Jenny Fisher

My day was not nice to me. I was clumsy and at one point the arse dropped out of a box of unwashed kipfler potatoes, at another point a cranky Chinese man tried to make me work the hydraulic box-squasher but I said no because I am a (faux) chef and I am trying to set up for lunch by myself and clearly you are the hydraulic box-squasher guy... seriously, on days like today it's inevitable that you are going to arrive home without your house keys. Which is what I did.

Anyway, the manager at the nice new place appears to have it in her head that the two of us doing lunch today are The A Team. She's made noises about this before and she was quite clear about it today. I know she is going to take this to higher people and it makes me soil my pants because I am not A Team Material. This is not false modesty, it's just a fact. The other guy is A+, I am B-. It's a classic case of her seeing me in my chef uniform, maybe occasionally seeing me do something right and believing I have a clue what I'm doing. It's all quite funny but also not funny at all. I just wanted to help out a bit and have a good part time job and things are really getting out of control. If she had seen me on my knees scooping up gazzillions of rollie potatoes while hissing "fuck this shit get over here arsehole potatoes" she wouldn't think I was A Team material. F Troop, yes.

Anyway. I don't want to burden you with how not nice my day was, so I've lifted below from an email I just sent to my editor. It's a random memory that amuses me quite a lot.

At the magazine I used to work at I reckon I wrote about 75% of the letters to the editor (as well as 100% of the smart arse replies from the editor). My favourite was a series from a verbose 16 year old girl I created called Jenny Fisher who took the most convoluted way to say absolutely nothing at all. She took on a life of her own (she was quite endearing) and I started getting invitations from readers asking her out, demanding that she have her own column and everything. I sent her along to reviews too, written in her inimitable style... it was a cack. She had a fucking fan club. There was even a band who at the end of an interview said something like "Hey - we'd really like to give a shout out to Junkmail Jenny. You go girl!"

Someone in the office made a comment about how much they love Jenny Fisher's letters and I said you do know who that is, don't you? I had assumed they knew. They didn't. I told them. They shouted it to the rest of the office and everyone was genuinely crushed because they had been following her tales too. Ah, Jenny Jenny Jenny. What has become of you?