[m i a o w] the cat

Spent yesterday in the country being a secretary. I was going to write ‘glorified secretary’, but really, I wasn’t even that. Am now trying to decipher everything I wrote. Oh yes, because it’s all so exciting, this ‘trying to plan for non routine events’ stuff. It was soooo interesting, listening to pompous men trying to figure out a ‘planning framework’ for something that cannot be defined, or anticipated and may actually never happen. Something high risk and low probability. Maybe. If you’re lucky. One of the men there interrogated myself and my workmate as to our work projects and ‘academic backgrounds’ with the kind of authoritarianism that screams ‘I-get-paid-more-then-you-could-even-dream-of-for-dealing-with-things-that-might-never-happen-AND-I-have-a-penis’. Of course, when I told him I’d been working on economics and f i r e and that kind of thing, he immediately assumed I was an economist. I took great delight in telling him I have a BA in Journalism/Literature. I was going to leave it there, but my boss got jumpy and pointed out that I did have a masters.
“In what?” said Government-spook hopefully.
I was going to say ‘astrophysics’ but thought that the truth would be more annoying.
“In writing,” I said.
All of them looked at me blankly.
“Science writing?” wheedled Government-spook.
I looked smug. My boss looked out the window.
“No. Just writing.”

Huh. At least there was a free lunch. And when Government-spook stood up, I was happy to observe he was at least two feet shorter than me.