The Idler

De-Fluffer

I held down a number of crap jobs as a student (call centres and the like), but none could quite compare to the horror of working as a night cleaner at the offices of a big telecommunications company.

This job, as advertised, should have involved pushing hoovers around a 24-hour logistics centre between 10pm and 6am for around �4 an hour. That would have been bad enough, but the people I had to share the work with made it hell.

Firstly, there was my boss, a crazed old blue-rinse bat aged about eighty who spent the time chain smoking L&B in the foyer, moaning about the police “victimising” her family and friends and finding ways to avoid signing off my payslips. Then there was my ’supervisor’, her seventeen-year-old daughter who alternated between chaining L&B, poking at her belly-button piercing which had gone very septic and finding the worst jobs possible in the building and giving them to me. Making up the rank-and-file (emphasis on ‘rank’) was the boss’s fourteen-year-old son, who smoked and played on a gameboy all night, but got paid more than me.

This left all the actual work to be done by a two-man team of myself and a big guy called Kevin. Kevin was tatood all over and had several teeth missing (he cheerily explained that he’d lost them in a fight after he hit someone with a pool cue in a nearby pub) and even the management seemed slightly scared of him. He also had some strange ideas about how best to lighten the workload - rather than use the hoover, he explained, he found it easier to scurry about on all fours, picking up the bits of fluff and crap by hand. I suggested that I’d use the hoover. He looked down at me. I spent two weeks scurrying for carpet lint.

Finally, as well as having to spend eight hours a night with a bunch of losers lording it over me with the infinite power contained in their ’supervisor’ name-tags and one semi deranged gorilla, I had the added fun of contending with the sleep-deprived, underpaid and justifiably craky nocturnal employees of the office, who liked to moan about the shitty standard of cleaning we were providing at every chance whilst they lay about waiting for a telecommunications crisis to justify their existence.

On my last night a guy who looked like he’d swallowed a KFC outlet whole, and who was attempting to smoke through the air-conditioning vent at the time, complained that my halfhearted 4am dusting was giving him asthma, and that I ought to get some GCSEs and a proper job

I became a seething ball of pent-up rage and had left within the half hour.

This story also has a postscript of sorts. Two years later, and doing another crap job as a freelance researcher for a magazine I was conducting interviews on New Street station in Birmingham when I ran into a couple who looked remarkably like my vindictive ex-supervisor and her brother outside near the taxi rank. I think they were sleeping rough there. I wouldn’t wish that on anybody, but the vindictive bastard in me couldn’t help but think it might be all that bad karma. Anyhow, at least I haven’t run into that Kevin guy since.

Tom Royal