The most useful thing anyone taught me, they taught me while we were both doing something boring.

My first proper job involved a filing cabinet and a woman called Pat who had been there nineteen years.

The work was mindless. Sorting, checking, matching one number against another number. It took about a week to learn and I spent eight months doing it. If you had asked me then what I was getting out of it, I would have said money, and I would have been annoyed at the question.

What I was getting was Pat.

She talked while we worked, because the work did not need her attention and she was not the sort to sit in silence. She told me which of the numbers mattered and which were there because somebody in 1987 had wanted a column. She told me what happened the time the numbers were wrong and nobody said anything for six weeks. She told me who to ring when something did not add up, and, more usefully, who to ring first so that the second person would take the call.

None of that was training. There was no course. It arrived sideways, in the gaps of a boring task, from a person who had time because the task did not need much of her.

I have thought about that a lot lately. The task is gone now, or it will be. It was exactly the sort of thing you would hand a machine, and you would be right to. It was dull and I was slow and the machine does not mind and does not get it wrong at four in the afternoon.

But the task was the room. It was the reason a nineteen-year veteran and an idiot of twenty-two were sat at the same table for long enough that she started talking.

I do not know what replaces that. A mentoring scheme, maybe, with a form. Somebody's calendar invitation. It is not nothing, but it is not the same, because the thing that made Pat tell me the truth about the 1987 column was that neither of us was performing. We were just getting through the afternoon.

You cannot schedule the afternoon.