As we heard last time My parents dream was for me to have a long lasting Saturday job so I could learn the importance of money, the healing powers of a hard day's work and be out of the house so they could enjoy their lives for 24 hours. But for me like school work was just a massive inconvenience. Another institution built to cage you and take away your dignity.
Whilst working at Starbucks I'd learnt what a macchiato was but more importantly I'd also found out it was very hard to get fired at a corporation. If you wanted a quick exit you could hit someone or say something racist but where was the fun in that? The real challenge was to eek it out and drain these non tax paying corporations finances whilst testing their bureaucratic boundaries to the limits.
The Day The Music Died
Next stop on the job train was HMV. Yes I wanted to get fired but I was an aspiring DJ who was interested in music so i thought I’d stick around as long as possible to take advantage of the staff discount. At first I really wanted to do some work at HMV but then I was wronged by management. That irked me. I was moved to accessories without warning or consultation. Blank mini discs and headphones. I had an encyclopedic knowledge of music and a great sales patter and instead of that being put to use I was carrying heavy boxes of blank multimedia over several floors.If I’d wanted to talk to people about the storage space of a mini disc I’d have Tron’ed up and uploaded myself to the cloud.
The management team at HMV were all from the north and very much spoke to us like they were back up there running a cotton mill. I was thinking of quitting but then I was introduced to the accessories store room deep in the bowels of the building. You opened the door to a room full of boxes which it turned out were perfect for fashioning a house out of that you could tunnel into and hide, fall asleep, read, listen to your disc man and relax. Due to the vast size of the store and lack of CCTV It would be possible for your manager to not see you as you could just say you were on floor seven whilst they were on floor three when really I had been chilling in my house of boxes.
Eventually I’d had enough when I got caught by a manager staring at my own reflection in a blank CD quietly questioning how my life was now devoid of all meaning and purpose. Yes I had my own house made of boxes (weirdly bigger than the room I live in now) but I may as well have been working in an industrial estate in Woolwich not the world's biggest music store. I decided to punch a security guard after he accused me of shoplifting and I was fired on the spot.
Limited Screen Time
My other love outside of music was cinema so where better to go than the Odeon Camden. Here i could combine my love of film with serving food with zero nutrition. The last place you’d want to be stuck in an apocalypse is a cinema, you’d have scurvy in six hours. The only way the food you served there could have any nutritional value would be if you dropped it on the floor and served it covered in the dirt it had picked up whilst down there.
This was a great place to work. When you weren’t serving horse meat or sugar served thirty different ways your job was pretty much just to watch films. After one week of working there I was still trying to fathom what part of the job was work. It was going to be very hard to get fired from here but like a great safe cracker faced with an impenetrable safe, I’d find a way.
My work bedroom at HMV had been a massive success so the first thing I’d have to do was find a room to sleep in. I’d heard from the Puerto Ricans who tore the tickets that there was a room on the top floor no one ever went into where they kept the posters. There were no Puerto Ricans ripping tickets, I don’t even know what a Puerto Rican is. I’d found my new room to sleep in and sleep in it I was going to sleep. Plus I could take the best film posters. It had taken several jobs but I’d finally sussed out this work lark.
Another thing I’d learnt on my shitty job odyssey is managers are the laziest members of staff, their whole raison d'etre is to distract from the fact they are doing nothing. If the system breaks down or there are any problems their idyllic life hiding in the office is going to come crashing down. To protect themselves they will do random patrols. It is at this point that you need to really pretend you are working - wiping a surface, emptying a bin, telling a customer that the new Lord Of The Rings wasn’t out yet. After you'd done your ten minutes work of the day, which was less work and more a one man play about work to an audience of one, the manager, you could relax. Once they were safely back in their office where they would not be leaving again for at least another four hours you could go grab a box of popcorn, half sweet half salt (I invented that by the way) and head up to your bedroom for a sleep. I’d wake up half an hour later, pick out the best poster and then go and catch a movie or two. You’d then pop down for half an hour and do the evening performance of your show about work, keep it fresh in the managers mind and then go back upstairs for an evening nap before cleaning up the cinema and leaving. I was living the dream. The Puerto Ricans grassed me up. I still don’t know what a Puerto Rican is.
Absence On Aisle One
After two jobs in the entertainment industry it was time to rough it with some real hard working people. I decided to go and work in a supermarket. How a man with my qualifications and attitude to work had avoided this so far I don’t know. This was not an ordinary supermarket though , this was an organic supermarket. In my naivety I thought the fact it only sold organic produce raised it above shelf stacking, drafty store rooms and check outs. That if the produce was organic maybe the staff would be treated like organic livestock and there would be a liberal attitude to doing work.
It turns out it was exactly like a supermarket in every way. It was the worst job I’d had so far. I hated it. To the point where one day I just didn’t go in. I didn’t ring or write. Just didn't turn up. The next day I realised I couldn’t afford to give the job up so I just went in as if nothing had happened. The manager nervously called me into the office and asked me where was I the other day. Thinking on my feet I said that my grandad had died and i didn't feel in the right frame of mind to come in. (The one I’d had in mind had died, before I was born) the manager took a breath and then soberly wished me condolences and then reverted to the matter in hand, if I was not going to make it in “I should inform them.” Absolutely, I agreed. “ If a grandparent was to die again and I was unable to make it in they would be the first to know.” I told them before heading out to stock some cashew butter that had just been delivered.
A few more weeks passed and the job had ground me down once more. I just could not face going in again. So I didn’t. Whilst watching TV the next day I realised that I could not afford to lose this job. But what gave me the flexibility to play fast and loose with my attendance?
The first three months is key in any job, this is the probation period. A three month audition where you have to pretend that you are hard working, want to stay there forever and that if you had any children you will call them Whole Foods after the place of work you love. If you successfully do that then you are offered a contract and then you can be your real self as it is very difficult for them to fire you. You have the upper hand.
I went in the next day and the manager was now slightly more irate. “Harry you didn’t come in again, what's happening?” Thinking on my feet, I said “my other grandad had died” (he too had died. More recently, but way before I worked here) there was a little bit of empathy from the manager but then she got down to brass tax. I can’t remember the exact words but it was something along the lines of she was trying to manage an organic supermarket and me taking the day off whenever my grandads died was starting to impact on her doing that. I was getting a written warning and if it happened again I’d be fired.
I was at my wits end with this job. It was time to go and look for another one but not before I got fired, it would be a shame not to keep up my 100% record. A month later I pulled the same trick again with a no show. This time when I went in she was really furious. I was marched into the office. “Harry! what is going on this is the third time this has happened” “my step grandad died” I retorted lamely. I was fired immediately.
As I came to the end of my teenage years it was abundantly clear that having a job was not my vibe. If was going to have one then I would need something stimulating and rewarding and it just so happened such a job was on the horizon.
As I came to the end of my teenage years it was abundantly clear that having a job was not my vibe. If was going to have one then I would need something stimulating and rewarding and it just so happened such a job was on the horizon.
Read all about it in the next instalment of this sorry saga here
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