After my first day in my new job, I blurted out to Nikki, “I’ve got an office, a Blackberry and a personal assistant! Who am I?”
To be true, the PA isn’t strictly mine - I share with two others - but I do have someone is supposed to manage my diary, do my photocopying and make phone calls for me. At least, I think that’s what she’s supposed to do. I haven’t quite got this figured out.
I did a bit of a survey of people I know to see what they thought.
My dad, who has had assistants for years now, said that you can get them to do anything. Organise your personal travel, get cards for birthdays, arrange your dry-cleaning. Basically, whatever work is making you too busy to do. My friends, most of whom don’t have PAs, generally agreed. “I’d love to have someone to do everything for me,” was the typical response. Although one mate said that he’d had an assistant for a few months and was as clueless as me.
I just feel really uncomfortable asking someone the same age as my mother to do things I am able to do myself. But on the other hand, this dry cleaning won’t take itself to the shops.
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Moving to the North Shore has its definite positives. I can afford a place bigger than a shoebox. I don’t find empty syringes or condom wrappers on my doorstep in the morning. I can walk up the street to get coffee without smelling urine once. It’s just so frigging…nice. There are trees and people have washed and my neighbours are nice and I am realising that I have always been a bourgeois yuppy on the inside.
There are dangers too. Naturally, the overwhelming upper-middle-classness of it all could mean that I forget that there are poor people out there. I could start to believe that absolutely everyone drives a BMW or a Lexus and that a Honda Jazz really is no car at all. I could start talking about my stock portfolio. I could have a stock portfolio. The possibilities are endless.
Another risk that Nikki and I observed when scoping out the area is that, like a number of other harbourside neighbourhoods, this suburb has recently experienced a “baby boom”. It seems as if everyone around here is aged between 25 and 40 and pushing a pram. It’s clearly the place you go when you want to buy a unit, do some renovations and have yourself a kid or two.
“Everyone’s nesting,” said my fiancée on seeing the young families dotting the park we were in.
“The worst thing is that they make it look kind of appealling!” I commented, guiltily.
“I didn’t want to come out and say it, but yeah…”
If you intend to stay young and footloose, you can’t be too careful where you live.
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