Workplace Connection

I first met Janet on February 3rd 1987 when I started work at the Chatham A Unemployment Benefit Office. As a new member of the team I was assigned someone to work with me and show me the ropes and it was Janet. She was a good guide but I was a slow and inconsistent learner and she was baffled by how difficult it was for me to repeat the same tasks over and over again despite being shown on a number of occasions. As she was to find out in the years ahead, it takes a long while for things to stick with me, but when they do they are there for good.

Over the first three months I was there we built up a connection even if we baffled each other with our approach to work, life, politics and pretty much everything else 🤣! She was quite intrigued by my habit of bringing the cryptic crossword into the break room at times and reading a whole parade of books by RF Delderfield which I bought from the WH Smiths across the road. I was intrigued by the fact that she had stood on the terraces at Gillingham games for about a decade. I found out later that it had given her a fairly wide vocabulary that she avoided using at work!

Then, Janet announced that she had got another job and it surprised me how much it affected my mood. I was going to miss her as a colleague but I didn’t think she was going to miss trying to teach me the basics over and over again! About a month after she left she sent a thank you card to the office with a specific message for me in the form of a crossword clue! I figured out, despite the fact that the clue was wrong (!) that the answer to the clue was Miss You. I didn’t know if that just meant as a colleague, but then I was spectacularly clueless in matters of the heart!

Eventually, Janet got up the courage to ask if she could see me again. If she’d been waiting for me to do it I would never have organised anything. The message came via Wendy, one of Janet’s best friends at work who she had kept in touch with. Wendy told me that if I upset Janet by messing her around I would have her to answer to! With that warning in my head I agreed to see her at the Crispin and Crispianus pub, my local at the time, on December 17th 1987. Safe to say, things went well and next month we celebrate our 36th wedding anniversary.