Personal Assistant

“You are just a servant with a glorified name!” The words echo and flash in my brain long after she stormed out of my office and I resumed typing, my fingers mechanically flying over the keyboard and my eyes staring unseeing at the monitor.

Suddenly, my fingers stop and I look down without moving my head. My hands are trembling and I feel a puzzled little frown forming between my brows. Slowly I move my hands into my lap, and there those thin trembling fingers entangle and grip each other convulsively.

Oh how dreadful, this visible sign of anguish. How remarkable that although the rest of me is quite numb, almost surreal; my hands tremble as if palsied.

I close my eyes for an instant as those words echo and flash once more: You are just a servant with a glorified name! The words flash bright in ugly neon colours, dripping like fake blood in a B-rate horror movie. Other words clamour to join them in a macabre dance through my ravaged mind. How do you know so much? You don’t even have a degree!

Decisively, I slam the door on them, gritting my teeth until my jaw aches. Relief floods my breast – the door still works, that mental tamper I imagined into being so long ago to counter these onslaughts. Blessed silence.

I am startled by a sound from the door and, looking up, I stare into the confused brown eyes of my boss. I almost laugh out loud, but check this impulse ruthlessly. Ah, the age-old confusion. Men do not and never will understand women, even less the little cruelties members of my sex visit upon each other like so many little endearments.

I plaster a bright smile on my face, rise from my chair and in a deliberately soothing voice ask if there is anything I can do for him.

Again, I almost burst out laughing when the confusion in his eyes are joined by a fierce frown on his affable face. In my mind’s eye I see him as one of the Greek Gods of old puzzled at Hera’s cruelty to one or other mortal woman. Not Zeus, for surely Zeus knew and understood his wife’s idiotic envy of his mortal paramours.

But my nemesis here is not the Goddess Hera. No. She is but the latest in a parade of uncomely, highly-educated – Phd, no less – androgynous, male-hating radical feminists. One of those pseudo-male women who utterly despise women like me; women who revel completely in their femininity. Women who do not want to be equal with men; but rather, understand intrinsically and instinctively since birth, that men and women are too different to ever be equal. To be equal, the two must be comparable – and they are not. They are like day and night, the moon and the sun – made of the same matter, but never the same nature.

I walk round my desk and approach him, smile still in place. The frown on his face smooths out and he returns my smile, shaking his head a little, and asks: What was that all about?

I tilt my head slightly to the left and answer softly: Nothing for you to worry about, sir, nothing at all.