CHAPTER THREE
Zero Hours Till Midnight
AROUND AUGUST 2018
The gig economy was neverland and I was Peter Pan flying through the air over a land free from employment laws and staffed by children. It was perfect for me as it was temporary, a temporary job forever. At this rate I would never have to grow up.
Zero hour contracts or the gig economy as it is affectionately known are specifically designed for low skill workers and immigrants. You would only take a work contract like this if you were mad or desperate, sadly I was both. When my great grandparents had first come to these shores they had worked their arses off to provide a better life for my family and here I was undoing all that work and dragging their name back through the Ukranian mud. They'd arrived on these shores 100 years ago but looking at my bank balance it may as well have been yesterday. I started to gravitate towards Eastern European people as I felt closer to them than the English. I'd drink Tyskie in the street in the hope a Slav would stop and say hello. I'd throw back litres of Borscht staring at my reflection in it's viscous purple hue looking for some sort of message on where I should turn. You'd find me in the Polski Skelp most weekends feeling the cabbages and counting the dumplings in the hope that someone would come in who knew of some work. After several weeks the Berlin Wall came down and I got wind at the cured meat counter of an immersive theatre show looking for some bar staff. The job looked fucking awful and was hours away from my house but I was an immigrant so I couldn't be choosy. I filled out the form and a chill went down my back, the job began when I would have started shooting my TV show if it had been commissioned. It was only for a month but that would tide me over till I worked out how to crawl out the wreckage of my life.
I had done a piece of immersive theatre before. Kind of. Well... I had done the box office for an immersive show in an abandoned church in Hackney. It was a Dracula themed show. I was paid to wear a top hat and had to sit in a freezing cold corridor in a giant coffin. The audience would knock on the coffin door and I'd open it and take their ticket bookings. Once all the audience were in the actors from the show would walk up to the coffin and knock on the door, the coffin door would creek open and the main guy playing Jonathan Harker would say for the benefit of me and me alone “I’m Johanathan Harker, this is Dr Van Helsing and with us are Lucy and Mina” and I for no one in an empty freezing corridor standing in a coffin would have to say “Mr Harker, four tickets. The party is in the courtyard. Go through.” One minute I'm stood in the changing room asking them how their day has been the next minute I'm opening a coffin door and they are pretending they are vampire killers coming to exorcise a haunted castle.I get the allure of immersive theatre is you immerse yourself in a fantasy world for a few hours to distract from your miserable existence and yes if anyone needed to immerse themselves in a fantasy world to distract from their miserable existence it was me; but playing a doorman of a haunted castle for £30 a night wasn't quite the escapism I was after.
I could find some solace in that this new job I was heading to was the pinnacle of immersive theatre. They took the immersive side very seriously. It was set in Tudor times so if your application was successful they would post you a parchment telling you so. You were expected to take it as seriously as them. This was not just another bar job. Three weeks five hundred years ago felt just far away enough to forget the current world I was living in. It was a step up from Dracula at least but then being a one armed grave digger was a step up from Dracula.
Working a shitty job has always been awful but with the popularisation of zero hours jobs the security of a shitty job for life has been taken away. Who'd have thought taking that security away would make the shitty job infinitely more depressing. I'm from a time when the prospect of having a shitty job for life was the depressing thing. What I'd give now for a contract promising me guaranteed hours at a shitty job for eternity. Zero hour jobs are a way for employers to transfer all the financial risks on to the employees. This is pitched to you as "flexible." But with no sick pay, no guaranteed hours and the freedom to fire you at any time it is flexible for them and not for you. No one is asking for a job for life but these are jobs for no life. It’s almost impossible to care about a job when the very nature of your employment is built on the premise of you being treated like a dispensable piece of shit whilst a more hungry, ambitious dispensable piece of shit is ready to step into your shoes if you make a mistake
The gig economy was neverland and I was Peter Pan flying through the air over a land free from employment laws and staffed by children. It was perfect for me as it was temporary, a temporary job forever. At this rate I would never have to grow up.
Zero hour contracts or the gig economy as it is affectionately known are specifically designed for low skill workers and immigrants. You would only take a work contract like this if you were mad or desperate, sadly I was both. When my great grandparents had first come to these shores they had worked their arses off to provide a better life for my family and here I was undoing all that work and dragging their name back through the Ukranian mud. They'd arrived on these shores 100 years ago but looking at my bank balance it may as well have been yesterday. I started to gravitate towards Eastern European people as I felt closer to them than the English. I'd drink Tyskie in the street in the hope a Slav would stop and say hello. I'd throw back litres of Borscht staring at my reflection in it's viscous purple hue looking for some sort of message on where I should turn. You'd find me in the Polski Skelp most weekends feeling the cabbages and counting the dumplings in the hope that someone would come in who knew of some work. After several weeks the Berlin Wall came down and I got wind at the cured meat counter of an immersive theatre show looking for some bar staff. The job looked fucking awful and was hours away from my house but I was an immigrant so I couldn't be choosy. I filled out the form and a chill went down my back, the job began when I would have started shooting my TV show if it had been commissioned. It was only for a month but that would tide me over till I worked out how to crawl out the wreckage of my life.
I had done a piece of immersive theatre before. Kind of. Well... I had done the box office for an immersive show in an abandoned church in Hackney. It was a Dracula themed show. I was paid to wear a top hat and had to sit in a freezing cold corridor in a giant coffin. The audience would knock on the coffin door and I'd open it and take their ticket bookings. Once all the audience were in the actors from the show would walk up to the coffin and knock on the door, the coffin door would creek open and the main guy playing Jonathan Harker would say for the benefit of me and me alone “I’m Johanathan Harker, this is Dr Van Helsing and with us are Lucy and Mina” and I for no one in an empty freezing corridor standing in a coffin would have to say “Mr Harker, four tickets. The party is in the courtyard. Go through.” One minute I'm stood in the changing room asking them how their day has been the next minute I'm opening a coffin door and they are pretending they are vampire killers coming to exorcise a haunted castle.I get the allure of immersive theatre is you immerse yourself in a fantasy world for a few hours to distract from your miserable existence and yes if anyone needed to immerse themselves in a fantasy world to distract from their miserable existence it was me; but playing a doorman of a haunted castle for £30 a night wasn't quite the escapism I was after.
I could find some solace in that this new job I was heading to was the pinnacle of immersive theatre. They took the immersive side very seriously. It was set in Tudor times so if your application was successful they would post you a parchment telling you so. You were expected to take it as seriously as them. This was not just another bar job. Three weeks five hundred years ago felt just far away enough to forget the current world I was living in. It was a step up from Dracula at least but then being a one armed grave digger was a step up from Dracula.
Working a shitty job has always been awful but with the popularisation of zero hours jobs the security of a shitty job for life has been taken away. Who'd have thought taking that security away would make the shitty job infinitely more depressing. I'm from a time when the prospect of having a shitty job for life was the depressing thing. What I'd give now for a contract promising me guaranteed hours at a shitty job for eternity. Zero hour jobs are a way for employers to transfer all the financial risks on to the employees. This is pitched to you as "flexible." But with no sick pay, no guaranteed hours and the freedom to fire you at any time it is flexible for them and not for you. No one is asking for a job for life but these are jobs for no life. It’s almost impossible to care about a job when the very nature of your employment is built on the premise of you being treated like a dispensable piece of shit whilst a more hungry, ambitious dispensable piece of shit is ready to step into your shoes if you make a mistake
Some weeks later a piece of parchment arrived heralding the new job I would be embarking on for the next three weeks. I assumed it would start with drinks training but it turned out you needed a three day extensive course in discovering your character in order to do this low level bar job. The real character that I needed to work on was the person I'd become who found themselves doing this job but I'd save that for therapy.
A few weeks later I found myself in a field a couple of hours commute from my flat.The guy who had devised "the story" for the show stood on a large stage and vomited out jargon at a rate of knots I had never heard before. "We are a family and as such we must treat each other like family" oh great I can borrow money off some of these guys I thought. I looked around I wouldn't mind fucking some of my family. "However this is a business and the running of the business can't be compromised. Failure to comply with rules will end in disciplinary action." I was getting mixed messages, was I allowed to fuck my family or not? He went on for two hours about how we were transporting the audience to another world. This particular world was in a giant car park next to a children's playground. For three weeks we would leave our real selves behind and become the characters he was about to give us. I actually had a lot in common with my character, we both worked in a bar for the London living wage and hated our jobs. I picked up a laminated menu and looked at the drink prices and thought it better be a good show in order to distract from how expensive they were. "Just have fun with it" he continued, which was weirdly the reason I'd been fired from every job I'd ever had. He finished with the words "go forward dream makers." He waited for an applause that never came.
The guy went round anointing us our character names. I felt like i was in a cult. Creating a world where you had fun at a job this guy was nuts. Reading between the lines this was just one big upsell to maximize profits. We were Colonel Tom Parker's dancing chickens. Colonel Tom Parker's dancing chickens was Elvis Presley's manager's carnival act before he met the soon to be worldwide star which involved heating a hot plate in a cage full of chickens creating the illusion they were dancing. Our boss was creating the illusion this wasn't another shitty zero hours bar job. But I wasn't getting paid to ask questions I was getting paid to dance round in a circle and sing ring a ring a roses with 50 out of work actors who seemed to think we were about to start shooting Apocalypse Now in a Phillipino jungle not rinse losers who need to dress up in their mums clothes and watch a film from twenty years ago to have a good time. At the end of three days training we had all been reprogrammed and believed we were about to embark on the greatest artistic achievement since Guernica was hung on the wall at the UN.
My character's name was Willy Sabitini. He worked in a mansion for a prestigious family as a bar man. We all had costumes, mine was a garish red sequined waistcoat. I had to buy my own shoes as according to the boss "my character wouldn't wear trainers" I argued that my character would ask his boss to pay for the shoes he was being made to buy for work but that fell on deaf ears. I put on my costume. I looked like a magician who had just got out of prison for sex offences. We were told not to take any pictures of ourselves. I wasn't quite sure what I would need a picture of me dressed as a sex criminal for but best to stick to the rules as I hadn't worked for these guys before. I looked around at my colleagues and there was no sign of life there. A rag-tag band of miscreants at the bottom rung of the showbiz ladder. They thought there were other rungs, wait until they found out it was a slide not a ladder. Twenty years ago I'd be excited about this job too but twenty years ago my knee didn't click when I bent down and hangovers lasted three hours not three days. They actually cared about this job,It was a series of customised portaloos in a park in Harrow run by failed drama students who thought by piggybacking on the back of a successful film from twenty years they were offering something to the culture. "ok" I whispered to myself "you are twenty years old and your name is Willy Sabitini." I closed my eyes tightly until it felt true.
It's always good to arrive early on your first day so you can scope out the worst bar to work at. It was glaringly obvious it was one outside next to a van that sold meatballs. I’m not a big festival goer, I’ve been to two. My abiding memory of the first one I went to was that I tried poppers for the first and last time. You don’t want to do poppers at the best of times. Festivals are the worst of times and the last place you want your anus expanding and contracting is a park full of crusties with toilets that look like a vegans dinner and smell much worse. The other festival I went to I was covering for the Guardian. It got off to a terrible start when Dave Gorman a comedian off the TV who keeps all his charisma on a laptop, grassed me up for tearing up one of those reservation slips on the train so I could sit down for the three hour journey. I spent the whole journey sat on the floor with him looking smug in his seat about protecting the dignity of south western trains booking policy. I'd have felt less angry about it if when we got out of the train station to get the coach to the festival site he hadn't said in a loud voice "I'm Dave Gorman" and pushed to the front of the queue. The festival wasn’t much better. I kicked a break dancing child (on purpose) The sheep on the farm had been dyed pink, Richard Curtis and his family were walking around and I had not read the memo so was not aware that a three piece suit was not suitable attire for a muddy festival. I vowed never to attend one again as they felt a little bit too "hunter gatherer" for me. I preferred my entertainment in buildings with toilets that weren't a hole in the ground.
My brief stint on the festival circuit showed me there are three things that like festivals cunts, Richard Curtis and Wasps. Ok two things. No one was ever pleased to see a wasp. Wasps are negative. No ones going “you know what this picnic could do with... More wasps...” I understand bees they pollinate and make delicious honey. Would you buy wasp honey if you saw it in the supermarket?They don't make honey they make chaos. Festivals and outdoor events are wasp havens and the meatball box looked like wasp mecca. Years of working at shitty jobs had allowed me to develop a unique skill set which included a sixth sense for sniffing out the part of any business that was the worst section to work on. This was the bar equivalent of the hot box from Django Unchained. The only storyline at this bar was to serve quickly, work like a dog and make the company some money. The place you wanted to work was The Mansion bar, it was only open for an hour and was exclusive to people who'd paid for premium tickets. The meatball box was just a white box in a central bit of the site it's only purpose to maximize sales. And it was open for the duration of the show which meant you'd be working for your whole shift and be the last to leave. It was not the sort of bar Willy Sabitini should be working on. I hadn't spent three days meticulously developing this character for him to stand serving people wearing tiaras who work in HR pre made cocktails from a portacabin next to a meatball stand. With how my luck was going I knew for certain they were going to put me on the meatball bar. And low and behold the claw crane of misery had picked me up and dropped me in this white sauna box that stunk of meatballs as when I walked into the office I was told I'd be on the box bar. Some say you make your own luck well my luck was currently being made in Taiwan by slave labour and was vastly inferior to Great British luck. Thinking on my feet I told them Willy Sabitini was allergic to sunscreen so I couldn't work outside.
Victory!
Quiet bars are not all sunshine and light, they have their downside. Most bar jobs there is nothing to do outside of setting up, service and then cleaning at the end of the shift. Your number one priority to minimize your misery at one of these shitty jobs is to be away from the managers. If you can combine avoiding managers and customers you are onto a winner. When there is nothing to do managers start to use their imaginations and they are not managers of temporary bars because they have a good imagination. The managers argument is always “You are not getting paid to do nothing” but then my argument is I am getting paid nothing for the 2 hours I spend commuting to your job, in fact I’m paying £10 for the journey so cut me some slack and let me stand around for the odd ten minutes when there are no customers. If you have rudimentary hand eye coordination and don't have alzheimers you can be a bar man, you listen to the order you pour the drinks then you mop the floor at the end of the shift and go home. The great con of the low skilled job is the manager. The only time a manager steps behind a bar out of whatever portacabin they are sat in checking facebook and watching netflix is to pour a friend of theirs who is coming to see the show a drink or make up something that needs doing in order to justify the extra £5 an hour they are being paid. At these entry level jobs it should be a division of labour everyone paid the same with equal responsibility. But they won't even guarantee you a shift on a zero hour job so good luck getting any responsibility beyond emptying a mop bucket.
I should have been sitting down to write a TV show. Instead I was wearing a sparkly waistcoat, hiding from wasps on an industrial estate next to Heathrow airport and was contractually obliged to refer to myself as Willy Sabitini. Never growing up was harder than I remembered it.
A few weeks later I found myself in a field a couple of hours commute from my flat.The guy who had devised "the story" for the show stood on a large stage and vomited out jargon at a rate of knots I had never heard before. "We are a family and as such we must treat each other like family" oh great I can borrow money off some of these guys I thought. I looked around I wouldn't mind fucking some of my family. "However this is a business and the running of the business can't be compromised. Failure to comply with rules will end in disciplinary action." I was getting mixed messages, was I allowed to fuck my family or not? He went on for two hours about how we were transporting the audience to another world. This particular world was in a giant car park next to a children's playground. For three weeks we would leave our real selves behind and become the characters he was about to give us. I actually had a lot in common with my character, we both worked in a bar for the London living wage and hated our jobs. I picked up a laminated menu and looked at the drink prices and thought it better be a good show in order to distract from how expensive they were. "Just have fun with it" he continued, which was weirdly the reason I'd been fired from every job I'd ever had. He finished with the words "go forward dream makers." He waited for an applause that never came.
The guy went round anointing us our character names. I felt like i was in a cult. Creating a world where you had fun at a job this guy was nuts. Reading between the lines this was just one big upsell to maximize profits. We were Colonel Tom Parker's dancing chickens. Colonel Tom Parker's dancing chickens was Elvis Presley's manager's carnival act before he met the soon to be worldwide star which involved heating a hot plate in a cage full of chickens creating the illusion they were dancing. Our boss was creating the illusion this wasn't another shitty zero hours bar job. But I wasn't getting paid to ask questions I was getting paid to dance round in a circle and sing ring a ring a roses with 50 out of work actors who seemed to think we were about to start shooting Apocalypse Now in a Phillipino jungle not rinse losers who need to dress up in their mums clothes and watch a film from twenty years ago to have a good time. At the end of three days training we had all been reprogrammed and believed we were about to embark on the greatest artistic achievement since Guernica was hung on the wall at the UN.
My character's name was Willy Sabitini. He worked in a mansion for a prestigious family as a bar man. We all had costumes, mine was a garish red sequined waistcoat. I had to buy my own shoes as according to the boss "my character wouldn't wear trainers" I argued that my character would ask his boss to pay for the shoes he was being made to buy for work but that fell on deaf ears. I put on my costume. I looked like a magician who had just got out of prison for sex offences. We were told not to take any pictures of ourselves. I wasn't quite sure what I would need a picture of me dressed as a sex criminal for but best to stick to the rules as I hadn't worked for these guys before. I looked around at my colleagues and there was no sign of life there. A rag-tag band of miscreants at the bottom rung of the showbiz ladder. They thought there were other rungs, wait until they found out it was a slide not a ladder. Twenty years ago I'd be excited about this job too but twenty years ago my knee didn't click when I bent down and hangovers lasted three hours not three days. They actually cared about this job,It was a series of customised portaloos in a park in Harrow run by failed drama students who thought by piggybacking on the back of a successful film from twenty years they were offering something to the culture. "ok" I whispered to myself "you are twenty years old and your name is Willy Sabitini." I closed my eyes tightly until it felt true.
It's always good to arrive early on your first day so you can scope out the worst bar to work at. It was glaringly obvious it was one outside next to a van that sold meatballs. I’m not a big festival goer, I’ve been to two. My abiding memory of the first one I went to was that I tried poppers for the first and last time. You don’t want to do poppers at the best of times. Festivals are the worst of times and the last place you want your anus expanding and contracting is a park full of crusties with toilets that look like a vegans dinner and smell much worse. The other festival I went to I was covering for the Guardian. It got off to a terrible start when Dave Gorman a comedian off the TV who keeps all his charisma on a laptop, grassed me up for tearing up one of those reservation slips on the train so I could sit down for the three hour journey. I spent the whole journey sat on the floor with him looking smug in his seat about protecting the dignity of south western trains booking policy. I'd have felt less angry about it if when we got out of the train station to get the coach to the festival site he hadn't said in a loud voice "I'm Dave Gorman" and pushed to the front of the queue. The festival wasn’t much better. I kicked a break dancing child (on purpose) The sheep on the farm had been dyed pink, Richard Curtis and his family were walking around and I had not read the memo so was not aware that a three piece suit was not suitable attire for a muddy festival. I vowed never to attend one again as they felt a little bit too "hunter gatherer" for me. I preferred my entertainment in buildings with toilets that weren't a hole in the ground.
My brief stint on the festival circuit showed me there are three things that like festivals cunts, Richard Curtis and Wasps. Ok two things. No one was ever pleased to see a wasp. Wasps are negative. No ones going “you know what this picnic could do with... More wasps...” I understand bees they pollinate and make delicious honey. Would you buy wasp honey if you saw it in the supermarket?They don't make honey they make chaos. Festivals and outdoor events are wasp havens and the meatball box looked like wasp mecca. Years of working at shitty jobs had allowed me to develop a unique skill set which included a sixth sense for sniffing out the part of any business that was the worst section to work on. This was the bar equivalent of the hot box from Django Unchained. The only storyline at this bar was to serve quickly, work like a dog and make the company some money. The place you wanted to work was The Mansion bar, it was only open for an hour and was exclusive to people who'd paid for premium tickets. The meatball box was just a white box in a central bit of the site it's only purpose to maximize sales. And it was open for the duration of the show which meant you'd be working for your whole shift and be the last to leave. It was not the sort of bar Willy Sabitini should be working on. I hadn't spent three days meticulously developing this character for him to stand serving people wearing tiaras who work in HR pre made cocktails from a portacabin next to a meatball stand. With how my luck was going I knew for certain they were going to put me on the meatball bar. And low and behold the claw crane of misery had picked me up and dropped me in this white sauna box that stunk of meatballs as when I walked into the office I was told I'd be on the box bar. Some say you make your own luck well my luck was currently being made in Taiwan by slave labour and was vastly inferior to Great British luck. Thinking on my feet I told them Willy Sabitini was allergic to sunscreen so I couldn't work outside.
Victory!
Quiet bars are not all sunshine and light, they have their downside. Most bar jobs there is nothing to do outside of setting up, service and then cleaning at the end of the shift. Your number one priority to minimize your misery at one of these shitty jobs is to be away from the managers. If you can combine avoiding managers and customers you are onto a winner. When there is nothing to do managers start to use their imaginations and they are not managers of temporary bars because they have a good imagination. The managers argument is always “You are not getting paid to do nothing” but then my argument is I am getting paid nothing for the 2 hours I spend commuting to your job, in fact I’m paying £10 for the journey so cut me some slack and let me stand around for the odd ten minutes when there are no customers. If you have rudimentary hand eye coordination and don't have alzheimers you can be a bar man, you listen to the order you pour the drinks then you mop the floor at the end of the shift and go home. The great con of the low skilled job is the manager. The only time a manager steps behind a bar out of whatever portacabin they are sat in checking facebook and watching netflix is to pour a friend of theirs who is coming to see the show a drink or make up something that needs doing in order to justify the extra £5 an hour they are being paid. At these entry level jobs it should be a division of labour everyone paid the same with equal responsibility. But they won't even guarantee you a shift on a zero hour job so good luck getting any responsibility beyond emptying a mop bucket.
I should have been sitting down to write a TV show. Instead I was wearing a sparkly waistcoat, hiding from wasps on an industrial estate next to Heathrow airport and was contractually obliged to refer to myself as Willy Sabitini. Never growing up was harder than I remembered it.
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CLICK TO FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER AND INSTA
THE DONATIONS REALLY HELP AND I PUT A LOT OF TIME INTO THIS