Orna Mulcahy on people we all know
Jill is cowering behind her partition, desperately trying to find something for Sorcha, the Transition Year student to do. Not easy on a Monday morning when she can barely remember how to do her own job, never mind make it seem vital and stimulating to a glam 15-year-old who looks terribly bored already.
"Normally this a busy time for us, a really busy time," she witters, shuffling through files, but actually it's not that busy and there is not a single job that Sorcha could do, just at this moment. Would it be awful to ask her to collect some dry-cleaning? No, better not just yet. Her father's a big client. The sort of man you can't say "no" to when he rings to see if Sorcha could spend a week in the office, learning the ropes "Very smart girl. Great with people. Give her anything to do ... "
Yes, but what? "Just have a look at the newspaper first, then we'll find something for you." This takes all of two minutes, with Sorcha handling the paper gingerly as if she had been given the Dead Sea scrolls, before finally settling on the television listings. After that it's back to twiddling her navel ring and texting her friend. "Soooooo boring. Hlp!" She's going to kill her Dad for putting her in here for a whole week. She doesn't want to be a solicitor and meanwhile her best friend is having a great time mucking out stables on a stud farm in Meath, and Aisling, her other best friend, is getting a walk-on part in Fair City.
This job looks really really boring, and she can't imagine ever being as old or as cranky as Jill. She must be at least 35. It's always the same with work experience. People say they are going to bring you to meetings and things, but all they do is make you put paper into envelopes; she would be much better off at home. It's just a complete waste of time. And there isn't even a spare computer so she can't even log onto Collarsup.net and see if there is any gossip from Wesley on Friday.
Jill, who has finally hauled out some papers that need filing from the bottom drawer, remembers her own days doing work experience in an office on Dame Street, where she sat under a stairwell wrapping up old wills in pink ribbon and making at least 36 cups of tea before doing the bank lodgments in her lunch hour. And glad she was to do it, too. At the end of her summer, the senior partner, old Mr Hall, gave her a pair of tights as a going-away present. Those were the days. She couldn't imagine Sorcha being happy with a pair of tights, but young people nowadays ... There's nothing for it but to send her down to the basement so that she can get on with making some personal calls.