My first real job was with TAAG – before that I was a teacher but that job doesn’t count and anyway it’s part of another story I’ll tell later. As you may know (or not) TAAG stands for Angolan Airlines, or “Take Another Goat” as the english expats loved to refer to the company, a joke about the company logo which looked like a goat. My work was not very glamorous. I wasn’t a crew member, my feet were firmly on the ground. I belonged in the company’s headquarters, on the fifth floor of the TAAG building, next to Hotel Tropico. I worked for the Finance Department, in the Interline office and it was there that I met my best friend, one of those friends one makes for life; one of those friends we may not see for over 20 years but when we meet again it’s like we saw each other the previous day. Our job was to accept (or refuse) invoices from other airlines for TAAG tickets flown by them. How many rows we had with some companies who thought they could trick us! Whenever I visit a travel agency today I realize what an easy life the staff enjoys. They put into the computer the start of the trip, the destination, the dates and….Hocus Pocus! They’ve got the price! We had to know how to calculate the price of a trip. We had some HUGE green manuals, which gave us the distance in miles between A and B and sometimes C, D etc and with the help of a troglodyte calculator, (huge too) we had to work out the cost! (when my daughters heard this story, they wanted to know if I was born while dinosaurs still roamed the earth!) The IT department (TAAG was very ahead of its time) took the whole tenth floor and used some monsters they called computers, which worked with perforated cards. Working for TAAG was sometimes fun, albeit for a very low salary. Sometimes we would go in groups to have breakfast at the hotel next door – it was always eggs and ham, but in those difficult times of food shortages it tasted delicious! At 5PM everybody went home – very quickly and all at the same time! The lifts were always so full they wouldn't stop on the ground floor, they would go straight to the basement. The problem was that the only way to get out of the basement was….in the lift........ and sometimes it was already 6PM when we finally managed to get out of the building. It’s interesting to note that I was always much more afraid of those lifts than the curfews, the prisons, snipers, assaults, robberies, …… There were a lot of jokes about the safety of TAAG’s flights which was unfair, as the maintenance and pilots were provided by TAP, the Portuguese airline. There may have been some scary moments, but nothing special, really..... and there was a story about how in an emergency in a flight from Sal to Havana the crew discovered that the oxygen mask boxes were kept closed by superglue, but I’m sure that was just a rumour spread by the enemies of the revolution!..... However, the two things everybody agreed upon was that God was Angolan and supported TAAG football club!