Typewriter. Hairspray. Hot.

You could find the Secretarial Pool of Smith, Anderson and Associates on the second floor of their headquarters, sandwiched between the canteen and the storage rooms. This was the perfect location – far enough away from the bosses who stayed in the lofty heights of the fifth floor that gossip could be shared freely without fear of being overheard, but close enough to the fire escapes to secret away for a cigarette break without any questions being asked.

The Pool, as they were officially revered to by the rest of the company, seemed to move as one herd. It was well known that half of the Pool would disappear for lunch at 1pm to graze in the canteen, whilst the rest were tasked with keeping guard of the computers. It was their sworn duties to cast a side-eye to any weak looking associated who dared to descend to the second floor, cap in hand, with their plea for help.

Official company policy dictated that there would always be a minimum of two people present in the Pool within the non-core hours of 6am-8am and 5pm-8pm, simply so someone would be able to deal with the work of some frazzled associate who may appear in the Pool with the sound of desperation in their voice. And as that moment of madness was a right-of-passage for each and every potential partner of the company, it was well known that your relationship with the Pool was key to your success. Rumour has it that if one member of the Pool had any issues with you, little had to be said for you to end up on the outs. Getting ‘drowned’ was a brutal way to go. Just as equally, though, the favoured would manage to get their work slipped that little bit higher in the queue.

If you were to ask a veteran from the upper echelons, they would tell you that little change had occurred in the Pool throughout the company’s 70 years of operation. At the company Christmas party, certain partners of the firm would chuckle wryly as they mentioned that the second floor no longer stunk of the fizzy aerosols of hairspray from the women in the Pool – hell, that Pool even had men now. Men! The more anodyne partners would stray into safer, less controversial territories, meekly recalling that during their time as a junior associate for the company, they were able to hear the swarming drone of the typewriters in their sleep at night. But if you were to ask the elder members of the Pool, they would say that the only thing that had never changed and would never change was the broken air conditioner, making the second floor a hot, sweaty mess during the Summer.

Decades had passed, both Smith and Anderson, the original owners, had long since died, and desks in the building had suffered from thousands of changes of ownership, but the one constant that could always be relied upon, day in and day out, was the Pool.