When I was quite a bit younger and setting off into the world of work, I got one of the worst jobs imaginable.
It was at a time when temping was the only work available and permanent employment was rarer than rocking horse shit.
The factory was based in Chorley, Lancs and made plastic containers and other plastic products. I had the job with my brother and a couple of mates which made it more bearable. We were tasked with checking plastic food trays for minute imperfections (holes, cracks etc.) This was to go on all night
with us squinting at ten trays together underneath a bright lamp. To say we felt like lab rats was an understatement. The thing that made it worse was the ten pallets of them all waiting to be checked.
After three hours of this and our clinging on to a wage, we gave up. It was a 12 hour night shift and to finish the shift would’ve been a living hell, let alone go back the next night for more. We all walked out together with a permanent squint in one eye and left behind the princely sum of �2-50 an hour. Bastards…
Ian Leach.
I had a job in the reprographics department of a secondary school. It was a disaster from the start. The work load was impossible to cope with and the copiers kept breaking down. I worked on my own. Queues of teachers psychotic with stress screamed for their copying to be done immediately. It was impossible to keep up with these “emergencies”, let alone the work they left in the tray for “when you get a moment”. I never got a moment. If I made a mistake I was sent to the office for a dressing down from the school manager, who was a teacher. During these moments I wore short pants and had a runny nose.
I came to see the cramped little room I worked in as one big amplifier, sensitive to my every move. If I hit a wrong button on the copier (forgot to select “enlarge A4-A3″ for instance) it wasn’t just one mistake, but 240 mistakes, or however many copies were run off. The book keeping was similarly frustrating, all done by hand, written in columns so that an incorrect number in the middle meant that all the figures which came after it were wrong and had to be laboriously erased with correction fluid and re-entered.
Thomas De Quincey had an epiphany in St. Paul�s Cathedral Whispering Gallery when he realised that the multitude of echoes emanating from a single point were like decisions taken in the present, which then grow and become the tangled, intractable situations of the future. His eureka moment became my hades. Those papers flying out of the copiers were the reverb echoes in some kind of nightmarish King Tubby or Keith Hudson track. A single pulse of information duplicated times X, which became a metaphor for determinism. Doing things right first time was the key, but as I was constantly under siege from all angles it was impossible not to make mistakes, molehill-sized mistakes which grew into Mount Everests of wrongness and had to be addressed. I asked the school manager to dismiss me after 3 months, at his suggestion. I can no longer listen to the dub records I once loved dearly.
Steve Hanson
Whilst completing a Master’s degree at Lancaster University (see crap towns) the year before last, I was simultaneously engaged in tackling the world of work. Having applied for countless tedious jobs, I ended up being taken on by a 24 hour petrol station, doing Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday nights from 11 till 7 in the morning.
Working at a petrol station is a deeply unsatisfying endeavour. When someone picks up a pump a beeper goes off and you press a button. That’s it. Crap.
Working nights at a petrol station is a vision of hell.
At night you’re locked in. There’s no escape. Made to feel like a terminally bored zoo exhibit, you share your evening with the hum of fluorescent lights, the smell of petrol and the customers.
Dear God, the customers.
After 11 o’clock nobody wants petrol except taxi drivers. After 11 o’clock the fun starts. You probably recognise the following scenario. You’ve probably been in it. You’ve probably been the person who wants to know what sandwiches I’ve got. I don’t have any fucking sandwiches but nonetheless I’ll go check what’s in the shop. After making my way round the counter and shouting out all fourteen varieties of chicken sandwich, you have probably replied that you no longer require a sandwich and would rather have some AA batteries instead.
Bastards.
I hated you. Not as much as the customers who threatened to come and twat me when the doors were opened, but I still hated you. Even hairy, hairy Jesus would have lost his patience had he been forced to hunt down snack foods and dairy products all through the night.
Of course there was more to the job. I had to contend with dodgy scallies trying out their new stolen credit cards, doing runners after filling up, and flinging bottles and bags of coal around the forecourt. There were also the nightly thrills of the two hour stock-take and floor mopping.
After a few months of enduring this tedium I got fired for inaction. Some pissed-up knuckle-scraper pulled the cover off one of the pumps, leaving bits of it all over the forecourt and obviously rendering it inactive. Apparently, I should have reported this incident to the police. I didn’t though and thankfully they alleviated me of my duties.
That was a crap job alright.
John McCaffrey
Probably the only office based job there is in which exclaiming - “I don’t want to be stuck in anal sex all day” - won’t be met by even the merest elevation of eyebrow, working on a phone sex line seemed like a good idea at first. After three months however, the novelty had well and truly worn off. I had fodded wank one two many times and ‘Fuckhead Syndrome’ (the technical term for headaches and faintness caused by repeatedly faking orgasms) had set in. I had had enough of sitting on those dubiously damp wheelie-chairs in the domination department, enough of being punished for coming late to a shift by having to stay in the anal sex chair for the duration of it (different story all together for coming late on a shift). I had to leave.
It was a grubby office, which despite the physical absence of men, had a definite odour of spunk - this might of been some sort of clever marketing ploy, like supermarkets pumping out the smell of baking bread and freshly ground coffee. On my first day I was given my very own partitioned desk and phone sex manual. This manual, I have to say, was a hugely entertaining tome, sadly it has since been confiscated by Malaysian Customs and Excise officers. It contained gems such as - ‘Phrases Men Like to Hear From You’ with ‘I’m separating my arse cheeks’ in the top ten. Also there was an excellent ‘Dictionary of Filth’, scripts for ‘Lesbian Watersports’ and a ‘Guide for The Dominatrix’. From my own personal experience I can tell you that slaves like to be penetrated by stiletto heels; to be instructed to beat their own cocks with the telephone receiver; to have cigarettes stubbed out on their bollocks and to be severely punished when they inevitably jizz in your fishnet stockings after you specifically tell them not to. Incidentally, a dominatrix is up a little bit in the whole phone sex office hierarchy. You graduate to domination once you have done a few weeks on straight phone sex chitchat and endured the anal inauguration.
It is quite shocking how this all very quickly becomes mundane. Before you know it you are silencing entire restaurants and tube carriages with your hilarious work-related anecdotes whilst friends and family look on openmouthed. After a while someone says - “You’ve changed, you used to be such a nice girl but now you’re weird and perverted and all you ever talk about is strap-on dildos, mutual masturbation and separating your arse cheeks and I don’t like having to call you ‘Mistress’”, and you say - “Oh crumbs Mum you’re right, I better jack this in.” Most people don’t last more than a few months for this reason but incredibly I met some women who had been doing it for six years or more. They are serious Fuckheads, doing double shifts seven days a week, dribbling into their headsets, tugging at their gussets, rubbing their fat thighs together, simultaneously chain-smoking and stuffing their slack-jaws with Eccles cakes whilst some weirdo spends a pound a minute telling them that in his excitement he’s ruined his carpet - bizarre.
sarahjanes@hotmail.com
Ignoring the fact that any form of labour, either physical or cerebral, is a basic insult to the human spirit, I’ve had a number of shit jobs. Chief amongst them were the twelve hour night shifts I used to regularly do at the cardboard factory near my house. This particular firm didn’t make boxes, or signs or any of the many interesting things that you can fashion from cardboard that might have injected a note of variety into the whole enterprise. Just the cardboard itself. All fucking night long. My ‘job’ consisted of standing next to big industrial binder, dumping pallets in front of piles of cut cardboard and pressing one button to wrap the cardboard to the pallet. No manual dexterity or variety was required, unless I was lucky enough to knock one of the piles over, in which case the line would have to stop and the regular staff, bon vivants and raconteurs all, would stomp over, swear and make jokes about students ‘not having any common sense’.
Is there anything more gut-wrenchingly depressing than a manual job that requires just enough concentration to prevent you from falling asleep, but is so mind-numbingly repetitive that your mind melts into gibberish whilst you do it? The noise was constant and loud and ear defenders had to be worn by all, so singing/talking to anyone/hearing yourself think was out, as was simply switching off altogether, as the piles of card might fall over. ‘Lunch’ was ten minutes in 12 hours and, reasonably enough, all the smokers had to squeeze together into a tiny metal shack outside for the fire risk. I now work for a London PR firm, so I’m still wrapping up monotonous shit into presentable packages. But at least my co-workers don’t have spider’s webs tattooed on their arms and fuck-off big mullets.
Tim Wild
I work for National Rail Enquiries…yes, there is still a call centre in the UK (although only until next April…then it all moves to India where they pay them the equivalent of £1 an hour).
I’ve been there for 3 years. Everything you do is watched, taped, timed and recorded. You have to stick to a script - having an original thought or idea is very much frowned upon (we work in a call centre - we’re not supposed to have a brain!). Our “supervisors” are all younger than us (I’m 34), and at the end of every call you HAVE to say “have a nice day” or “have a nice journey”. If you don’t do it, you lose points on your “monitoring” record. If you lose too many points, you get taken to see the boss. If you have too much time off sick, they ask you if “there’s anything they can do to help” (like what?!)
We get all the abuse from the callers about trains being late, too expensive etc, not that there’s anything we can do about it, we’re just the managements abuse forcefield, protecting them from the public’s wrath. It’s like being a punchbag and the pay is shite.
Anon
After an unpleasant incident with my bank manager in the summer of 1996 (he physically threatened me in his office due to my immense and unauthorized student overdraft) I was reluctantly forced to get a summer job through a temp agency.
As I lived in a remote Cheshire village and had no transport the only job open to me was working in a cheese factory. I did this for three months and every time I think about it now I have to hold back tears of pain and regret.
My job was working in the packing room for �3 an hour (�3.30 for late shifts!). Huge, heavy blocks of stinky cheese sweltering in the humid factory heat would trundle along a conveyor belt into the packing room. One of the deranged cheese packers would slap it into a 3-part tin box and stick it in a compressor where it had all the lovely sweet smelling cheese juice squeezed out of it.
When it was ready the cheese in a box would be passed down to me on a conveyor belt. My job was to grab the heavy metal box, slam it down and wrestle the cheese out, chucking it into the storeroom to the waiting hands of a wry, piss-taking Scouser.
I’d then bang the box apart and put it through an industrial washing machine to a fat middle aged man on the other end who hated me because on my first day I put the the parts through in the wrong order and fucked up his ’system’.
The boxes came thick and fast, all day every day. If I stalled on a box they’d pile up and crash off the conveyor belt, causing the packing ‘team’ to laugh hysterically. Humiliating. By the end of the first week my hands were in tatters due to the sharp box edges, I’d lost half a stone in weight due to the heat and constant toil and I stuck of rancid Cheshire.
The only relief from the job was being sent to the ’scraping room’ for a day. This was like Cheese Factory R n’ R. It involved scraping bits of mould off huge slabs of cheese. The smell was indescribable. After a week in the mould scraping department my co-worker, a middle aged violent Teddy Boy confided in me that he occasionally liked to make holes in the blocks of cheese and have sexual relations with them. I asked for a transfer back to the packing room.
The only high point of the job was watching a deranged Mancunian take a �5 bet and jump fully clothed, into a huge vat of curd. The final straw was when I staggered into the factory with a chronic hangover one sweltering morning. The manager took one look at me, gave me a knife and pointed to a huge stack of plastic wrapped cheese in the factory forecourt. I had to slice the bags open to release the cheese sweat that had built up inside the bags. I can still recall the sound of the cheese juice-sloshing out on to the concrete.
I still can’t look at cheese without it bringing back all sorts of painful memories.
Matt - Brighton
A summer job working at a local mental hospital was supposed to be a bag of laughs. I had envisioned chatting therapeutically to slightly confused older folk over soothing cups of tea, but no.
As I was the new recruit - worse, a student - the hardened old lags of orderlies gave me a series of amusing tasks to see how I would cope.
On my second day I was told to take a trolley from a ward to the hospital morgue. The trolley was occupied by a patient who had snuffed it in the night. She was covered with a sheet, so I thought, OK, this is not so bad, I can manage this.
As we trundled along the depressing dingy green corridors, though, I noticed that my “passenger” had a peculiar lump on her chest. It didn’t quite fit the outline of a human body, somehow. Worse, it seemed to be loose and was wobbling about alarmingly as we went along. I found I couldn’t look away from it, until I bumped the trolley over a ramp and
the bulge slipped off its resting place and crashed to the floor. It was the patient’s false teeth.
I was slightly hysterical when I reached the morgue, where the
attendant, an overalled skinhead with a very dodgy grin, whipped the sheet off my passenger, nodded at a bin bag full of cotton wool and said, “Ok, now stuff her.” Cotton wool goes in all the body cavities, you see, to prevent leakage.
I do mean ALL the cavities, though at least my crop-headed colleague allowed me to do her upper end, taking care of
the sub-navel area himself with more enjoyment than I thought strictly necessary. I got the impression that he was one of those lucky people whose job is also their hobby.
The task I did most of that summer was launder bedding. A number of the patients were doubly incontinent, so every morning there were trolley-loads of rank sheets to be wheeled to the basement where huge front-loading washers and dryers ground endlessly on. At first I just piled the trolley loads in and slammed the door, but I learnt the hard way to inspect the foul piles first for anything that needed hosing off:
the sight of a totally solid turd knocking rhythmically through the soap suds against the round porthole of the washing machine is one I’ll never forget. In a strange way it was symbolic of the whole experience.
Sarah Walker
During my Student years (having not yet become accustomed to a life of poverty) I got a summer job in a Marquee erection company in Thornton Heath. My reasoning being that:
1. I would earn money so would make friends and have fun.
2. I would be working outside so I would get a tan making me gorgeous and irresistable.
3. I would be doing manual work so would grow muscles making me gorgeous and irresistable.
4. And I had heard from my elders that its good to work like a bitch when you’re young.
The reality of this job however was very different from my idealised version:
1. I earned a paltry amount of money for the hours I was working and was too knackered every day to make friends and have fun. The only people I did meet mostly called me ‘cunt’ rather than remember my name and were either tired angry worn down old men who never spoke and drank large quantities of ale every night so as to forget their miserable lives, or angry jumped up idiots who liked to wield their small amount of power over me like a whip so that they could feel that there was someone residing lower than their pathetic place in the world. None of which was improved when I explained that I was studying Illustration in Brighton. (”What are you some kind of poof? pick that up and carry it over there, and then do the same with those 500 over there before the next load gets here you cunt!”)
2. My delicate flesh bubbled and burned under the glaring summer sun, I then had to carry huge heavy canvas bags, metal poles and wooden flooring on my red shoulders, and when the blisters came through I was advised to burst them and piss on them so as to build up hard leathery skin.
3. I did grow muscles but strange ones in weird places and I hadn’t considered the hours of repetitive and painful heavy things carrying and chain gang style sledge hammering under the angry shouts of idiots neccesary to make this happen, and I was too tired to ever get the opportunity to show them off to any young ladies until they had broken down and turned back into fat.
4. And that’s nonsense.
Some years ago I took a part time job working at a green house that produced lettuces. The lettuces were packed into big cardboard trays, and it was my job to take the flat cardboard blanks, fold over the end to make them up into trays, then staple each end using a large industrial staple machine.
This machine was a wonderful piece of engineering. It consisted of a pair of jaws that could put a thick metal staple through several layers of corrugated cardboard when the operator pressed the foot pedal. Impressive.
I was working with a another guy who had been there for several weeks, and was obviously an expert in the “grab it, fold it, hold it, staple it” action. We were paid on how many boxes we could make, so obviously the faster you could go…
I was so impressed that he could make trays up so quickly - and he could even talk at the same time. I sweated my bits off trying to match the size of his impressive pile of finished boxes. My puny contribution looked pitiful.
Then it happened. He put a staple cleanly through the top of his thumb. It had gone straight through, and out the other side. The machine had unflinchingly bent the staple round, to complete the join, and yes, his hand was now firmly attached to the box he had just made. Interestingly there was no blood. The staple had crimped the whole thing so tightly that the blood could only build up beneath the surface of the surrounding skin.
It let go only when the farmer who ran the place casually unbent the staple, and pulled his hand quickly form the offending box. Farmer type mutterings along the lines of “it’s only a little nick” could be heard as I finished up for the day.
David Eliott
Ah, buxom, rosy-cheeked milkmaids carrying wooden pails, cheery, Ermintrude-like cows with flowers in their mouths… yuh, right.
The milk comes out of a pipe, into waxed cardboard boxes, which become the familiar tetrapaks. Tetrapaks are then fitted into trays of a dozen, which are shrinkwrapped. When the trays come out of the wrapping machine, they’re hot as hell, and guess who has to pick them up. Oh yes.
They then get placed on vast pallets. There’s a specific pattern. There’s a precise gap between each pallet. On the first layer, the trays go north-south, the next layer they go east-west. Sterilised milk goes on blue pallets, full-cream on brown. Twenty-four trays on each pallet, stack them six high, wrap with another layer of plastic. Unfortunately, nobody bothers to tell me this, so when the supervisor comes round after an hour and a half of wasted effort, I get a profound bollocking for slamming them down any old how. This, apparently, is very amusing, according to the mad-eyed fork-lift driver. Another worker joins in his laughter, then, when the driver leaves, informs me that his colleague is the only worker not in the local rugby team, because he’s “a queero” and “will shag any hole there is”. Did I mention we were in Devon?
I get the hang of the process, and the work gets… well, not “better”, maybe marginally less vile. Then we get a “burster”. A carton is slightly overfilled, and the pressure of the heatwrapping causes its warm contents to erupt over my face. It’s like an industrial bukkake video.
I become a vegan.
IDLER DEPUTY ED IN McDONALDS HELL
I worked at McDonalds, in Liverpool. I didn’t get any stars. I failed all the tests, even though they merely involved copying the answers from The Big Book of McDonalds Test Answers into the questionnaire. Also, I had to work twice as hard as everyone else as the other staff were all junkies and couldn’t be trusted to operate a deep fat fryer. They were very good at cleaning though. They could polish one square yard of stainless steel for eight hours. Meticulous, if not efficient.
As bad as this was, I have to say it beats working in an office any day. Even standing on the gangplank of a ship for twelve hours was better than bleaching my mind by staring into a monitor all day, negotiating with deranged marketing harpies. When I think about it, I once met the man with the worst job in the world. I was at a party, he was introduced to me as a “pig wanker”. That is, he manually stimulated pigs until they filled a beaker with their issue. I said, “Let me shake you by the hand.”
Matthew De Abaitua
It’s all very well celebrating being idle if you’re Louis Theroux or some other member of the Groucho mafia and get paid healthy sums for idling with the great, good and kitsch.
For those of us who have yet to escape the provinces life is necessarily idle and it is hell. I would happily avoid paid work if there was anything else to do. Instead, work and social life merge into a lethargic fog.
I spent three months in a timber-yard office outside Chorley where my biggest challenge was seeing how long I could get away with playing minesweeper or sleeping on the desk before I was given some more photocopying. This is not idleness as lifestyle choice. It is like living inside Memento. I have no memory of the past year and occasionally find myself stuffing paper into envelopes and wondering how I got there.
My only sources of amusement are refusing to make anyone else a cup of coffee and the warm glow that can be gained by sending queries on the short journey from in-tray to bin.
Paul Turner
pturnerj@hotmail.com
I worked in a warehouse for a week where they flattened out old cardboard boxes and redistributed them for wholesalers. It was complete physical agony, but it was the mental pain that weighed heaviest.
I was working with a guy who’d been there for 20 years (and didn’t even take time off on Christmas Eve). His forearms had become strong enough to bend girders, but his mind had become softer than custard. He told me he dreamt about boxes, saw boxes when he closed his eyes and could taste boxes when he ate. Every 20 minutes or so, he would shout “BOXES,” at the top of his voice, before continuing his running commentary on the forthcoming alien invasion. As far as I know, the poor bastard’s still there.
Sam Jordison
samjordison@hotmail.com
My parents forced me to take a summer job working at a kennels.
The sun shone all that summer: it shone on the quiet lanes of Binfield, on the birds chirping gaily in the beech trees, on children playing hide-and-seek on freshly mown lawns: it shone on the dog crap festering in the corners of the kennels.
In an ingenious ploy to avoid the most distasteful elements of kennel work I adopted the posture of an animal hater, and was rewarded with a job in customer service in the kennel shop. I cheerfully set to work lugging sacks of animal food from the warehouse, boxes of tripe and other doggy delights from the walk-in freezers, safe in the knowledge that other poor fools -
who had felt a need to display their credentials as animal lovers - were rewarded by the management with jobs shovelling dung.
But, as anyone cursed with the necessity of work can testify, the wheel of employment turns inexorably toward degradation, and so it was for me. One day I wandered into work, turning up my personal stereo in order to avoid the din of a hundred deserted pooches, when I was informed that the boss wanted to see me.
The problem, it transpired, was this. A few days before, someone had left open a door to one of the freezers containing frozen dog meat destined, in all likelihood, for a burger joint somewhere in the vicinity of Bracknell. The sun had also been shining on the now uncomfortably warm, nascent happy burgers, which had attracted the undivided attention of a surprising large local blow-fly community. The result of this happy union had been discovered by the boss early that morning: maggots, thousands upon thousands of maggots.
My mission, whether I chose to accept it or not, was to
affect the removal of the maggots, the rotten meat and
then thoroughly clean the freezer. It was without doubt
the most uncomfortable and distasteful two days of my
life and as I set to work clearing out the maggots with
my shovel I cursed the world of work and all the people
who had placed me in this invidious predicament.
Jamie Bell
For the past year I have been blissfully, magnificently idle. But lately I have noticed my pockets are not bottomless, and the bottom I have hit is full of lint and only lint. No hidden pots of gold anywhere to be found.
So I decided to look for a “job”. I dragged myself, kicking and screaming, to a temporary agency. There, I underwent two hours of rigorous, quality control testing to see if I was good enough to join the ranks of their prestigious corps of temps. The testing consisted of typing tests on Commodore 64 computers and multiple choice questions: “On your feet you are wearing: a. pots b. pans c. rugs d. shoes.”
My first assignment was at a customer service call center. I lasted one day there. There had apparently been a recent change in dress code policy and the incessant droning on and on and on about the new code made the office complex feel like a re-education camp. I found this to be entirely too oppressive for my tastes.
My second assignment I liked much better, simply because I made more money on the hour. It was as a manager of an apartment complex. The owner was an absentee landlord, so the place was run by the maintenance guy. He had complex, long-standing grudges against nearly every tenant and quickly developed mysterious new ones towards the dolts trying to get an apartment there.
I delighted, however, in the job because I got to sit in an air-conditioned office alone and read or nap or chat on the phone with friends. The maintenance guy would be there in the morning and say “I’ve got to go look at number 64.” Then he would get into his truck, where a haggy, cigarette smoking blonde waited in the passenger seat. They would disappear and leave me to my napping. I lasted a week. One more day and I would have ripped my hair out by the roots.
Jennifer Hart
After graduating from a prestigious London design college and realising that I wasn’t going to get a job, I found work at a small shop in the more salubrious end of Soho selling overpriced designer gee-gaws to media types. The job had
it’s perks, I’ve sold cheap tat at high prices to people from the A, B, and Z list. However, my boss had some dodgy personal and financial habits (not to mention the fact that his best friend, a trolly-dolly for the world’s favorite airline, was a nonce who got on the Far East flights so he could screw underage boys during stopovers). He lived in the shop as a way of avoiding living costs and supplimenting his expensive living habits, not above the shop, but actually on the sales
floor, and though there was a toilet out the back, it was not only broken but used as a place to stuff cash, large bundles of which I had to carry across central London on a regular basis to iffy contacts. Due to my boss’s sleeping habits, and liking for drink, it meant that in the mornings, vases had to be handled with care. Yes, he would piss in them during the night. My morning routine involved kicking him awake,
emptying piss-filled vases, trying to eradicate the smell of said piss from the shop, then keeping an upmarket pretence for 8 hours while the sickly stench of odour-neutraliser gave me a headache. Last I heard he’s legged it abroad as he was wanted for fraud.
Anon
In the Summer of 1992 I worked in an off-licence on the edges of a South Coast town. Minimum wage, of course, whatever that was at the time. It was an amount that ran constantly through the mind during the outrageous tedium of the day, the only answer to “what the hell am I doing here while all my friends are lying on the beach or still in bed?” Not much of an answer, either, more an insistent, constant insult.
The problem really was with the government. That’s who I blame anyway. It was around then that someone decided that the “socially handicapped” of the area should be “re-integrated with society.” All that was required of them was that they sign once a week at a hospital, and if possible not kill anyone.
Our offy was next door to the hospital, and therefore mighty handy for a post-signing tipple. Oh the things I saw. My personal favourite was the man with the funny hands who had me remove every can from his three 6-packs from the plastic ring. Which would have been fine, had he not also required that I insert each one separately into his special bag. Which was covered with shit. In and out. Literally.
In those days I had long hair, and hot summers frequently led to itchy head. However, this summer, the itching failed to stop. All the time I was not trying to persuade customers not to pee in the shop was spent scratching my head. Nits. My girlfriend of the time worked this out for herself, when she got them from me. I got them from a customer. Needless to say, she failed to see the funny side.
Martin’s last day was the final straw. He was close to a breakdown at that point I think, and had stepped away from the counter to nervously throw a balled bit of paper from one hand to the other, while I dispensed the Norseman lager to the 11 am crowd. A particularly minging man stood directly in front of him, mimicking his actions and hopping about in a crude dance. Eventually he went a little further, progressing from belligerent disco swaying into an old fashioned drunken waltz.
The pain in Martin’s eyes is visible to me even now. We cut out a picture of the chairman of the parent company from the Annual Report, mounted it on cardboard, and set it just above the counter with a sign saying “your money goes to me”.
Soon after, I left in the way you leave jobs when you are young, pissing off with several bottles and not coming back. As a consequence I still can’t really drink Southern Comfort. Or have long hair.
Harry P
For a time, struggling as a quasi-legal immigrant writer in the East Anglian hinterland, I worked in a restaurant owned by a chef whose name one would undoubtedly recognize were I not bound by the terms of a hastily signed nondisclosure agreement.
The food prepared by this chef, whose name I’m sure one would instantly recognize, was pretty decent, and I unfortunately have no sordid tales of ants in the pudding or mice in the oven.
However, the military machine that this chef, who I know you know, had put together was quite astonishing and disturbing. Large, burly, often German men managed the restaurant’s various rooms and bars, while the chef-in-chief was an actual shouting, cursing Frenchman.
Because of last year’s well-known East Anglian labour shortage, the restaurant was forced to hire just about every warm body it could Hoover up with the aid of a classified ad in the Eastern Daily Press. People with odd numbers of limbs, folks who admitted that the mere sight of china plates sent them into epileptic fits and yes, even quasi-legal immigrant writers
were taken on.
Needless to say, the first mildly busy day was a disaster, with a barely trained staff trying to keep up with the increasing amounts of gourmet food coming out of the kitchen and, four to five times out of 10, ending up in front of the correct starving diner. Starving, because he or she had been waiting for epic amounts of time for his/her gammon steak with free-range egg. Multilingual swearing reached new heights of expression, and I was dispatched to hose down the walls and scrape all the spilt sticky toffee pudding off the floors.
Things eventually settled down, but more horrors were slower-developing. I will not attempt to describe, for example, the agony of polishing silverware for a five-course meal attended by 300 friends of a chef whom you most definitely know.
By the way, the chef whose name you have undoubtedly guessed by now was a frequent diner in her own restaurant (though, funnily enough, I never saw her behind the stove). The chef’s favourite dish? Beer-battered cod and chipped potatoes, or as some people call it, fish ‘n’ chips.
Anon
Janitors are viewed by most as being very low down the food chain, to be an assistant Janitor is as low as it gets. The guy I was working with was about 50 and proud of the fact the he was a Janitor. He had ridiculously ineffecient systems for doing everything but to even suggest an easier way was seen as shirking. I shirked. Big time. I used to hide for most of the day, sleep, or blatantly bunk off and sunbathe by the river. On one rare occasion that I was doing some work, he started shouting at me for not following his systems. I frankly told him that he was mistaking me for someone who gave a shit about their job. Later that day, the foreman informed me that they would no longer require my services. I shook his hand and thanked him. It was the nicest thing anyone ever said to me there. I left North Devon shortly after. My 6 day career as a Janitors assistant was over.
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"I do nothing and then I do something. But it's taken years of investigating idleness in all its forms to be able to achieve this. My discipline is borne out of concerted study of idleness."