EPTYou can, however, come in an hour late, stinking of booze and fags and act like they should be happy you came at all.
This is the only thing I really learned during my apprenticeship:
It's all about attitude. If there's a trait they all have in common, all the suits and the dressed up hussies, typing their e-mails with impossibly long nails and reeking like they robbed a perfume store, it's this:
They know that only a very thin lair of ability divides them from everyone else, that everyone with minimal training could do their job for them. They're not car mechanics, or cooks, or scientists, their training revolves around slightly refining skills you and I and everyone who grew up with a PC or a typewriter already has.
This is why they invent bogus titles that mean nothing, that's why every one of them is a "manager" of something, that is why they react allergic to every sign of confidence. Show them you look through their bullshit, and there goes anything they get their confidence from.
I was beginning my second year in the office. Coming back from six months on laying in a hospital bed, after a mean bacterial meningitis, I was ordered to my boss' office an hour into my first day back.
"Consider yourself made redundant." she said with a mean sneer.
"What for?", I asked, knowing full well she had more than one good reason to let me go.
"You can't just take six months off and play ill. We both know you were faking it."
I laughed out loud.
"Is that all? I have a lot of work to do. I don't know you if you noticed, but I was absent for half a year."
"Didn't I say you were fired?"
"Yes, but we both know you can't do that. So may I be excused?"
She had ordered one of the representatives of the apprentice association to the office that day, so I could officially be made redundant the very same day I returned to work. The hearing took about half a minute:
"I assume Mrs. S. has already presented you with the reason she intends to let you go?", the rep said, barely containing a smirk.
"Yes. She suspects I have been faking a bacterial meningitis, having fooled a full hospital staff for the better part of six months, having faked regular blood work. Her extensive medical training certainly qualifies her to make that diagnosis."
"So you haven't?", she asked, now smirking ostentatiously.
"Though I enjoyed the lumbar punctures a hell of a lot more than the work here, I have not."
"That is all."
I had won. I could do what I wanted from then on, she could write warnings until her hands cramped, the apprentice association wouldn't take anything she said seriously.
Part of my apprenticeship was going to school once a week, to learn economics and accounting.
My classmates were exclusively douches. They made fun of everyone who studied anything else.
They reckoned the cooks were idiots, the mechanics were nerds, and the bakers were borderline retarded. Apparently the only pursuit they deemed worthy was wearing a tie and sucking up to customers. I mostly hung about with the cooks, so the breaks were alright, but the lessons were soul-sucking. None of us had visited high school, and half of the teachers never went to university.
It showed in the lessons...
Part 1: Enticement
Part 2: Sarah
Part 3: Attitude
Part 4: Finale
![[image loading]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41Plq4P5yaL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg)
so your in an apprenticeship to be an office clerk? is there such a thing? 
