Lucy Mangan: Beware the power of the office temp (unless it's me)

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/may/17/lucy-mangan-could-have-been-edward-snowden

Version 0 of 1.

When I was a temp (gap year, holidays, years after university, again during law school, the latter helpfully purging my system of the last vestiges of hope and energy that kept irritatingly reminding me that I was still technically alive), I used to marvel at the power I had. The agency sends you into a blue-chip company as infill receptionist, typing monkey or coffee-fetcher-cum-filing-clerk and the company gives you a desk, a chair and unfettered access to information – whether stored on hard drives, Dictaphones (or nano-recorders now, maybe, embedded in your fingertips and waved at the screen), memos or in the braying heads of twonks standing too near your badly partitioned office.

Or rather, I used to marvel at the potential power I had. I was saved from turning corporate spy or insider-ish trader (or, I suppose, proto-Snowden disseminator of truth and bringer of justice, though, to be honest, that wasn't where my penury-whetted thoughts were heading) by an intense cluelessness. I knew I must be looking at gold but not how to mine it, smuggle it out or sell it on. I suppose if I had, I wouldn't have been sitting there at the age of 27 temping for £5.50 an hour while my bosses tried to get me replaced by someone more nubile and whose entire professional wardrobe did not comprise two white shirts and a green Next suit so large it looked like she was wearing Wimbledon.

I don't know what I would have done if I'd found myself in the position of the woman hired as temporary PA to the chief executive of the Premier League, Richard Scudamore, who had access to his personal emails and discovered several discussing women in fairly vile fashion.

I suspect I wouldn't have sent them to a national newspaper in a state of high dudgeon, as she says she did. I'd like to claim that this would have been because of a complex of concerns about the ethics of intruding on private correspondence and uncertainty about the wisdom of applying a blanket "Reap what you sow, boyo!" philosophy to every transgression. But it would probably have been because, until I reached my 30s, I had – as a subsection of the aforementioned intense cluelessness – an astonishingly high tolerance of male twattitude. And oh, how well that served me in the preceding decade, but that's a thought for another time.

But her motivations, whether financial or moral, are perhaps less interesting than what he and other bosses – of assorted degrees and types of dickishness – are thinking when they fail to take steps to protect themselves and their businesses from those from outside the fold. Does the image of the vapid secretary, so silly, so far from being a fully sentient being that she is capable neither of being offended nor of going on the offensive still persist so strongly that it never occurs to the high heid yins to take preventive measures? Maybe they are so immersed in an atmosphere of company loyalty they forget others may not feel the same? Maybe they've been so successful for so long that they feel invincible? I'd love to know. Of course, once print dies and I'm back out there with my 60wpm, I might get to find out. I'll sell anything else I find to the highest bidder, of course. I've learned that much over the last 15 years.