I am sure that back in the distant past I made a concious decision that some kind of job where you sat all day in an office was not for me. During the summer I was 18, after a brief episode picking tomatoes which meant getting up at dawn and coming home with your fingers green I took a summer job as a clerk. The work was mundane, but then I was a junior, but it did give me sufficient money for a holiday in Malta before I began my nurse training that autumn.

Who would have imagined then that less than 30 years later (well ok that is quite a long time later) I find that I now work in an office environment; now how did that happen? Don’t get me wrong, my job is varied and interesting, what is more it doesn’t involve me spending 8 hours a day, 5 days a week sitting at a desk or even inside the office. But I do spend some of each week at least here. As a nurse on a ward, I had nothing but a locker to call my own and nor did I actually desire my own space. Later as a district nurse we shared various office spaces, but I wouldn’t have called them ‘mine’. Now though I have a desk, I have a PC and I have files (plus a very nice desk tidy and a rack thing that you can stack stuff). I don’t have place to put the files, other than on or under the desk, but I can live with that.

NHS office managers (and NHS senior managers in general) like nothing better than moving people around. It is like a hobby. In my 7 year office career I have moved to different towns, different buildings within the same town and now to different dests in the same office vicinity. It is this current move that is stressing me out now, well the move doesn’t stress but the people involved in it does. Most of my near neighbours have moved to different offices in the same building, and other colleagues (lets bring the commissioning team together is the philosophy) are about to move in. “Can I stay at this desk?” I ask the office manager lady. “Oh no says she, you are to move to the window seat”. So last Friday I turn up and find my computer in a new place, I think ok, this isn’t bad and spend the morning rationalising my files (this involved the recycling and shredding bin) and generally tidying up. Imagine my joy then when I am greeted by colleagues yesterday to be told that a mistake has been made. Another person had been told she could have the desk she coverted by the window and that I would move again later this week. No one can tell me yet if I am to return to the original desk or the one next to it, but you have to wonder what it matters who sits where? Plus the new window seat owner had better watch out, because if there are any other days like yesterday when it was 90f, without any breeze, this is one hot spot!

So there you have it, Julie works in an office, but can’t abide the politics!