Is this a restaurant? For a minute there I thought I'd wandered into a toy shop

Tonight I had my second leaving do in the last 3 days.

Tonight's meal had twice the number of people in attendance but it was also twice as much money for half as much food, which is a big consideration when you're unemployed.  That Copper Beech place we went to on Wednesday, the dinners were huge, and even with drinks you still got change out of a tenner.  The mince and dumplings I had could have fed a village, and the parmos were so big you could have used them as liferafts in the event of a flood.

But for all the cheapness on Wednesday, the food was still excellent.  Also, I understood the menu.  I knew what every dish was.  Parmo, check.  Mince and Dumplings, check, Fish and Chips, check.  I had a pretty good idea in my head what each of those things might look like, and when they got delivered to the table, I had no trouble telling them apart.  And neither did the waiter.

The restaurant tonight was a lot posher than the Copper Beech, but it was one of those places where they build stuff out of your food.  Dan Footy's dessert looked like a scale model of the Black Pearl out of Pirates of the Caribbean, and as for me, I got served a stack of something that looked like a replica of the paperwork I used to batch.  It even had orange case separators made out of carrot.  The veg was advertised as being hot pot potato, but it looked more like potato that had been hit with a hammer, mixed with some carrot and then assembled into a square in one of those car crushers.

I didn't have chips, and I was glad I didn't, but some other people did and they were those big chips that you got about ten of and that you could have started a game of Jenga with.  If I'm going to order chips, I want them to look like chips, not building blocks.  I'm not a child, I haven't played with blocks and bricks and that type of shit since I was about 9.  I just don't get what the appeal of this kind of food is.

The choice of food on offer played havoc with poor old Deano.  He'll only eat traditional British meals, so he ordered sausage and mash which you would think would be a safe bet, but they'd even tried to cut the sausages in half and build something out of that.  And instead of good old Bisto on it, it had some sort of black sauce, and they couldn't just slip him a wadge of mash, they had to mix it with some green stuff so it ended up being the colour of mint chocolate chip ice cream.  For God's sake, just give us food we understand!

Not only could we not tell what the meals were, neither could the staff.  Nothing looked like you thought it would, and it took about 10 minutes of swapsies before we got the right dinners.

Also, the gap between the courses was really long, and I think at least some of this was probably because of all the time it took to assemble the stuff out the back.  I've put IKEA bookcases together in less time than it took to fetch our desserts.

It was £13.95 for two courses tonight, plus drinks, so £15 each near enough whereas on Wednesday I was almost embarrassed to walk away after only paying £8.40 for what I had.  Not only embarrassed, I could only just get out of there under my own steam.  I nearly had to put my stomach in a wheelbarrow to get it out to the car, it was so full.

Maybe there are some people out there who want to pay extra to have their dinners made to look like stuff you might find in a 3 year old's bedroom, but I'm not one of them.  Just give me a proper dinner, that looks like a dinner please, and not one that looks like a Lego house.

Thank you.  Rant over.  Now I'm off to make some toast.

Getting fired and laughing at stuff - 20 years on

The last time I worked in a big office was in the early 90s.  Gazza was bawling his eyes out and the internet hadn't been thought of.  It was all faxes and post then.  I think mobile phones were just getting off the ground, but only just off the ground because they were as heavy as a log.

Even though that was half my life ago, I still remember that time like it was yesterday.  I can't remember the work very well, but I remember the laughs.  I remember going out to the pub for lunch all the time, and I remember being off my bonce on whisky at the Christmas party because there was no other booze left, and I'm told while I was out of it I won a competition for moving an elastic band from my forehead to my neck without touching it, just by wiggling my face, but that part I don't remember.

I remember getting absolutely bollocked for bouncing hundreds of direct debits that I wasn't supposed to, and I remember having trouble getting to work because of the snow, and I remember being late in and having to take it out of our lunch breaks.  And I remember arguments about parking charges and I remember being in a very minor car crash with Alison Rhodes and I remember her falling on her arse in her wellies on the ice, and it was funny even though her bum really hurt.  And I remember Andrew Spink being annoyed that Leeds had sold Vinnie Jones, and I remember the two of them dressed up for Yorkshire Day (Alison and Andrew, not Andrew and Vinnie Jones).

And I remember Mandy Mason dressed as Andy Pandy and I remember her going on maternity leave to have her daughter who is now all grown up.  And I remember Anne Smith and her stories of horrible car crashes and the worst broken arm anyone had ever seen.

And I remember that the manager's office doorframe was coming away from the wall, because of all the times it got slammed behind one of us, when we'd got absolutely hammered for making a mistake, and I remember the long walks across the office we had to do when our badge card numbers got read out.  And I remember how they used to draw the blinds before they used to shout at you.  And I remember Liz Thompson always wore trainers and she was always chasing and tackling things in them, or so she said.

And I remember that they brought Total Quality Management or TQM in, and part of it was that there was supposed to be a no-blame culture, but I still remember getting the blame for a lot of stuff.

And I remember Angela Richardson used to hang around for hours out the back looking through boxes and I remember that we used to make each other giggle, just by saying the word 'smashed'.

But the thing I remember the most is the laughing.

Anyway, since then I haven't worked in a big office, with lots of people.  It's all been small offices with only a few.  Until the last 4 months.

I'm 20 years older now but it's been like going round again.  Working with a new bunch of young people, all in their twenties or younger.  They've all got smart phones now, and they're all on Twitter, and they like to Facetime each other, and music's all gone digital and now there's more different colours of drink to get hammered on.  And nobody uses faxes anymore.

But some things have stayed the same.  Sometimes you still get called into meetings to get bollocked, and sometimes you even get called into meetings to get fired.

But the thing I'll remember the most has been the laughter.  And if I can still remember the people I was laughing with in the early 90s now, I'm sure in twenty years time I'll remember the class of 2012 just as well.

I may forget what a PFF2 is, and I might forget that it goes 'cover letter, then financial' (although I doubt it) but I'm sure I won't forget the people.  I didn't forget the ones I went to Germany with in 1983, I didn't forget the ones I worked with in 1990, and I won't forget Gibbo and Rob and Vicky and Footy and Rookesy and Deano and Joss and Lucy and Sophie and Cozza and Kirstywho'snotaGeordie and Steve and Phil and Edd and Rebecca and all the rest.

Because whatever differences we may have had, whether we were older or younger, or came from different places, or had different backgrounds, or had different life experiences, we all had one thing in common.

We all knew how to laugh at stuff.

Working in a factory - like Germany in 1987, except for the naked showers

I started work in a factory yesterday.  Making frozen desserts.  Yesterday I peeled about a thousand bananas and helped in other ways to make a job lot of banoffee pies.  I did most of the tasks in the production line, although I never got to feed bananas into the banana slicer, but that at least means I've got some goals left for the next time I'm in.

I have worked in a factory before, in Germany in 1987, although that one was packing powdered paint into sacks, and this was making frozen desserts.  Despite the different products, there were similarities.

The shifts are virtually the same.  6 till 2.  2 till 10, and 10 till 6.  Yesterday I was on a 6 till 2, so arriving at the work in the dark, and leaving in the heat of mid-afternoon.  Very like Germany.

I had to wear a white uniform, and standard issues boots.  Same as Germany.  I had to clock in, and out.  Same as Germany.  A large proportion of the factory staff are from countries other than the host nation, same as Germany.

The main differences were that I was working in a production line with others yesterday, so if I didn't keep up, it would affect the whole line, whereas in Germany it was just me and a machine, so as long as I'd emptied the machine by the end of the shift I could go at my own pace.

The other big difference was the absence of naked communal showers at the end of the shift.  In Germany these were necessary because you would be so completely covered in paint dust by the end of the shift that you had to go into a big shower and wash it all off.  And not just with a regular sponge, you had to scour it off.  You got so much paint inside your clothing as well that it was necessary to get someone else to scrub your back clean.  I am not joking.  So, a big communal shower, no clothes on, scrubbing each others' backs with the equivalent of a pan scourer.  And from experience I have to tell you, the thing you do not want in this situation, the thing you absolutely must not get, is an involuntary erection.  Anyway, enough about that.

So, thankfully, the cake factory, no communal showers.  Your feet get cold, especially if you're working near the freezers, and you do get some cake on you, but it mostly washes off quite easily, without the aid of stripping down to your birthday suit.

There are lots of rules, but these all make sense, as they are all to do with not getting food poisoning into the pies, and not letting foreign objects fall into the mix.  I have to say, from a lifetime's experience of eating pies, I consider both these things to be very good ideas.

Everybody has to wear a hairnet, but there is a very sensible colour coding system in operation.  Most people wear white ones, but supervisors wear red ones, first aiders wear green, and the people who come along to clean up and empty the bins wear yellow, so you know who's who, without having to know exactly who everyone is.

I didn't mind that the tasks were repetitive, and this was helped by the fact that you are rotated onto a different task about every half an hour.  I got a half hour break in the middle so I only had to get through 4 hours in one stretch.  There isn't a lot of time to talk, especially on some of the tasks, like the spreading cream around with the back of a spoon task, but the people I did speak to seemed friendly and helpful.  There's a quiet efficiency about the place, which I hope to emulate in due course.  I think I've got the quiet part right, I just need to work on the efficiency.

The main problem I had were that my feet were like blocks of ice.  The temperature at floor level is around 5 degrees C, because of the cold air coming out from the freezers.  This is especially noticeable when you're working near the end of the line, doing the finishing touches.  By then I felt like the liquid metal guy out of Terminator 2 after he'd fallen into a lorry load of liquid nitrogen.  When I started walking again afterwards, my  legs didn't exactly snap off, but I did have trouble getting them going again.  Thermal socks needed, I think.

Anyhoo, there it is.  I've done a day, and it was fine, and I'm going back to do some more on Friday.  I'd like to have warmer feet next time, and I'd like to be better at using the back of a spoon, but apart from that I have no complaints.  Especially not about the lack of showers....

How am I going to get another job, when I've already got a bar of chocolate?

 I'm getting fired on Saturday, so I'm going to be starting the New Year without a job.   That would worry me except for the fact that I've got plenty of stuff in the fridge.

I've managed to reach the age of 43 and I still don't have a clue about what to do for a living.  But part of the problem is I lack the motivation to go after things.  All the things I want are either free or cheap, so I don't invest much time and effort into getting them. 

I am aware that there are people who have proper careers, who have put years of effort into attaining qualifications etc, to enable them to do a skilled job.  I'm afraid I lack the motivation to do this.  Apparently there's a thing called Deferrment of Gratification.  I don't have it.   

Mostly my goals in life are pretty modest, like getting some sort of pie or a bar of chocolate.  There were times when I was a child when I didn't have money for these things, but since I've been an adult I have pretty much had constant access.  I haven't really wanted stuff like motorboats and round the world cruises, so I haven't needed to plan years ahead and build up funds for this.

When I was growing up, we didn't have a car, and we lived in a council house.  I barely owned anything, and the things I did own were very low tech.  Things like clothes, a football, a few toy soldiers and a bike. 

These days I live in a nice house with nice things, I've got a car, two or three bikes, plenty of books and dvds and nice plates and cups and a coffee maker and I don't aspire to have any more than this.  I already think my carbon footprint is huge.  Just taking out the recycling lets me know how much I'm consuming every week. 

The trouble is, I only have a temporary job at the moment and I will be out of work on Saturday, and I've made no strides towards getting another job.  And this is mostly because my modest needs are being satisfied.  I just bought a Yorkie for later so that's today  sorted, and I've got enough left in my wallet to buy two tubs of ice cream tomorrow, so that'll take me through to the middle of the week.

I haven't really planned any further ahead than that.  And that's what's worrying me....

Bert Trautmann, Harriet's Biscuits and other reasons to be cheerful this Christmas

I usually hate Christmas.  Or rather I hate having to do anything at Christmas.

I can't be bothered to shop, or to put the tree up, I rarely send Christmas cards and I resent spending money.  All in all, this doesn't make me Mr Festive Cheer 2011 or whichever year I'm moaning about.

I moan endlessly about the commercialisation of Christmas, and about greed and wanting stuff and all that.  Blah blah blah I go on.

Well, this year I'm almost enjoying it.  And as crazy as it sounds, a lot of it has been to do with working in a shop.  I haven't exactly been doing a survey, but the feeling I get from most people isn't that they've been half Nelsoned into the shops to buy stuff for their loved ones.  They actually seem like they want to do it, as if they like giving gifts to people they love.  Some of them seem genuinely excited, as if they can't wait to hand them over.  And old ladies who can't walk very well have got their coats on, got on buses and brought themselves into town to buy a gift voucher for their grandson, or whoever.  And people have been buying books about Bert Trautmann for their dads who remember the 1956 Cup Final when he played on with a broken neck.  And other people have been giggling at the till while they're buying books of jokes for their 52 year old dad, so he can sit in the chair full of Turkey and smashed on sherry with a paper hat on, and tell a few jokes before he passes out in front of the Queen.  And two girls could barely speak when they asked me for a book called 'How to Poo at Work', which is full of diagrams of cubicles and lots of real advice on etiquette and all sorts.  That will really make someone's Christmas Day (I hope).

And I've been food shopping twice.  And today I was in there hours, and thank goodness I wasn't being time and motion studied because I did more laps of the fruit and veg section than they do laps of the track in the Grand Prix, and I didn't even know what some of the stuff was I was supposed to be buying.  I'd heard of cloves of Garlic, but today I had to buy garlic-less cloves and I wasn't sure if they're fresh or powdered or they come in tubes or what.  They didn't have any anyway.  Or any lemons or cooking apples or muffins or red potatoes (so that's my Christmas ruined). 

And I got my foot run over, and I had to ask a shelf stacker to look after my trolley while I went to go pee, because I'd been in there so long my bladder had packed up, but I didn't mind at all.  I liked being in amongst people.  People buying things to make a nice dinner for their mother who's getting over a stroke, or for their stepson who is home from uni (oh hang on, that was just me).

But whatever they were in there for, they were people buying things to help them to enjoy spending time with their loved ones, and that can't be a bad thing can it?

There's a Half Man Half Biscuit song, called It's Cliched to be Cynical at Christmas, and I just listened to it, and I think I am a cliche, because I moan a lot about Christmas.  Well, moaning doesn't make the Christmas dinner, and it doesn't wrap presents, and it doesn't put any more love in the world. 

So, I have put up a tree, and I have decorated it really badly, so it only looks any good from one particular angle if you don't look closely.  And I sent 6 Christmas cards, including one to the Chemist to thank them for all the drugs, and I've bought one of just about every type of dead animal there is that you can eat.

And I'm looking forward to Christmas.  And I don't need any presents, because I've already had a really special one.  I got a parcel with biscuits in that were made by my small friend Harriet, and some of them had melted boiled sweets in the middle to look like stained glass, and some were in the shape of boots and hearts and I ate them with my cup of tea one morning, before I went off to work, to sell books to people.  And it made me feel happy.  And selling books and knowing Harriet are just two of the reasons why I want to be better at Christmas this year.

Then we came to the end, but not quite.

I'm getting fired from my job at Waterstone's in 3 weeks.  It's not the first time this has happened.

Before I got fired by Waterstone's the first time, I used to review books for their website.

And I once won £100 in book vouchers for writing a review for head office about reading Murakami in Mevagissey, which is harder to say than it is to type.

They may have deleted me, and turned the branch where I worked into a Poundland, but my reviews are still there, which is somehow comforting.

My reviews 

It's strange reading things I wrote a few years ago, because not only do I not remember writing some of the reviews, I don't remember reading some of the books. 

Of course I still remember clearly Timequake, Brilliant Orange, Football against the Enemy, the Life of Pi, The Cruellest Miles, Seabiscuit, Stasiland and the Wall.  They're not just books, they're unforgettable, life-changing events.

One of the last books I read before I got fired, was called Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris.  It's a book about getting fired, and not long after I read it I got fired.  Luckily, I am able to separate fiction from fact, so I resisted the urge to go back to my old workplace dressed as a clown and blow away my colleagues.  It wouldn't have worked in my case anyway, as I'd have only ended up making a mess of some strangers in Poundland, since the last day for me, was the last day for the shop too.

Sometimes when I look back, particularly at the good ones, I think, in the words of Kurt Vonnegut 'How the hell did I do that?'

I don't read much these days, mostly because my eyes are now full of super glue, but I used to do it a lot, especially in the days when there were only 3 channels on the TV.

Life was simpler then.  I used to alternate between watching TV, playing football, playing with toys and going to the Library.  I can't remember owning any books in those days, but I was in the Library every week.  I went back in recently.  It's had a refurb and an extension and it's even got a coffee shop now.  They let me use the internet there when my mum was ill.  I tried to talk to the woman on the counter about the olden days, when all of this were fields blah, blah, blah, but she didn't seem as interested in my monologue as I was.....

TQM my ass

I used to work in a bank (between 1988 and 1998).  I wasn't very good at it though, because I didn't like selling stuff to people, and that was a big part of the job then.  One of the best ways to avoid selling stuff was to do admin and that's why between 1990 and 1991 I worked in Bradford in a place called the Customer Service Centre.  

It should really have been called the Customer Misnomer Centre, because we tried really hard not to let any customers in.  It was basically an admin centre that allowed us to do loads of mundane work centrally, like setting up standing orders and bouncing cheques and it meant they would need less staff in branches.

Although we used to speak to customers on the phone, they weren't supposed to get in.  We did once get a stray one in the reception area, and no-one knew what to do with him.  It was ages before someone asked him what he wanted and then politely and firmly ushered him out of the door.

We had TQM in those days, short for Total Quality Management.  One of its core principles was that no-one was ever to blame.  If something went wrong, it was a fault in the process rather than in the person who made the mistake.

Well, so much for that theory!  The reality was somewhat different.  We worked in a big open plan office, there were about 40 of us in total.  And we all had individual badge card numbers.  If there was a cock-up it could easily be traced back to your badge card.  The manager and his assistant didn't come and find you if you made a mistake, they just opened the office door and yelled out your badge card number.  This was followed by the walk of shame across the office, and then as you disappeared into their office the door would be slammed behind you and the blinds drawn.  The door got slammed so much in those days that the door frame was coming out of the wall.  If it wasn't your turn, you could see it get looser every time it got slammed.

One of the jobs I used to do at the CSC was to manually redirect direct debits intended for accounts that had been closed when small branches had been shut down.  This wasn't in any way the customer's fault as they hadn't had any say in having their account number changed by us.  In time, the bank put a technological fix in place for this and the original account numbers were retained after branch closures, but this was the early 90s.  We were still using Casio calculators then with green numbers on.

The first of the month was always the heaviest workload for direct debits as that was when Prudential amongst others took their payments out.  Anyway, one first of the month I decided that the originators of the direct debits would get the message more clearly about having to use the new account numbers if we just bounced all of that month's direct debits on the closed branches.  There were about 120 in total. 

I hadn't really foreseen the full consequences of my actions, but I had set off a chain reaction.  One of the direct debits I bounced was the mobile phone payment of one of TSB's very important commercial customer's and pretty soon his business mobile had been cut off.  

With the benefit of hindsight, I probably shouldn't have said when asked about this 'Yeah well, we bounced all of the closed branches direct debits that day'.  I think the manager got a bit high pitched when he said 'What do you mean all of them?'.  

Every time we bounced a direct debit we had to write it on a sheet and he asked me to go find the sheets.  You could fit about 20 to a sheet and I'd filled pages of them.  I remember he kept turning the pages over and over in disbelief.

It was okay though, because I'd told my supervisor what I was doing, and she was pretty gung ho and thought it was all a really good idea, like most ideas that you have in the heat of the moment, so after they'd finished with me, she got a pasting as well, but even more so, because she wasn't a young thing like me, and also a supervisor and so she should have known better!

It wasn't the best day I had working in a bank, but it wasn't the worst either.  No, that was the day I lost £1000 and they had to call the inspectors in.  They found it eventually.  After 3 days of interrogating me.  But that's another story....Actually, that one got blamed on my supervisor aswell in the end.  I think there's a pattern emerging here, maybe it wasn't my fault after all.