I want to tell you a little story about my first day at work. I doubt it will provide you with any astonishing insights into the human psyche (in fact it may even confuse things further still), but it will at the very least answer a question you may have been asking yourselves, namely does being single turn you into the kind of severely distracted moron who takes a bag of trash outside on the way to the supermarket, and is startled to find himself in the supermarket forty minutes later still holding a pongy black bag of old vegetable peel and beer tins? The answer, you will perhaps be relieved to discover, is that does not. Simply put, I have always been a moron, as we will soon see. However, before I tell you the story I should probably explain why I wish to tell it now.
I am going on a little trip at the end of the week. Actually it’s quite a big trip – a little trip is the sort of day out we used to take in my Dad’s Singer Gazelle, when we would spend four hours trapped in a traffic jam just outside Malton, an hour and a half shivering on the beach in Bridlington (when someone we know invariably wet his pants or got his big front teeth stuck in a bar of toffee) and were halfway back to Leeds before my mother asked where my eldest sister was, and what that nice but heavily tattooed fairground worker who had taken a shine to her was called again.
In a few days time I am going to Thailand. I will be there for a couple of weeks, during which time I hope to relax and make some notes for a couple of travel articles I want to write. While I’m there I will also research a food-related article and perhaps a couple of business profiles, one of which will almost certainly involve me hanging out in a bar for an extended period. Such is life. Such is work!
It is unlikely that these articles will be realised as neatly as I have them envisaged at this precise moment. There has never been a time in my life when I was ever in control of my modest ability to write fairly entertaining prose; for me writing has always been a much-loved but senseless and untrainable thing, a gorgeous, lolloping puppy as likely to drag me into the path of a speeding car as roll over to be tickled. However I will still give it a go, because, frankly, as Stephen King says, it passes the time.
The reason I am here now – fucking hell, don’t I go on? – is to tell you my story about work. I was out running the other day, thinking about my upcoming trip to Thailand, when I happened to pass by the factory building of a local engineering company. Above a large double doorway is a stained glass arch bearing the legend TB CRAWSHAW - PLATE GIRDLE WELDERS AND POT FITTERS 1867.
It doesn’t really say that. It says something like that, something equally meaningless unless you happen to work in engineering and know exactly what those mystifying terms relate to. You will hopefully know what I mean when I say it is one of those imposing Victorian industrial structures that make you think of the Workhouse in Oliver Twist. As I was running past the double doors were open. Inside it was vast and gloomy and reeked heavily of hot machine oil and danger. I could hear the noise of machinery from deep inside, a cacophony of hellish mashing, clanging and pounding sounds. Screaming through this demonic symphony were men’s voices yelling urgent commands.
“Ernie! Hurry up and get that ‘kin’ plate girdle welded!”
“Shut tha’ gob! I can’t weld t’plate girdle till you’ve fitted that effin’ pot!”
What a simply horrible place to work, I thought. Imagine how utterly terrifying it must be to arrive at those institutional doors as a skinny sixteen year old with an unsteady Adams apple and a crop of blazing spots on your chin. It would be like standing at a literal crossroads, looking longingly back at the fresh fields of your childhood, and ahead to the dark, dreadful drudgery of your future with TB Crawshaw, Plate Girdle Welders and Pot Fitters. If you survive to the end of your first day without being dragged into the gnashing teeth of an automated girdle plating machine, you can look forward to being stripped naked and rubbed in a barrel of iron filings by the older apprentices. Welcome to the firm. Welcome, in fact, to the rest of your life.
I knew all of this before I had even left school, and so I wisely got myself a job as a sales assistant at Woolworth’s. There would be no noisy, smelly factory for me. No rough men barking incomprehensible instructions and swearing at me when I got things wrong. I was heading for a civilised environment, one where everything was ordered and formal and there was no running in the corridors and shit, just like school.
Woolworth’s at that time was still a somewhat stuffy and archaic institution, something like the Grace Bothers store in the old comedy show Are You Being Served. They still had Floor Walkers and charmless old dragons whose job it was to check that you were wearing your tie properly or that you weren’t taking too long at the toilet. Within two years the whole ethos would change and become much less formal; it brought sweeping changes of great significance to the traditions of stores like Woolworth’s, like the end of Communism.
However when I was there you didn’t address the store manager by his first name. You afforded him the respect you afforded your old headmaster. You called him Mr So and So, and there were all these fussy little rules and stuff regarding what you did when you had to go to his office or whenever he came onto the shop floor. It was like meeting royalty. Unfortunately this stuck in my head, that meeting him would be like meeting the queen or something, and at the very end of my first tiring, traumatic day at work, I did a very strange and regrettable thing. When the store manager came onto the shop floor to meet me, offering his hand and welcoming me to a career at FW Woolworth, I was so confused, so overwhelmed by the day, that instead of a manly shake and an acknowledging nod, I touched his hand ever so lightly and, well, sort of curtsied. I looked just like a clumsy chamber maid meeting the queen.
Nobody laughed. It would have been better if they had. Instead everyone stared right through us with a kind of excruciating deliberateness. The store manager briefly gaped at me, then quickly composed himself and moved on without another word.
To this day I have no satisfying explanation as to why I behaved that way. The only possible clue is in that bag of garbage that I took to the supermarket and – this will really nail it for you – carried all the way back into the kitchen again. Which is to say, skins change, but the people inside them rarely do.
