The Typist

 

The office looked very small on the first impression. A room divided in two parts. One had a cabin for the owner and the other part, which comprised of only three medium sized square shaped wood tables and four wooden chairs, was allocated to the employees. Veronica wasn’t impressed with what she saw. It was her first job and the office didn’t look attractive or lively at all. There were three more employees sitting at their allocated spaces. Only one table with a typewriter placed on it and a chair were empty which she presumed would be allocated to her. She observed that there was no air conditioning in the office, only a ceiling fan.

Veronica Gomes never wanted to be a steno typist but since her mother had been the same for her entire career, it wasn’t a surprise when she decided to start her career with the same profile. After she had completed her graduation, she was recommended by one of her relatives to the owner of the office for the job of a steno typist.

Finally, after waiting for half an hour, an electronic bell was heard and one of the other employees told her to go inside to meet the owner.

The first observation that she made was that the cabin was air conditioned unlike the employee designated area. The owner was submerged in some papers when he abruptly looked at Veronica.

“Oh, yeah. Please have a seat.” He said putting down his round spectacle.

Zubin Electricwala didn’t seem to be a strict employer at first sight but he was one. Expecting the best performance from his employees, he was a hard task master. The fifty- nine -year -old had seen number of employees in his career as a consultant and he had been fairly disappointed with the new generation of employees.

“Everyone wants money. No one is interested in quality and skill.” He would comment to his club friends.”

Zubin Electricwala was a law consultant by profession and the sole owner of his law firm named, “Electricwala and Co”. His main forte was corporate law and labor laws as advertised. The position for which Veronica was hired was as his Steno typist. Zubin Electricwala had a lot to say and he would do so in his letters and papers to his clients. Of course, when involved with his clients on any particular case, he would make pages after pages of documents all typed on a typewriter. The year was 1991 and though computers had made a foray in large corporates but it was far away from the walls of Zubin’s office.

“I hope you have been trained very well. I have read your bio- Data. The institute where you have learned the steno work is a very renowned one.”

“Yes, sir. I have gone through six months of training. I shall give my best.” She replied hesitantly.

“Well. Good then. Let’s start for the day.” Zubin clapped his hands and handed over a bunch of hand written papers.

“Please get these typed at the earliest. We have to dispatch it by today evening.”

Veronica’s eyes popped out looking at the volume of papers she was handed.  As she took hold of them, “all these today itself?” she asked.

“Yes. Yes. We cannot delay furthermore.”

It was eleven in the morning when Veronica sat down on her chair. The next time when she got her head up and looked up at the watch was three forty -five in the afternoon. She had finished her typing and she collected and arranged the typewritten papers and handed over to Zubin. While Zubin reviewed the papers, she sat down for lunch on her table.  Twenty minutes later, Zubin rang the bell alarm that signaled that he was calling the typist.

When Veronica entered the cabin, Zubin handed over the papers back to her. “Make these corrections as highlighted,” said Zubin and looked back into the documents on his table. Veronica stood there in silence and looked at the papers. She observed grammatical corrections with respect to comma, full stop, hyphen, brackets and a lot more.

“Sir, but I copied everything as it was written in those hand written pages.”

Zubin looked up and kept down his spectacles. “I understand that. But it was your job to check the grammar and everything else with respect to the language and sentence structuring.”

Veronica stood there in silence unable to actually understand her job profile.  Avoiding a clash on her first day, she nodded and took the papers out and kept on her table. By then, evening tea had arrived. She gulped down the tea and then again sat down to re work and re type the papers.

The day ended at seven thirty in the evening when the last set was ready. Before moving out for the day, the papers were packed and kept ready for the post early next day. While she got up and was ready to leave, she observed that Zubin was still at his desk inside the cabin. She left without asking anything.

Over the next few weeks, it became the same routine.  Veronica would type based on hand written notes from Zubin or based on oral dictation by Zubin. Post this, she would then present it to Zubin. Zubin would make corrections with respect to grammar, sentence structuring, vocabulary and other alignments. Subsequent to the changes as suggested, she would again re-work on those papers.

To her surprise, one day, when a notice had arrived to a client Zubin had found many errors in the English and structuring of the contents. He dictated a letter to Veronica which corrected all the mistakes with respect to English and the technical content. He then posted the letter along with the notice back to the authorities requesting them to rectify and resend and informing them that only after the corrections in the notice would he take the requisite action in consultation with the client. Veronica was astonished.

Every time Veronica typed and presented to Zubin, he would find mistakes and correct them and make her do everything from scratch. Months passed and then two years passed following the same routine. Veronica by now had been irritated to the brink of her limits. She couldn’t understand the old man.

Finally, after completing two and half years with Zubin, on a winter morning of 1993, she presented her resignation letter.

Zubin looked at the letter and then looked back at her, “You leaving?” “But why?” he asked.

She looked at him silently trying to understand whether he did this on purpose with young people.

“I have got an opportunity with a medium sized corporate house. I would like to take that offer, sir”

 Zubin nodded his head. “I will have to search for one more typist then.”

After thinking for some time, he signed the resignation letter and looked up at Veronica, “All the best dear. Hope you make me proud one day.”

Veronica took the letter back from Zubin unable to understand what he had meant by the words “ Hope you make me proud one day.”

Shrugging aside her thoughts, she walked out and then started to arrange everything. Two weeks later, Veronica finally left from the office one last time relieved that she wouldn’t have to again come back to that office.

Seven years later on a misty winter evening of the year 2000, when Veronica Gomes received her promotion letter of Executive assistant to CFO of a large listed company, she couldn’t believe it. It had been one fantastic journey for her, she realized. After she had left Electricwala and Co, Veronica had joined a medium sized auto spare parts manufacturing company. In that Company, she was responsible for drafting and typing all the correspondences with the customers and vendors. Over the next one year, the Company was very happy by her performance and she was transferred to the Holding Company which was a large Auto manufacturing Company listed on the Bombay Stock exchange ( BSE). At that Company, she was responsible for corporate communications and media communications. Though the world had undergone a change and her work had moved from a type writer to a computer, but her core strengths that she had learned remained intact. She read everything in detail, worked impeccably, reviewed her own work and re-worked on everything. Her final papers would always be her fifth or sometime the tenth draft. Finally, in 1999 she had joined one of the largest auto companies in India at that time and was promoted to be executive assistant to the CFO of the Company responsible for all communication, paper work and drafting from the CFO’s office.

As she sat down for a coffee in the plush and luxurious tenth floor office over- looking the Arabian sea, her thoughts drifted back to her first job. All these years she had never looked back to her first office. She had never gone to meet Zubin and neither she had contacted him. She couldn’t have denied that everything she had become was primarily due to the initial seeds of learning she had done at Electricwala and Co. She never forgot the learnings from Zubin, “Review everything number of times until you are completely satisfied,” he had often said during those years as she recollected. “Re-work everything to the tune of perfection,” she recollected another favourite phrase of Zubin. Her current office was just at a distance of fifteen minutes from Electricwala and Co. That evening as she sipped her black coffee in the luxury of the plush corporate environment, she decided she would visit Zubin the next day.

Next day, when she reached the building of Electricwala and Co, nostalgia struck her. It was the same lift that had taken her to her first job. She observed that the building didn’t change even after all those years. She reached the third floor and walked through the passage and looked at the corner room that was the office of Electricwala and Co. She reached the office door but surprisingly found a different name on the door. She pushed the door and entered and found herself inside a plush and well air- Conditioned office where people were glued to their computers. She looked around the room and found no cabin. “Sorry,” she apologized and walked out. Unable to find any known face, she walked back to the lift. She entered the lift. She finally recognized the liftman. The liftman was the same man who would foray the lift even in those year.

“Hello, sir. Can you tell me where did Electricwala and Co shift to?” Veronica asked excitingly.

The lift man looked closely towards Veronica. “Oh. It’s you. I remember. You use to work in this building once.” Veronica nodded smilingly.” Can you tell me where is Zubin sir now.”

“Actually, I don’t know. But after you had left, the office closed down.”

“Can you tell me why did the office close down.” she asked inquisitively.

“They say that he didn’t have much customers to work with.  After some months, he only pretended to run an office. He was only interested in teaching young people how to work and think. He made them work very hard and gave them money for that. They thought that they were getting salary but there was no business so it was all a loss for Zubin in those later years. All the work was only to train young people who came to his office and then those young people left getting irritated by his hard task master role.”

Veronica was stunned and shocked. Her mind went down to the years when she worked so relentlessly in that office and he would review, check and make corrections.

“Do you know where did he shift?”

“No one knows that actually. He just vanished one day after everyone came to know that he wasn’t left with any business or clients.”

Tears had almost rolled down her eyes. She controlled herself and walked down the building. She looked at the sky above and road ahead. The shops were the same, the road side stall was the same and the people all around also seemed same.  Everything she had learnt was attributable to Zubin and the firm. If not for him, she would have been a routine employee doing routine work in some organization. She felt sad that she couldn’t say a goodbye thank you to him when she had left. Those words came back to her, “Hope you make me proud one day.”

It was afternoon time. She decided to walk down to her current office. As she walked and mixed into the crowd of hundreds of people heading to some destination or other, some two thousand kilometers away, in a small town, at the door of a small office, there was a knock. The owner of the office looked up and said, “Come in”

“Hello, sir. I am Aniket Mehta and I am here to work as a Typist.”

“Are you sure you want to work here? I am really very strict and a hard task master.”  

“Yes, sir. I am ready”

“Good. You can join then. Please take these hand written papers and type them on the computer outside. We have to dispatch them today itself.”

Aniket took the bunch of papers and hurried outside.

The sixty- eight -year- old Zubin Electricwala rested back on his chair thinking happily about the fact that he will be training a young mind for the future.