The SnippEthel

With Kate on holiday this week, I have twice as much work and with Amanda having a day off, I was on my own yesterday at the wheel of Igolus. Unfortunately, there was no way I could enjoy this little freedom by dancing around the office, as Sarah the trainee was here as well. Shame...
I still find it really weird to use that word: trainee. This is essentially because ‘trainee’ can also be understood as ‘trainée’, an old fashion French term meaning... whore. The coincidence of translations can be quite cruel. Being a trainee is hard enough (work with hardly any pay!) without having to be insulted all day long by your title (although I have a colleague who didn’t mind too much calling a trainee a ‘special needs monkey’, but well, he had his reasons and that’s another story anyway...)
For a long time, the double meaning didn’t occur to me. But I clearly remember the day it struck me.
When I was single and in London, I used to take the train every Saturday to Central London to get my French Saturday paper. I would sometimes have to search through five newsagents to find it. Then, I would end up in a café, order a black americano and start my reading, looking through the pictures first. One day, as I was comfortably sitting at a Caffe Nero, reading and sipping coffee, my attention was taken from my paper. In front of me, a member of staff was cleaning a table, her back to me and in large capital letters, I could read on her T-shirt: TRAINEE. For a moment, I was really upset, and it took me a while to understand she had just started her job and wasn’t here to offer an hour in the hotel next door.
Week after week, I would come back to that same café and notice the entire staff changed every two or three weeks. I like to think they found a better place. Somewhere they were given a T-shirt that said: ‘I’m great’.