Job #3 - Regatta Bingo
An alcohol-related error in my UCAS form - surprisingly easily done in post A-Level euphoria - had resulted in me being allocated a place on entirely the wrong course at a University that didn't even actually run the course that i'd intended to study (Journalism was the intention, Print Mechanics the outcome), and I therefore found myself alone in the great city of Edinburgh with nowt much to do, shivering in my Trimm-Trabs and duffle coat, with my Ian Brown haircut getting gently soaked in the drizzle coming in from the Forth.
Perhaps my senses were jarred by the all pervading smell of mince and tatties from the still-brewing breweries, or maybe the intoxicating qualities of Tennents Eighty Shillings and golden dripping deep-fried haggis knocked my common sense askew, but I quickly lost my heart to a fair high-kicking highland maiden who went by the name of Louise Sutherland. Aah, the lovely Louise Sutherland...
Sadly, the lovely Louise Sutherland had no desire to take my heart, preferring instead to playfully toy with it and occasionally jab it in moments of boredom - however I remained blissfully unaware of this, following her around like a lovelorn little indie puppy, convinced that our future lay in "Monarch of the Glen" style splendour. A stolen kiss after she had spin-kicked me in the head one evening (I had agreed to let her practise her Ju-Jitsu on me) was all I needed to convince me to apply for a job at the bingo hall where she worked just off Tollcross. This, in retrospect, was a mistake.
Those not in the know may imagine bingo halls to be places of quiet, the harmony only being disturbed by the odd croak of "house" and the occasional bout of octogenarian flatulence. This is not the case. Bingo halls are frequented by very old ladies who, although they may appear meek and mild in everyday life, mutate into snarling spitting savages at the faint trace of a bingo caller on the wind. All semblance of order goes out of the window as soon as the game starts; it is open warfare.
My duty was to man the bar. An easy task? Oooh no. You see, there is generally only a five minute window to visit the bar during breaks in play. The bar was very small, and the ladies were many. If you have never witnessed a bingo bar stampede, it is akin to a scene from "Shaun of the Dead". A hundred or so broken bodies with violet tints and nasty brooches and once-glam debutante dresses from parties where the band stopped playing long ago, all shambling and shuffling at speed (they are surprisingly agile when they catch the scent of gin), clutching and grabbing, biting and spitting:
"Ah wis first, eh!"
"Dinnae listen tae her wee laddie, i'll hae a haf an' haf..."
I was also appointed unofficial bouncer, meaning that it was my job to escort troublemakers from the premises. What's that you say? It can't be too difficult to deal with frail pensioners? You rather eject a pensioner than a six foot shaven-headed thug with teardrops tattoed down his cheek? Gosh no. I will tell you now that it would be infinitely easier to escort an entire battalion of aggrieved squaddies from the premises than one bingoed-up great-grandmother.
The problem, you see, is that they are breakable. Very breakable. That doesn't mean that they can't do you damage - I still have the scars today - but essentially, due to their skin-and-bones composition, they are impossible to lift safely. I would equate it to a removal man attempting to carry a very old, very delicate antique bookcase down a steep flight of stairs. A bookcase that bites. There is no grabbable part that is immune to snapping off. They are, in short, immensely awkward. And breaking them is frowned upon.
I lasted a month, and never got to see the fragrant Louise anyway, as she worked in the foyer. The manager's parting words were "Son, ye'll never make it in the bingo industry". I agreed with him. Still do.
Friday, 12 February 2010
VVV cont'd...
Job #2 - Chumco
"Are you a hunter, are you a closer, are you eager for the money, is your grandmother a bankable asset, do you want to sell sell sell?..."
I assured the slick ponytailed gentleman that indeed she was and indeed I did, and in doing so secured my position as the newest member of West London's premier crack frontline sales team; dammit, we'll sell it to you before you even realise you've bought it and then sell it to you again when you call to complain.
The "it" in question referred to a wide variety of products to suit all needs and desires: Ice Melt, Graffiti Removal kits, Toner Cartidges, Bic pens, and - the icing on the cake, the Chumco flagship product - the Millennium Bug Protection Cd, yours for £399 including post and packaging ("What's that you say sir? The disk was blank? Did your computers get infected with the millennium bug? No? Well then...").
"Leads" consisted of a well-thumbed copy of the telephone directory, resulting in much time spent trying to convince old ladies that they had great need for industrial quantities of strip lights or wood adhesive. That said, all that was required to put a "deal" up on the board was an affirmative indication that some poor individual had agreed to accept the product on a weeks trial, at which point several pallets were dispatched complete with invoice and no return address, along with the "sweetener" - a "genuine Premier League football shirt for the team of your choice", ie: a Fruit of the Loom T-Shirt with an embossed trophy and the word "Goal" embroidered below.
Our office was a run down series of rooms above an electronics shop on Kensington High St - presumably intended to give the impression of legitimacy - below a flat occupied by a horrendously over-stretched perma-tanned leopard-print-leotarded crimped vision of faded grandeur named Marina, who occasionally swayed and wafted down to slur encouragement to the sales force flashing more flesh than any of us would have wished, and who may or may not have been sleeping with the aforementioned slick ponytailed chap. She was the (stapled) face of the operation, as the two directors - lets call them the Silver brothers - were generally tied up dealing with "legal" issues of their own.
I recall that summer as being a very happy one; despite the clearly disingenuous nature of the role, we were all young and carefree. A weeks wages spent in one Friday night session could easily be replenished the following week with a few questionable "deals", cigarettes could always be pinched from Louis The Greek, who never left the house without at least eighty Bensons on him, and a generous hooker in the flats behind obligingly took her clothes off in her window every day at 11am on the dot.
But summers - as they tend to - change to autumns, and new challenges were calling. University, in fact, was calling. And that is a story that will have to wait. For now.
"Are you a hunter, are you a closer, are you eager for the money, is your grandmother a bankable asset, do you want to sell sell sell?..."
I assured the slick ponytailed gentleman that indeed she was and indeed I did, and in doing so secured my position as the newest member of West London's premier crack frontline sales team; dammit, we'll sell it to you before you even realise you've bought it and then sell it to you again when you call to complain.
The "it" in question referred to a wide variety of products to suit all needs and desires: Ice Melt, Graffiti Removal kits, Toner Cartidges, Bic pens, and - the icing on the cake, the Chumco flagship product - the Millennium Bug Protection Cd, yours for £399 including post and packaging ("What's that you say sir? The disk was blank? Did your computers get infected with the millennium bug? No? Well then...").
"Leads" consisted of a well-thumbed copy of the telephone directory, resulting in much time spent trying to convince old ladies that they had great need for industrial quantities of strip lights or wood adhesive. That said, all that was required to put a "deal" up on the board was an affirmative indication that some poor individual had agreed to accept the product on a weeks trial, at which point several pallets were dispatched complete with invoice and no return address, along with the "sweetener" - a "genuine Premier League football shirt for the team of your choice", ie: a Fruit of the Loom T-Shirt with an embossed trophy and the word "Goal" embroidered below.
Our office was a run down series of rooms above an electronics shop on Kensington High St - presumably intended to give the impression of legitimacy - below a flat occupied by a horrendously over-stretched perma-tanned leopard-print-leotarded crimped vision of faded grandeur named Marina, who occasionally swayed and wafted down to slur encouragement to the sales force flashing more flesh than any of us would have wished, and who may or may not have been sleeping with the aforementioned slick ponytailed chap. She was the (stapled) face of the operation, as the two directors - lets call them the Silver brothers - were generally tied up dealing with "legal" issues of their own.
I recall that summer as being a very happy one; despite the clearly disingenuous nature of the role, we were all young and carefree. A weeks wages spent in one Friday night session could easily be replenished the following week with a few questionable "deals", cigarettes could always be pinched from Louis The Greek, who never left the house without at least eighty Bensons on him, and a generous hooker in the flats behind obligingly took her clothes off in her window every day at 11am on the dot.
But summers - as they tend to - change to autumns, and new challenges were calling. University, in fact, was calling. And that is a story that will have to wait. For now.
Thursday, 11 February 2010
Vocation Vocation Vocation...
As a newly inaugarated member of the great unwashed - by virtue of somewhat unwisely resigning from my position as a corporate insolvency negotiator in the claims department of a large insurance firm in the midst of the greatest employment crisis since Gazza was sober (the irony of which is not entirely lost on me) - I thought it may be interesting to take a moment out between todays episode of Matthew Wright and filling in my benefit forms to reflect back through my long and varied curriculum vitae in the hope of being able to ascertain where precisely it all went a little wrong.
Let us begin by travelling back to an altogether more innocent time, when jeans were baggy, hair was undercut and pubs still smelled of smoke.
Job #1 - Youngsters Toys and Sports
As a fresh-faced sixteen year old with a unfortunate knack of attracting trouble and collecting black eyes like I had collected Panini stickers a couple of years previously, a small family-run toy emporium in the leafy London commuter belt seemed the natural place to begin my working life, and gave me the ideal opportunity to show off a variety of weekend war wounds to the neighbourhood nippers as they perused Playmobil.
My emloyer was a genial forty-something of Asian descent with a penchant for illicit Cafe Creme cigars (his wife had encouraged the transition from cigarettes in the belief that he would smoke less - he simply smoked twenty cigars a day instead) and a entirely commendable faith in the twin tenets of hard work and capitalism, manifested by his willingness to regularly spend several hours at a time in the yard attacking toys that had failed to sell with a club hammer in order to claim damaged goods and a refund from the manufacturer.
A suspicious man by nature, he was utterly convinced that the world was out to take his money, which meant that I was never to be left unsupervised with the till. This alone rendered my employment almost completely pointless, and I therefore spent most of my time discreetly tailing angelic four year olds around the aisles ("James, follow this one, he is a thief, he has naughty eyes...") and embarking on complex missions of subterfuge to the other toy retailer in the town centre with instructions to find out the price of their cricket bats and report back by eleven hundred hours. I never did tell him that the kindly old fellow at Chaplins Games was perfectly aware of his scheme, and that the loyalty of his spy could easily be bought with a can of Pepsi and a packet of Embassy #1.
Upstairs - in the sports section - was Carol's domain. An ancient, wizened, hump-backed old bird with yellowed razor sharp teeth and an angry look that could stop a thieving schoolboy in his tracks at a hundred yards, she presided over the somewhat sad selection of moth-bothered football gear and stacked boxes of boots deep with the dust of a generation. Any customer enquiries for said sportswear were met with a Medusa glare, and a curt "this is a toy shop...Allsports is next to Bejam", and an invitation to perhaps purchase one of the large range of Hornby model railway accessories, of which she had an encyclopaedic knowledge. She terrified me, but I rather liked her.
Great fun was had when it transpired that my nemesis at the time - a chap called Rupert (who admittedly does not sound especially menacing in retrospect) - had taken a position at the window place next door, and many Saturdays from then on until then end of my employ were spent muttering dark oaths and curses at each other whilst both pretending that we weren't wearing name badges. He would point to his head in reference to where he had recently hit me with a pint glass. I would retort by gesturing at my wrists, where he'd had to have corrective surgery after a second attempt to hit me with the pint glass went wrong and he'd inadvertently sliced through his own artery. Ah, them were the days.
Sadly, I think I knew that this little idyll could not last forever; career advancement was calling...
Let us begin by travelling back to an altogether more innocent time, when jeans were baggy, hair was undercut and pubs still smelled of smoke.
Job #1 - Youngsters Toys and Sports
As a fresh-faced sixteen year old with a unfortunate knack of attracting trouble and collecting black eyes like I had collected Panini stickers a couple of years previously, a small family-run toy emporium in the leafy London commuter belt seemed the natural place to begin my working life, and gave me the ideal opportunity to show off a variety of weekend war wounds to the neighbourhood nippers as they perused Playmobil.
My emloyer was a genial forty-something of Asian descent with a penchant for illicit Cafe Creme cigars (his wife had encouraged the transition from cigarettes in the belief that he would smoke less - he simply smoked twenty cigars a day instead) and a entirely commendable faith in the twin tenets of hard work and capitalism, manifested by his willingness to regularly spend several hours at a time in the yard attacking toys that had failed to sell with a club hammer in order to claim damaged goods and a refund from the manufacturer.
A suspicious man by nature, he was utterly convinced that the world was out to take his money, which meant that I was never to be left unsupervised with the till. This alone rendered my employment almost completely pointless, and I therefore spent most of my time discreetly tailing angelic four year olds around the aisles ("James, follow this one, he is a thief, he has naughty eyes...") and embarking on complex missions of subterfuge to the other toy retailer in the town centre with instructions to find out the price of their cricket bats and report back by eleven hundred hours. I never did tell him that the kindly old fellow at Chaplins Games was perfectly aware of his scheme, and that the loyalty of his spy could easily be bought with a can of Pepsi and a packet of Embassy #1.
Upstairs - in the sports section - was Carol's domain. An ancient, wizened, hump-backed old bird with yellowed razor sharp teeth and an angry look that could stop a thieving schoolboy in his tracks at a hundred yards, she presided over the somewhat sad selection of moth-bothered football gear and stacked boxes of boots deep with the dust of a generation. Any customer enquiries for said sportswear were met with a Medusa glare, and a curt "this is a toy shop...Allsports is next to Bejam", and an invitation to perhaps purchase one of the large range of Hornby model railway accessories, of which she had an encyclopaedic knowledge. She terrified me, but I rather liked her.
Great fun was had when it transpired that my nemesis at the time - a chap called Rupert (who admittedly does not sound especially menacing in retrospect) - had taken a position at the window place next door, and many Saturdays from then on until then end of my employ were spent muttering dark oaths and curses at each other whilst both pretending that we weren't wearing name badges. He would point to his head in reference to where he had recently hit me with a pint glass. I would retort by gesturing at my wrists, where he'd had to have corrective surgery after a second attempt to hit me with the pint glass went wrong and he'd inadvertently sliced through his own artery. Ah, them were the days.
Sadly, I think I knew that this little idyll could not last forever; career advancement was calling...
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