There, Their, They're - Sandra 1

Sandra Xanadu Dedbury stares at her computer screen with something approaching horror. She’s just mailed out to over 5,000 people on her ‘A’ list and the press release she’s slaved over for 45 minutes now has a typo in it. Naturally it hadn’t had a typo seconds before she hit send, but that was before. Now, she’d made what everyone would see was a rookie error. A simple and mortifying case of using the wrong version of ‘there’.

Her situation wasn’t much improved by the need to recover from last night’s virtual cocktail party. Linked by a video sharing platform and hosted by someone she wasn't sure she knew, the event might have been virtual but the hangover was anything but. Actually the session had been surprisingly authentic as well. She’d got over drunk on Prosecco and then ploughed on into the G&T – home supplies, natch – found herself propositioned by a couple of people she didn’t know, got stuck in a corner of her screen with a rather boring middle aged woman she thought was someone else and who obviously thought she was someone else and then logged off before time and without much notice or thanks to anyone in order to go and be sick in her own toilet. At least it wasn’t in the cab back home.

At the front of her mind, if she concentrated hard enough, Sandra felt sure she would be able to remember a few people who would be good business contacts in the future. In the back of her mind she felt sure she had actually gate-crashed the entire thing because she couldn’t for anything at all either remember the host’s name or what they looked like. She could always check her history through the browser, she reflected, but felt this was a very sorry state of affairs and that doing so could make her feel worse then ever – either because it was an admission that now she didn’t remember anyone there, or that the turn of fortune would reveal she really didn’t know whose party it was and that she really shouldn’t have bothered crashing it in the first place. The link had been on Twitter though – and with a bona fide hashtag she thought.

And even if she did know whose party it was and she was there legitimately the fact was many of the people there were now receiving an email from her which mistook the use of ‘their’ for the use of ‘there’. A mistake which she reckoned she needed to own up to and admit, because at least it showed self-awareness, but leave it or admit it the error was going to do nothing to promote her career among them.

Things were not good. Sandra was trying to make a decision, to find a way to make things good again, but the hangover, armed with the usual ‘and then I remembered we were on lock down and the world was heading for oblivion’ thought had crashed in as usual and shattered any happy thoughts she stood a chance of forming. 

And that was probably why ‘there’ had become ‘their’ at the last second.

At least she wasn’t working for her old boss. That was the thought which now propelled her forward. If she couldn’t find something entirely positive, she’d fire off on the motivational negative. Her old boss had been a back-biting, misogynistic loaf of an affair, whose smarm came fresh out of his tin of hair product every morning. Friendly, enthusiastic and supportive at first, it hadn’t really taken Sandra that long to realise these elements all just boiled down to manipulation. Ideas she put forward, clients she landed and projects she managed were simply taken, examined and reserved for faint praise with a large undertow of condescending flirtatiousness – before being re-served as all his own work and sure signs of genius in any context. She lasted three months with him before walking out of the office in the most dramatic way she could think up over her fortnight’s notice period.

Now she sat in front of her computer screen and mobile phone, attempting to prop up the reputations of a couple of her clients, one of whom had already furloughed employees left right and centre, the other of which had now told the world they did not know the difference between ‘there’ and ‘their’.

Sandra Xanadu Dedbury tells herself that she’s a consummate professional in everything she does. She reminds herself about the storms she’s weathered before and how this one, like those, will pass. She tells herself she is a desirable partner to have alongside any organisation that wants to raise its profile among its client base. She tells herself everything is alright, and that pushes her onwards, onwards into the kitchen to make coffee and consider her next move. She will be brilliant again, in a few minutes time, just like she was before.