The Fanny Bone

Odd name for a story I hear you say, but this is one of my favourite memories and a great representation of what it’s like working with eclectic personalities in a relatively small environment.

It features primarily my beautiful Latvian colleague; and I say beautiful loosely because she was indeed very very beautiful but she was also very badly dressed and often looked like she had rolled straight out of a bin and into work. Her car also looked like it had come out of a bin or been retrieved from a skip given that 90% off the cars interior probably rivalled a skip in terms of rubbish content. I’m not judging anyone with a messy car, I have my fair share of mouldy babybels and tissue boxes rolling around in my back seat but this car was another level of shit. I suspect that she often slept in it because the gear stick was covered in foundation so much so that it was actually beige in colour. The outside wasn’t much better and it looked like it had had several arguments with bollards and maybe the odd traffic warden given how many tickets were stuck to the window on a regular basis.

I once went to a yoga class with her after work (let’s call her Sabrina.) So Sabrina and I headed to yoga via her flat to drop her car and I drove us to the studio – which turned out to be in a very insalubrious area of Hove and where she assured me I ‘would be fine’ parking down the back alley behind the studio despite the many many signs stating to the contrary. Anyone who has lived or knows Brighton & Hove will know that you do not take threats of clamping lightly lest you in fact get clamped. So that gives you some idea as to how many parking tickets she had in her car that were probably unpaid.

She also never paid her road tax and when she got caught she remained incredulous that no one had ever told her you need to pay to tax your car and it was in fact everybody else’s fault for not reminding her – she had the same attitude towards insurance, booking annual leave, and paying for stuff in general. It didn’t take me long to start taking out only the exact amount of money I needed in cash to buy lunch because the amount of times she ‘forgot’ her wallet in Sainsbury’s and I ended up buying her lunch/weekly shop probably could have funded the deposit on my first house. She would never book annual leave in advance and when challenged about this fact she would stalk around the office absolutely fuming that she had been told she couldn’t take tomorrow off because she hadn’t booked it and what the hell was she supposed to do with her ticket to the Vegan Food Festival if she couldn’t go and the company should have to pay her back for it because they hadn’t guessed she might need the day off to attend.

So you get the gist, she was just that kind of girl who made her problem your problem and didn’t give a shit about anything unless she could eat it or get money out of it. Appearance wise despite looking like Oscar the Grouch when she extracted herself from the bin/car if she wanted to look good she could. She had the kind of looks that didn’t need much to go from zero to movie star with one sweep of mascara if she thought she could attract a wealthy suitor to her door.

Clothes wise – and this is the main point of this story – she would come into work wearing some of the strangest office garb I have ever laid eyes on and bearing in mind the job I had before this one was a very suited and booted place I was still struggling with the concept that jeans were ok in the office.

There was zero dress code in our place because all of our customers were oversea’s and video calling wasn’t really a thing back then but being a firm believer in dressing for the job I want rather than the job I have I still couldn’t slum it completely and I dressed smart/casual. Sabrina however, dressed hooker/russianballetdancer/casual. She once came in not only carrying a bag of her wet fresh from the washing machine knickers that she then hung on the radiator but also in what was essentially a small scarf masquerading as a dress. I then had to spend the day looking not only at her knickers but also her nipples.

Another time she came in with a fresh hair cut (nice), clean clothes (also nice) and absolutely nothing on her feet (not so nice when she had also walked to her car from her flat and her feet were black from the dirt of Brightons streets.) To make matters worse she sat in her office chair cross legged which as a person of normal flexibility made me wince, and her dirty feet pointed right at me through the arm rest of her chair.

However – by far the worst outfit she ever wore was a full body leotard, even worse it was flesh coloured. Imagine being me sat at my desk on a Friday morning (the memory is so clear I can even remember the day of the week) and a tall, skinny, naked woman walks into the room. By this point nothing much shocked me but I think I must have let out a little scream because she turned round to face me with a look of curiosity on her face and it was at that point I realised she wasn’t naked, thank fuck, but she was in fact wearing a skin coloured body stocking. It must have taken her a long time to engineer her limbs into it because she hadn’t even brushed her hair and it was sticking up at all angles giving her a look akin to a comical clay person – like morph but with hair if anyone remembers him from popular children’s art shows.

Later in the day once we had recovered from the fact there was an essentially naked woman walking about the place, I pointed out to Sabrina that I could see her fanny, imagine the worst camel toe you have ever seen and then imagine it right in your face for 8 hours. She looked down at her fanny, happily sticking out in all it’s hoofy glory, and she said ‘Don’t be silly that isn’t my fanny. That is my fanny BONE’ she then patted it so as to demonstrate it’s bone like structure. Having a fanny myself I was shocked to find out that hers was made of bone and in between howls of laughter I did point out that that wasn’t a bone but she remained adamant that it was and that there was absolutely nothing wrong with walking around all day with your fanny bone on full view for all to see, she even wore the leotard/body stocking again multiple times so eventually the shock factor died down and I became used to her camel toe. So much so that I often felt I had an extra colleague to share rants and bants with especially when it looked right at me and appeared to laugh along with the bants, I swear once it even winked at me!