Some things are truly universal ...

Thanks to my beloved I have become quite the Austenite or Austenophile or just-plain-fan-of-Jane. Recently we rented the film adaptation of The Jane Austen Book Club and, of course, followed this with the book itself. As anyone who has Facebooked me knows - one of my interests is reading good books and then watching the film adaptations - which is not exactly true as I usually tend to do this the other way round.

Anyway - about mid-way through the book one of the characters is being fleshed out. Grigg is the lone male member of the reading circle and tells the assembled ladies "how he'd lost a tech-support job in San Jose when the dot-coms crashed" and was not "working in a temp job at the university, part of the secretarial pool" and assigned to a computer lab of the Linguistics department. Tell me how many of my dear readers can relate to the following:

He'd recently been told the job was his for as long as he liked. His computer skills had everyone pretty excited. He spent his days recovering lost data, chasing down viruses, creating PowerPoint presentations of this and that. He seldom got to his real work, but no one complained; everyone was relieved to avoid the campus tech support. Apparently the campus group was some sort of elite paramilitary operation in which all information was treated as top-secret, to be doled out grudgingly and only after repeated requests. People came back from the computer lab looking as though they'd made a visit to the Godfather. Grigg's pay was less than it had been, but people were always bringing him cookies.