The Meeting
By gletherby
- 1060 reads
Tanya and Helen are in a meeting. Less formal than most they spend much of their time in they meet in the coffee shop on the first floor of the library in the university in which they both work. Having collaborated together on a number of institutional projects over the last few years they are comfortable in each other’s company and move easily from discussing work concerns to chatting about more personal issues and interests. Well into their second coffee they are talking about a future event they are jointly organising when they are politely interrupted by a woman in her late 50s. She is dressed in trousers and jumper, protected by a black tabard, and has a staff card hanging from an institutional lanyard around her neck.
‘Excuse me,’ she says. ‘Are you here for the cleaners’ meeting?’
‘No, no,’ Tanya and Helen reply in unison and return to their own business whilst the woman takes a seat at a nearby table.
A little while later the third woman leaves. It seems that her meeting is in some other place. Tanya and Helen are left to reflect on how her intervention made them feel.
As mid-life women themselves that they were the only ones approached makes them smile, if a little wryly: ‘Why not the men? Clearly too important. Why not the younger women? Clearly students. What an assumption of the other woman to make. How shocking.’
As social scientists who each like to think that they have a strong social consciousness and empathy with those whose privilege is lesser they are disquieted by their initial emotional response: ‘Do we look like cleaners? But why not, for what do cleaners look like after all? How snobbish of us. How shocking.’
Coffee finished, conference planned, responsibilities divided, Tanya and Helen part. On returning to her office Tanya opens an email with further detail on the timings of her forthcoming presentation to senior management. On the way to hers’ Helen is stopped by one of her post-graduate students who thanks her for the insightful comments on his latest piece of writing.
Status equilibrium restored the two women are no less uneasy with their early sense of effrontery. Feelings that don’t leave them even when come evening they both find themselves, as is more often or not the case, responsible for the preparation of supper, the washing and other household tasks.
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