I was asked to write a story about a young man working for an older woman in a large company. For this story I put myself into the young man's point of view.
Story Code: M/F, MM/F, Voyeurism, Exhibitionism, Public Sex, Dogging
I left school at sixteen, went into an office, I was the only man, well, boy that started that year. The company took on ten office juniors each year and they had a two year training program and they never kept more than two of the juniors on after the training period. The company, which I can't name here for obvious reasons, was a long established, nationwide company with long established practices and procedures.
At eighteen I was given a post in Customer Services, a CA2 post, that meant that I got to do photocopying and filing and could be trusted to make coffee, it was made clear to me that I would have to work for five years as a CA2 before I would be considered for promotion to CA3, mainly because it would take five years to work my way around every section in Customer Services but also because that was one of the unwritten rules, minimum five years in post before promotion. The company was the kind of place that people started working for straight from school and worked for forty-five years before retiring and very few got as high as a CA6 before then, definitely a case of 'Dead-man's shoes'.
I hadn't planned on stopping, I wanted a more exciting job, something with freedom and travel but, I got a CA3 at twenty-three, which gave me a thousand pound pay rise and the chance to deal with customers on the phone and field staff on the radio. I had friends who had left school at the same time as I had and not one of them was earning anywhere close to what I was earning. I was a keen sports man plaid football, badminton and tennis, so I was fit and muscular, just over six foot tall.
Against all expectations I got a CA4 at twenty-five, by rights, I shouldn't even have been allowed to apply for it after only two years in my CA3 post and my workmates made it clear that they didn't appreciate my meteoric rise through the company. At twenty eight my team leader took me into a conference room, the company were looking at a different way of interacting with customers on the phone. We had two telephonists who sat in a quiet booth, the calls all went into them first, they decided who you needed to be connected with and put you through. The new idea was to have twenty staff who were experienced in all areas to take the call and deal with it without putting it through to anyone else. Because of the skill level and knowledge base required there would be twenty new posts created at CA6 grade, now that was serious money. "Mrs Benbow has asked me to have a word with you, nothing will be announced officially for six months and then it will take a further six months to get it up and running in every office, it's up to you, if you want to be considered, you have to get experience in dealing with enquiries in every area in just six months!"
Mrs Benbow was a principal assistant, if you believed the 'locker room' gossip, she was the youngest ever principal assistant and she had slept her way to the top to get there, at forty she was still very attractive, her mind was very sharp and from the little I had seen of her she had a wicked sense of humour. I told my team leader that I would be keen to try for it.
I had just six weeks in each area, I had to go into Engineering and commercial as well as customer services and get training in every kind of enquiry that was possible, the worst section was complaints. The staff in complaints were the worst in the business to work with, every one of them were as miserable as sin, totally negative about everything, comes from having people moaning at them all day, every day. I found myself agreeing with the customer ninety percent of the time, their requests often seemed very reasonable to me and I noticed that a recurring problem was that they had spent hours on the phone being passed from one department to another and when they lost their temper due to frustration they always ended up in complaints. I started to try and fix the problem instead of just recording the complaint and getting a letter of apology sent out. It was a good thing that I had been to all the other areas before complaints as I had the skills and knowledge to fix almost everything.
I was the only one in Complaints that had a good time, I actually looked forward to going in to work, I spent less time in the toilet, less time at the coffee machine and the day that I got a pensioner on the phone in tears because we had messed her about so much and to compound things we had inflated her bill for the work too, as she sobbed through her tail of woes, I asked her if I could look into things and phone her back, "Well, I know that you won't phone me back, I'll be back on tomorrow to go through it all over again with another faceless drone!" And with that stinging comment she hung up the phone.
I sat for a moment mulling things over, Mrs Benbow had started me off on this course of training and up-skilling, I could just have made a few calls, erased a few computer records, recalculate the bill and that would have been that, that would have been the 'face-less' approach. I called the complaints team leader and asked for permission to leave the group, then I searched for Mrs. Benbow's phone number and called her, I detailed the complaint, mentioned the lady's age and how upset she was, "What do you want to do about it?"
I was on my guard now, there was no signs of agreement with me, she just asked what I wanted to do about it. "Well, if it were my own company I think I'd be out buying a bouquet of flowers and delivering them to her and telling her that I'd wiped her bill!"
There was a long pause, "You have a driving licence?"
"Yes!"
"Have you been cleared to drive company vehicles?"
"No!"
"OH, that's a shame, give me five minutes!"
Two minutes later Ray Weston walked over to me, he was manual staff, it was hard to place him in the structure as manual grades didn't line up, well, we seldom did anything together, Ray was in total charge of all safety matters, "Get your coat on, it's cold outside!"
"Are we going somewhere?"
"Driving test!"
I jumped out of my seat, grabbed my jacket and followed Ray into the car park. I had to go through a series of manoeuvres in a Metro van, the same series in a maestro van and again in a Ford Transit van. Then Ray took me to a large black BMW six series saloon car. I didn't need to know the car, the parking place was marked Mrs Benbow, Ray got in the passenger side and I in the drivers, I was directed out of town and on to the dual carnage way and told to get up to speed. I had never driven anything like it in my life, the power, the speed and the handling were all impeccable, there was a bonus too, the smell in the car was wonderful, expensive scent from the car's usual owner.
Ray added me to the list of recognised drivers and gave me the ignition key to the BMW. "You need to pay for the flowers yourself and claim the cash back, if you come to me I'll counter sign the expense form and when you have the final write off figure for the bill, I'll have to counter sign that too, it's going against health and safety just this once!"
I was almost walking on a cloud, I was being allowed to deal with that vulnerable little old lady as if the company were my own. When I knocked on the customer's door and handed over a bunch of flowers and told the lady that the bill was being cancelled there were more tears, but this time tears of joy.
Overnight I was getting all the worst complaints, all the complaints that the rest of the team couldn't resolve and at the end of each day I had to go into Mrs Benbow's office to give her a breakdown of what I had cost the company each day, she was less interested in the problems or what went wrong, just what I had done to sort it out.
I was just coming to the end of my time with complaints team and I was in Engineering trying to talk them into replacing a cable that had been laid in a place that worried the customer in case they hit it while digging their garden. As an aside I asked if the engineer knew of any parking spaces close to Market Street as I had to pop out at lunch time to visit a shop there, Mrs. Benbow was in the room too, she came over, "Can you lend him your car John, your car has the electronic tag and can park in the substation in Market Street can't it?"
John just handed the key to his car and Mrs. Benbow took me by the arm and led me away, she needed something picking up from the fancy dress hire shop and wanted me to do it while I was in town for myself. I was even given extra time, the team leader in complaints was used to me nipping out to deal with complaints face to face so an extra long lunch break wouldn't come as a surprise.
I did my shopping and then went to the hire shop for Mrs. Benbow, I had just expected to pick up a suit bag and head back to the car, how wrong I was! I had to inspect the costume and sign for it, the costume was a very sexy nurse's outfit, not the kind of thing that a man would expect to pick up for his boss. In the office I was asked by several of my colleagues what I had fetched for the boss, I just told them that I had no idea and kept my mouth shut.
Mrs. Benbow must have had spies in the main office because when I went in for our daily meeting she thanked me for not breaking her confidence. That started a much closer working relationship, I had proven that I was trustworthy and knew how to keep my mouth shut. I had even been invited to lunch one day when Mrs. Benbow needed someone to unload onto. We were in a local pub, company rules stated that you were not allowed to drink while at work, Helen Benbow downed almost a full bottle of wine as she told me that things at home were strained. I was a single man, living alone in a one bedroom rabbit hutch so I couldn't offer any advice on relationships. I walked back to work and Helen drove home.
Well I didn't find out for six weeks that as she drove home Helen had been clocked doing one hundred and twenty miles an hour on the M6 motorway, I wouldn't have found out then but for the fact that she had to go to court in Birmingham and because of the speed and the fact that she managed to evade the police car that had chased her, she was banned from driving for six months. The first I knew of it was that my phone rang; I could see from the screen that it was a call from a mobile phone, "I need you to meet me in Birmingham!"
I had never received a phone call from Helen Benbow's mobile phone before, so I didn't recognise the number, "I'll have to check with facilities but I can see two pool cars in the car park!"
