Who's this Bertha? you ask. Not who though - what. And maybe when. Bertha was a children's TV programme that was on in the 1980s - a golden age of television, when I was a curly-mopped twinkle-eyed lad who spent his days playing with Lego and plastic pira... hmm.
It was great, Bertha. It was a motion-stop animation show, featuring a factory-machine with a sort of programmable personality. Bertha, the eponymous contraption, could make anything required: cuckoo clocks, spinning tops, beach balls, garden gnomes. All you had to do was push the right buttons, feed-in the right instructions and off she went with a blink and a squeaky pop.
I mention it now because it occurs to me that this little show might well have influenced quite a lot of how I see the world of work.
There was a very clear divide in Bertha, between the overalled engineers who fixed her whenever she went wrong (roughly once per episode) and the smart bespectacled office workers who surveyed the factory floor from the comfort of an upstairs office.
'Upstairs' was a world of pot plants, umbrella stands and graphs with jagged red trend-lines pinned to the wall. A thin pane of glass separated them from Bertha, who was churning out watering cans or jigsaw puzzles or whatever else was required that week.
'Downstairs' was a world of greasy sockets, spanners and troubled engineers, sweat beading from their plastic faces while someone's pet squirrel climbed into Bertha's inner workings and jammed the conveyor belt.
I'll let you work out how this dichotomy of worlds might have influenced me... and perhaps everyone in my generation. Which of the two worlds would you feel most comfortable in?
I'll say this much though - I sit downstairs in my building and I know exactly what 'Bertha' is and is not capable of. And I think I got here by accident.
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