I’m sort of surprised I’ve never written this one but on the other hand, there’s not much to write. It’s about the time I spent a week dogsitting in the south of France and I’m writing it now in honour of the day that my ex-boss emailed me out of the blue* to say “it would be nice to schedule a call to say hi”. What’s my ex-boss got to do with dogsitting or indeed, why is my ex-boss getting in touch? Read on, all will be revealed.
My contract at my first job was a bit vague. I had five or six specific tasks, plus anything else anyone asked of me. It was literally written into my contract that my job was to do absolutely anything. I was an office junior, so if printer ink needed to be ordered, or fetched from the stationery company next door, that was my job. Prepare the lunch for the big meeting? My job. Phone Mauritania on a Friday afternoon to try to sell our services? My job. Bless the Muslim world for taking Friday as a weekend! Nothing was too big, too small or too weird to be handed over to me.
In 2011, my boss decided to move to France. That’s the luxury of owning the company, you get to just dump your job and go off to the French cookery school of your dreams. And because my job was absolutely anything and because he knew that I did Rangers and Brownies, I was hauled out of the office to babysit his kids while he and his wife packed the van. So I spent two days in his garden trying to entertain a three-year-old (well, it was his third birthday on the second day – I threaded marshmallows onto string for the party) and a fourteen-month-old. That’s not an age group I specialise in but the van got packed and the kids survived and hey, I got paid to spend two days playing with crayons and ride-on dumper trucks in the sunshine instead of sitting at my desk.
Fast-forward nearly two years and my boss was going on holiday. Coming back here, in fact, and for some reason they couldn’t bring the dog. We’d been very accustomed to the dog going backwards and forwards with them – she was a very placid dog who was apparently perfectly happy to sit in the van for two days in each direction while he drove up from Provence and we were used to her wandering around the office on his semi-regular trips back. Even before he moved to France, she’d been in the office whenever he was there – she was in my interview and I still credit her with getting the job in the first place. To this day I have no idea why she got left behind this time. And guess what? My job was absolutely anything I was asked to do and so I was asked to fly to his house in Provence, in the hills above Aix, and babysit the dog for a week. The company paid for the flight, he picked me up from Marseille airport, we got settled in that first evening, I had the house tour and the fridge tour and then they left the next day, leaving me on a paid holiday in France.
Except it was February. And I was expected to work.
Remote work didn’t work quite as well back then, or perhaps it hadn’t been set up as efficiently as it would be these days. I had his big Mac on the kitchen table, which was a challenge in itself because I’m not a Mac sort of person (when I started my current job, I took his spare Macbook to meet the company in London and within five minutes, my new colleague said “…that’s not your laptop, is it?”), and a remote connection to our server back in England, and I updated our pricing and packing system the same as I always did. It took ten times as long as it usually did. I measured it and calculated. By the third or fourth day I’d all but given up. What took me half an hour at home was taking the entire day and frustrating me half to death.
Eventually I gave up almost entirely and took to the big sofa in the living room with his iPad. My mum had an iPad at the time from her school and I spent my last three or four days talking to her on Facetime, bored out of my mind, or watching his collection of Disney DVDs, with the occasional dog walk to break the monotony.
Everyone had been very excited when I said I was being sent to the south of France. Very exotic, very different to a desk in an office above a warehouse on an industrial estate. Now here I was supposed to spend my time working but unable to, but still unable to go out and enjoy my “holiday” because I had to work and it was February. It was freezing. Instead of the gas-powered central heating he’d had in his old house near the office, my boss had a woodburner, the first time I’d encountered such a thing in real life. As it was the only source of heat in the house, I had to get it going but I’ve said several times before that I’m not a talented firelighter and I was even worse in 2013. After several failed attempts, I watched a YouTube tutorial and eventually got it lit and warm. Too warm. It roared. Stuff rattled in the flue and the ferocious heat burnt all the dirt off the glass door. I was petrified. I phoned my boss’s mum who said as long as there were no flames coming out of the roof, it was probably fine, which wasn’t reassuring. I don’t think I lit it again after that day. I’d rather be frozen than accidentally burn down my boss’s house.
That glass was crystal-clear by the time that fire died down.
The other thing that scared me was the shutters. It was fine. But first thing every morning I had to go downstairs into a very dark house with the sun blocked out and open those shutters. What was hiding behind them? What if there was a man with a knife lurking underneath? Shutters look lovely but I’d never have them on my own house, or I’d never close them at least. Once the light was streaming through the house and I could see the chilly February day, it was fine, but what if there was something outside? The dog was no use. She was very sweet but she’d have stood by and gazed vacantly if someone had broken in and murdered me. Mind you, for such a sweet and good-natured dog, I didn’t enjoy the morning when I got growled at several times because it was gone dawn and she still hadn’t had her breakfast. I don’t remember it being a later morning than any of the others but she was clearly in a mood and I realised there’s a wolf still hiding inside even the sweetest domestic dog.
At long last the weekend came. Even in France I don’t work at weekends. I went to Marseille! I imagine I got the bus into Aix from the house in the suburbs on the hill and then took the train. I was definitely at the station at Marseille because I’ve got photos of trains and I remember being concerned by an alarm in the station that might prevent me getting back to the house. I don’t remember a lot about Marseille itself. It’s not somewhere I would have chosen to visit myself – the entire south coast of France isn’t somewhere I’d choose to visit. I think I probably spent the entire day feeling like I needed to get back to the dog. All in all, I saw the sea, I saw a new city and I was quite glad to get back to the house, which wasn’t comfortable but was at least familiar.
The next day I went into Aix. Now, Aix I liked a little more. I’d already been to Iceland a few times by now and I had discovered geothermal springs. Aix has a naturally warm fountain and I was very taken by it. It’s a big moss-covered boulder in a big dish and in February, it steams gently. That was brilliant. Warmth! And warmth that wasn’t going to burn anything down! In hindsight, I’d have made my way to the Thermes Sextius, which I think I saw from a bus. 2021 Me can’t figure out why 2013 Me didn’t, although it’s likely I didn’t take my swimming things. It looks nice. It looks exactly me. I’m almost tempted to return, possibly with a disguise just in case, just to go to that spa. I love spas and hot water.
I remember going into a supermarket, probably in Aix. I remember buying a baguette. And I remember that baguette tasting of absolutely nothing. Well, supermarket French bread isn’t going to taste like real boulangerie French bread but I’ve had better baguettes from my local Tesco, where I don’t think they know what a baguette even is. Further investigation led to the discovery that I’d accidentally bought a salt-free baguette. And if I got nothing else out of my week in the south of France, it was the necessity of salt to make food taste of anything.
The boss came back. I tidied the house, put away the DVDs, cuddled the dog and then I was driven back to the airport to fly home. I’d had my first ever work trip away and discovered why it is that no one really likes work trips.
*about the call, by the way. I left that company (well, I left it twice!) and last year so did my ex-boss. He has a new company (the intersection of mindfulness and professional networking) and he also works for the one I currently work for, although he’d probably say he “consults” for us. The two companies are quite well intertwined – I was just the first of three employees so far to come over to the new company from the old one and one of the others has gone back to the old company to take the CEO job once my ex-boss left it. The old one bought a large chunk of the new one and did the recruitment and payroll for the first couple of years. My job application and interview went like this: “We can’t find anyone in London to stare at spreadsheets. You know, we’ve got someone downstairs we’re only using three days a week who’s quite good at staring at spreadsheets. Juliet, can you come up? You’re starting a new job.” So my ex-boss getting in touch isn’t entirely “out of the blue” as he’s on the company Slack but our roles don’t involve any interaction at all and he’s right, it’s been a few years since we’ve talked.