What doesn't kill you makes you stronger...mostly

As a young gun reporter on the Saturday Express in 1990
 Angela back left!

By Angela Bensemann

My work life less ordinary began cleaning offices when I was about 13 with my younger sister.  That’s where I got the taste for: hard work = money in the bank = a new 10-speed bike (all the rage in the early 1980s).

From there it was natural to want to keep moving and get better jobs to buy the latest roller skates, shoes, jeans etc.

Working in a roadside fruit stall seemed like a step in the right direction.  The pay was good - $3.54 an hour - the outfit somewhat less so.  However the death to dog incident soon put paid to that job.  I was 16 and the owners left me and a friend in charge of their orchard, fruit stall, and dogs while they went away for the weekend.  The hubby told me to let the Rottweiler and Chihuahua out twice a day for a run while I was attending the stall.  How was I to know that the Chihuahua would run into the path of oncoming traffic on State Highway 1 and get squashed?  Needless to say this job did not end well and I resigned the next day.  Lesson learnt – never let a Chihuahua play on the side of the road.

From there I went to volunteering at my local newspaper – the Marlborough Express.  Here followed several years of holiday jobs reporting on local croquet games, diamond wedding jubilees and lost cats.  My big break came when I got to write for the Saturday Express and moved up to ‘Bovine Bingo bit of fun for all’.  Reporting on the two hundred people who crowded into a local carpark to watch Alethia the cow (and I quote) ‘drop her load’.  If she dropped it on your square you won.

An Angela Bensemann classic from the Saturday Express

My days writing for the University of Canterbury student newspaper yielded slightly more in-depth assignments like ‘Stirring the Pot’ (to legalise or not – marijuana), ‘Overcrowding in lecture theatres’ and on the same theme – ‘Overcrowding reaches Lancaster Park’. 

The biggest debate of the day was whether newspapers should print in colour - imagine... Oh the dizzying heights of journalism – it was soon to go to a whole other level:  A job at a publishing company.  I’d finally hit the big time or so I thought. As a naïve journalism graduate this was soon to become the job that stole my innocence! 

I was surrounded by sales reps, who would have sold their own grandmothers to get that commission - one was sleeping with the office manager at lunch time and defrauding the company the rest of the time.  The others were out back smoking pot when the boss was away.  Friday drinks would begin at 10am when the boss would put a can of beer on my desk (that was
before I discovered wine).  As you can imagine the rest of the day was a bit of a blur.

It was time to go on my travels and hit the UK.  Work wise things were pretty uneventful until I met Dr Darla.  This was in Liverpool when I got a job in a medical centre.  What I didn’t know was that Dr Darla was going under.  All his staff left and before I knew it I was practice manager writing out prescriptions and even observing patient consultations.  My most noticeable faux pas was drawing up a script for the contraceptive pill for an 80 year old woman – have you ever tried to decipher a doctor’s writing?

When I came back to New Zealand I landed a job working for a health authority.  We were the flavour of the month (NOT) closing down psychiatric institutions and restricting health services.  Five thousand people marched on our offices protesting what we were doing. 

It was the early days of email so I flicked around an email to staff saying they might want to use the back door for their lunch break, that I’d organised security for the front door and that ‘let’s hope it rained’.  One of my colleagues took great offence and forwarded my email to the local newspaper which ran my email on the front page.  Oh the shame and humiliation – oh the thousands of crank callers ringing to abuse me.  Oh the fact that the guy who ‘leaked’ my email to the newspaper got summarily dismissed and escorted off the premises.  Crikey – lesson learnt: if you’re going to leak an email don’t get caught.

Next job: Corrections.  Yep out of the frying pan and into the fire.  National media manager - what was I thinking? I must have been insane. There followed several years of intense stress.  You know that when the phone rings at midnight, or 5am, or on a Sunday afternoon that it’s not going to be good news.  That your day is going to consist of writing media releases, fielding phone calls and trying to find out what really happened.

Leaving work to have a baby seemed like a good way out, however, anyone with a baby knows that working fulltime is imminently easier than looking after a baby – back to work for me, this time working for a local council.

I mean nothing ever happens at a council right? Wrong.  The next few years were spent dealing with issues like a tiger mauling at the zoo, contractors hitting a gas main necessitating a mass evacuation of the centre of the city and lest we forget, the vote counting glitch at the local elections one year.

With all this drama in my life I’d pretty much had enough and decided to go out on my own and set up my own communications company Halo Communications.  This gave me back a degree of control over my work life.  I could pick the jobs I wanted to do, the people I wanted to work with and the hours I wanted to work.  That was eight years ago and I’ve never looked back.  Time now for a new venture…enter WorksWonders!