2002 girl is interviewed by a charming man who says she’s ideal
for a new role in marketing in an engineering corporation.
2002 Girl eats Thai food in a London pub with the charming man
and another just like him and imagines she charms them.
She accepts a salary five times less than the charming man gets.
She straightens her hair and walks to the tube on boots that make her feet bleed.
After travelling for an hour and a half, she enters the sky-eating office
and is told to take the minutes. Ten suited men hurl darts of jargon,
the only thing she understands is they took their client to a lap-dancing establishment
(should she record this?). She doesn’t know
how to use Word to type the minutes and make the men’s documents pretty,
which is what her job involves. There is no training given.
2002 Girl wants everyone to like her but the men soon think she’s useless
and the secretaries who sit like eggs in boxes don’t approve of her.
When she cries at work, her male boss tells her, If you want to know what stress is,
try living in Barnsley with five kids.
She writes poetry during work hours and is told off for it
in her yearly appraisal. She tells her boss, I’m just researching.
Sam Szanto lives in Durham, UK. Her poetry pamphlet 'This Was Your Mother' was one of the winners of the 2023 Dreich Slims Contest. Her collaborative pamphlet, ‘Splashing Pink’, was published by Hedgehog Press and is a Poetry Book Society Winter Pamphlet Choice. She won the 2020 Charroux Poetry Prize and the Twelfth First Writer International Poetry Prize. Her poems have been published in journals including ‘Northern Gravy’, ‘The North’ and ‘The Storms’. She has an MA in Writing Poetry with Distinction from the Poetry School. Her short story collection, ‘If No One Speaks’, was published by Alien Buddha Press.
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