Good morning, Charlie

Have you ever watched Charlie's Angels? Personally I've never seen the series but I loved the movies. Three super strong, super sexy women kicking villain ass in killer stilettos and cute outfits, all without smudging their eyeliner. Going undercover and somehow pulling mad skills out of the hat to fit whichever seductive persona they assume. Stealthily sneaking into highly secure vaults and pulling off Chinese Olympian gymnast moves to manoeuvre through spider webs of alarm beams. That scene in the first Charlie's Angels movie when they've designed gloves and contact lenses with duplicate finger and retina prints so Drew Barrymore and Cameron Diaz's characters can break into the vault? I wanted to be them!!

Unfortunately for me I think working for a bank is the closest I'll ever get to being like an Angel.

Let me explain.

Firstly, being an engineer from a manufacturing background, I was hired as a Business Efficiency Manager to streamline processes and make bank operations more productive. I know it's a stretch of the imagination, but isn't that kind of like that scene where Lucy Liu's character goes undercover into that software engineering company as an efficiency expert? You know the one where she's wearing that black leather pencil skirt outfit and she keeps hitting people with her pointer? Yeah, like I said, it's a stretch but the thought cheers me up when I feel like my job is boring.

Secondly, I often spend half my day in a room alone talking to a speaker phone. (If I need to explain the connection, you have clearly not watched Charlie's Angels and should stop reading this and go out and rent it immediately.) Since my role is national and I can only be in one cash centre at a time, I spend a lot of time in tele-conferences with various people across the country. Not quite the same as discussing instructions for my next mission, but humour me.

Thirdly, I don't just work for a bank. I work for the bulk cash handling division of a bank. So my world is not your cheerful local branch one floor down from the Woolies in the mall. My world is the bulk cash centre. The bank's equivalent of a factory. Think rows and rows of high-speed machines counting bills faster than the eye can keep track of. This is where the cash that you spent at the Woolies one floor up from the bank's branch in the mall ends up. From the retail cashier's till point, to the store's back cash office, to the bank's bulk cash centre. Needless to say there are large amounts of moola in these buildings. And where there is lots of cash, there tends to be lots of potential for robberies. And where there is lots of potential for robberies, there tends to be lots of security. Basically I work in a big old vault. The front door is a hefty bullet-proof, drill-proof, fire-proof, chivalry-proof affair which is programmed to remain open for mere seconds at a time. (No gentleman will be holding that open for me. Ever. ) So my daily dose of stealth is trying to slip through it with my lunch box and my laptop bag before it smacks me on the behind. Glamorous. There are a few more security hurdles to jump before I can get my hands on my morning cup of tea (everything short of a cavity search). But if I tell you more I'll have to kill you. See? That's a little bit undercover agent-ish, isn't it? No?

Well, at least this little fantasy makes my work day a bit more fun. A private joke between me and... well, me. Now if only I could convince my boss to let me call him Charlie...