The Idler

Fishpaste

Straight after finishing a Graphic Design degree four years ago I moved to London where I promptly decided I had enough of being creative, for the time being at least. Having specialised in illustration I realised that 20% of my degree (a miserly 2:2 at that) had been gained through a written dissertation, the other 80% of my grade having been gained through imaginative use of ink, paintbrushes and crayons. I decided, quite rightly, that I was appallingly under skilled for a 23 year old and joined various high street temping agencies who didn’t seem to mind that I had no idea how to work a computer and had never been near an office in my life.

They promptly got me jobs stuffing envelopes and making coffee, perfect employment for an idle git like me, but soon enough I hit paydirt. MAFF (Ministry for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food) were looking for a general office monkey, or “data inputter” for the Fisheries Department for at least half a year, and they were prepared to pay me the jaw dropping sum of �5 per hour. I snatched up the job and almost instantly wish I hadn’t. You could argue that manual labour of any kind is worse than a job in a warm office in Whitehall, but I disagree. If you ever get lucky enough to go inside MAFF you will notice that it is peopled by Papa Lazerou’s circus freaks from The League of Gentlemen. I think they must have some sort of government quota (very PC you know) on how many simpletons, social cripples, malignant dwarves and general accidents of nature they must employ at any one time. In my office we had an army-mad deaf lad with a hare lip and lisp who dreamed of climbing the ladder of MAFF, and opposite me sat Bill, a fat, sweaty, balding middle aged wreck of a man who had clearly left school back in the 60’s and come straight to MAFF and had never plucked up courage to leave. Every day he would come in half an hour after me, and flop into his chair with a soul destroying sigh of such sadness that no matter how much I prepared myself, would drop me into a pit of depression. He clearly hated his job, but got some kind of perverted gratification from sighing and tutting and carrying the weight of the world on his rounded and flabby shoulders.

All I did was file, as you can imagine everything was copied in triplicate, stamped and then put into a paper file, usually covered in dust and stored in rows and rows, there must have been thousands of them. I suppose government ministries should keep records, but they kept everything, no matter how trivial or unimportant, what’s more, my dull colleagues clearly thrived on filing, they loved it! People often complain about bureaucratic people and ‘red tape’, well I’ve met the people who make this red tape, and I can assure you they get a big kick out of it. As for me, it was the most boring, mind numbing and demeaning thing I have ever done in my life, and I have had a plethora of bad jobs.

After 3 months I could barely take any more, I was waking up every morning close to tears, it was destroying me, sucking the life from me. I started looking for an excuse to leave. Then one day I was asked to file a whole month’s worth of correspondence on the import of Fish Gametes into the UK. Fair enough. So I filed them, it took all day. Like so many times before I had no idea what I was working on and didn’t really care much, but for some reason I decided to ask what a Gamete was. “Sperm” was the simple reply, from my simple colleague. I digested this, and began to wonder why on earth we were importing tons of the stuff each day, and then started to worry about how the fish muck was ‘harvested’ in the first place (now that really is a crap job!). So I asked why we wanted so much fish semen. “To put in fish paste” was the reply. I left the next day.

Also, I haven’t eaten fish paste since, I suggest you follow my example.

Finlay Coutts-Britton