask when I want to book another session.

By the time I got back to the office I was so stiff I had to ask Mr McAndrew to rescue the diary from under my desk - I just didn’t think I could have got up again. Mr McAndrew was very nice about it, even though he was wearing his going-to-a-client-meeting suit and the carpet under my desk was covered in crumbs from my sandwich. I resolved to get the vacuum cleaner out when he’d gone but when I asked, no one knew where it lived. I spent the next forty minutes trying to track it down only to have the people in Stores tell me that we now outsource the cleaning to an external company. They bring their own tools so we don’t even have a vacuum cleaner any more.

Pete needs a good deal of support now that Xander has taken Sam’s place. The two of them are so competitive it’s starting to be funny. If Xander goes to Italy one weekend, Pete has to go to New York the next. If Pete brings in doughnuts for everyone on Friday, Xander has to bring in cream cakes to share on Monday. If Xander has a new Palm Pilot, Pete has to have a new Handspring Treo.

Emma from IT spent ages trying to get the two non-standard handhelds to sync with Microsoft Outlook. She couldn’t work out why no data was being passed from the handhelds to the computers and was especially puzzled to have the identical problem on two completely different products. It turned out that neither Pete nor Xander actually uses their very expensive gadgets - it's all show! I offered to give them a quick lesson in adding contacts and appointments, but they’d moved on to comparing the size of their expense reports by then.

Amy has them both taped. She told Pete that the roses on her desk were from Xander, so Pete went off and ordered her white lilies. She told Xander that the roses were from Pete, so Xander arranged to have a bunch of orchids delivered for her. She was so swamped with flowers she let me have the roses, which were beautiful creamy white ones and had only been on her desk for a day.

Secretaries’ Day isn’t getting much of an airing this year because we’re no longer secretaries, we’re ‘administrative assistants’ or ‘administrative executives’. Mr McAndrew told me I could take the afternoon off in recognition of my hard work, which was nice. I think I’d rather have something good like that than chocolates. Mind you, Über Boss is giving Amy a huge box of chocolates, a bunch of flowers and the afternoon off. I’m not sure if he knows this yet. He will when Ms Rigby gets hold of his credit card bill!

That’s all my news for now. Not long to go until we meet again in person! I can’t wait, it’s going to be so great having you back in the country. I hope you won’t find it too dull after your exciting travels.

Lots of love,

Kerry

xxx

EB