Work experience

I remember a long time ago, more than 10 years in fact, I went to the holiday inn in Reading (the one near Caversham) to complete my week of 'work experience'. The placements were chosen at random, and despite wanting experience in a 'busy office' I found myself in the wonderful world of hoteliering- perhaps this is where my love was born (of staying in hotels and cleaning, not the two together of course).

Each day I reported in via the back entrance to my supervisor, a rough'n'ready Reading lass, probably about mid-late 20's but who might as well have been 50 to me at the time. I donned my green and white checked jumpsuit and yes, I had to clean bedrooms. I even had to do that little poncy thing with the toilet roll where it forms a neat little 'point' at the end for easy grabbing.

I learnt how to do proper nurses corners on the bedsheets, how to change a duvet cover in a time efficient manner, how to plump cushions (which Sam has since re-taught me) how to steel the chocolates that were meant for the guest's pillows and how to take longer lunchbreaks than I was supposed to. All in all, many valuable life lessons were learnt that week.

The reason I cast my mind back to these happy carefree days (ahem) is that at present we have two 'lads' in the office on work experience. I say 'lads' as everyone in the office is desperately trying to call them something PC- young people, young men, lads etc rather than children, or even worse as I did earlier....kids! Oh dear god.

Trying desperately to make them feel an integral part of the business, I felt it would be good to involve them in a mini focus group to ask their opinions some on preliminary designs done on a site we're developing aimed at kids their age (see I'm at it again, old mother Hubbard!)...rather unfortunately about sexual health. Funny, but 15 year old boys don't appear to want to talk freely about sexual health problems to a 20 something erm, woman. When I asked if they recognised a picture showing a pile of contraceptive pills one of them piped up and said, 'yeah, it's a load of e'....yes! Well, not quite- e-strogen maybe. Thank you and goodnight.