Confessions of a Reluctant Recessionista

incomprehensible announcement. Probably something about signal failure. It’s usually signal failure. A few minutes after that the train began to move again, lurching forward painfully at walking-while-carrying-heavy-shopping pace.
    By the time we made it to Waterloo, where I change to the Waterloo and City line, I was already running late. By some truly amazing feats of contortion (those Yogalates classes at Holmes Place must be paying off) I managed to squeeze myself onto the next carriage, bracing myself against the door and craning my neckto avoid having my face pressed into the sweaty armpit of the man in front of me. This, part two of a three-part journey to work, is usually the low point.
    Part three I like. In fact, I must be the only person I know who actually enjoys their commute, or at least a part of it, to work. I love sitting at the front of the DLR train as it rises up out of the gloom of Bank station into bright sunshine, trundling along above the streets of East London like a particularly slow and not especially frightening roller coaster. I love the view across the water from West India Quay towards the forest of steel and glass towers rising up from the Docklands. I like riding the super-fast lift to the forty-second floor of One Canada Square, the tallest of Canary Wharf’s skyscrapers and home to Hamilton Churchill’s equity trading floor. This is the kind of place I dreamed about working when I was growing up: not that I pictured myself as a PA, obviously – I didn’t really know what I wanted to be. But I knew where I wanted to be: I longed to be somewhere like this, somewhere noisy and glamorous and frenetic, a place where important, consequential things happened, a place a long way from suburban Kettering.
    The second I went through the doors of our open-plan office, I regretted the choice of bright red trenchcoat that morning. Against a sea of men (and a couple of women) in sombre dark suits I stood out like a beacon. Or a red rag to a bull.
    ‘What the fuck time do you call this, Cassie?’ he yelled at me before I’d even made it to my desk.My boss, ladies and gentlemen, the charming Mr Nicholas Hawksworth, fifty-something divorcé, father of two and all-round bastard.
    ‘It’s ten minutes past eight,’ I said politely, flicking on my computer.
    ‘Don’t be fucking smart with me,’ he snapped. I was telling the time , for God’s sake, how is that being smart?
    ‘Where the hell is that analyst’s note on Vodafone? It was supposed to be on my desk first thing this morning.’ Well, at least he’d switched from ‘fuck’ to ‘hell’ – it usually meant he was calming down. I followed him into his office.
    ‘I put it on your desk last night – on the left . . .’ I looked down at his desk. He’d plonked his newspaper down on top of it. ‘It’s under the FT ,’ I said.
    ‘Well, that’s no bloody good, is it? Get me a coffee, will you? And when I say I want something on my desk first thing, that’s what I mean. Not the night before, not that afternoon. All right?’
    Yes, of course , I thought as I descended the lift to go to the Caffè Nero round the corner (there’s a Starbucks in the building but for some reason Nicholas won’t drink their coffee), God forbid I should be too efficient . The thing is, I am efficient. I’m good at my job. Punctual (well, almost), organised, resourceful and very presentable, I can type one hundred words per minute, draw up elaborate charts in PowerPoint and remember every meeting he’s going to have this week without looking at the diary. And I pick up his dry cleaning. I’m indispensable. He wouldn’t survive a day without me.
    Today, though, it felt as if he would happily go the rest of his life without ever laying eyes on me again. There was the lateness issue, the craftily concealed analyst’s note, and then the coffee I got him was insufficiently strong (it’s not as though I make it, for God’s sake) so I had to go back and get another one which was then insufficiently hot. I thought he was going to throw it at me – I kid you not, legend has it he did just that to a previous assistant. I was saved by his mobile ringing, where upon he spent the next ten minutes giving his ex-wife a load of abuse about the fact that his younger son had failed to make the school rugby team. Why exactly that was her fault I couldn’t quite work out. Then he couldn’t get an email to send (my fault, naturally), the dry cleaners had