First day of lone working (no boss backup) and it went without too many hitches. I only buggered up a few bits of paperwork. The job is easy enough, and my long career of handling shit from infected animals and people means I’m pretty much undisgustable by anything Local Shop customers can do. Even the banjo-playing ones, although the children are as vile and monstrous as I expected them to be and I’m not allowed to whack them accidentally with a filthy mop. It’s all the forms and regulations I have to learn, but that is just a matter of time. Should have that sorted in a week.
I have cleaned things the cleaners don’t see. I wonder if they’ll ever notice I cleaned them? Tops of light switches and power points, the tops of door signs, that sort of thing. My advantage is that I can name what could be growing in that damp dust but I doubt the names mean much to anyone. Pseudomonas? Listeria? Klebsiella? They’ll kill you faster than smoking ever could. Listeria monocytogenes is really nasty and very easy to grow on any food production line but have you heard of it? Oh, the food lines test for it. I used to be, some years ago, one of those doing the tests but hey, cutbacks, redundancies, your problem. I know the risks so I’m all right Jack.
I’m not scared of smoking because I see the real threats that are out there and the very real quick deaths awaiting us all. Not some idiot government-sponsored ‘maybe you will die of this one day’ rubbish but the ‘you will definitely die of this in a week’ stuff no government cares about.
Actually there are fewer forms in this job than those required by my little lab and far, far fewer than those I used to deal with in a big lab with accreditation (nightmare!). Chemicals they mark as ‘hazardous’ are ones I’d wash my hands in. However, there is food on sale so even the slightest, most harmless contamination can cause trouble. If people can be scared by third hand smoke, imagine what they’d do if they found out you’d used an actual disinfectant within five hundred yards of the carrots!
No tobacco in Local Shop because Scotland requires a licence for tobacco sales as well as all the tax malarkey. They don’t sell it because it’s too much bother and soon to get worse but they don’t despise us.
I like their smoker policy. Rather than the usual cop-out of ‘it’s company policy to prohibit smoking’ they are clear that they aren’t allowed to allow smoking by law. Not company policy. Enforced by government. Also, they have rules about those who want to smoke on the night cleaning shifts – if you want to go outside at night, you have to go at least in pairs. Not alone. Local Shop is looking out for smoking staff safety.
Met the Boss’s Boss today, who has read my CV and has ambitions for me that I don’t have for myself. Damn those qualifications. I just want to do something menial and cover the bills. I did give Boss a copy of ‘Fears of the Old and the New’ because she said she liked scary stories. Also ‘Ghosthunting for the Sensible Investigator’, which is incidentally showing a slight increase in sales as Halloween approaches.
I work 12 to 6 pm at the moment, I was today offered 9 to 6 but no, I have to work out what the hell I’m doing before I make it a longer day. Also I have to keep the eBay stuff going until the first pay day and that means posting stuff in the mornings.
I have stuff ready to post for eBay and I have to contact the National Insurance mob to tell them to stop taking ‘voluntary’ contributions every month now that I’ll be paying via salary.
Then there is Samuel’s Girl, 90,000 words that have to be sorted very, very fast. The editor doesn’t seem to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of grimoires and demons, which seems odd. It’s useful though in case there is someone else out there without such knowledge. I have to explain a few bits in more detail.
Chaos reigns for a few days yet. Soon it will settle and I’ll be back to my normal-ish self.
Oh. Apparently poking your face through from behind when someone takes something off a shelf is regarded as being Very Naughty. Well, the rules of retail are a work in progress for me.
Like your work ethic, Leggy. Mrs D had to do lots of shitty things to make ends meet when her first hubby fucked off and left her dumped well and truly in it with a 2 year old in tow.
As she says “There’s nothing wrong with cleaning. It’s honest money. You just do whatever is necessary to pay the bills and put food on the table.”
Absobloodylutely, D. The current Mrs n is a qualified accountant in her home country, managing accounts departments for medium size firms, but her professional skills are superfluous here, so she takes care of cleaning an upmarket villa during the summer months to earn some money. Most of which she sends home to Mum.
Mum doesn’t actually need it really, but it’s the done thing in that particular society, so that’s what she does. I imagine that when Mum finally pegs it, she’ll get it all back with interest.
Funny old world.
I just want to do something menial and cover the bills.
Trouble is others more qualified [less qualified] get those jobs.
I’m following your progress with interest because the Artful Dodger – along with many other unemployed recent arts graduates – hasn’t signed on, preferring to take casual work of any sort until a suitable permanent job turns up (for ‘suitable’, read something that earns enough to pay the bills and leaves him the weekend free for writing and historical re-enacting).
I don’t think it’s an absence of work ethic (he’s picking up about what he would get in jobseeker’s allowance); it’s more that he’s bypassed the whole business of ‘milk-round’ = soulless office job for a few years followed by either redundancy or resignation and a need to keep body and soul together while writing fantasy stories. He’s also interestingly reluctant to allow the state more information about him than absolutely necessary.
His friends seem to be doing much the same thing; eschewing the traditional ‘graduate careers’ for less prestigious jobs that let them have more intellectual freedom. I don’t know whether to be proud that we have raised a child for whom material wealth is a very low priority or worried at his lack of ambition.
Either way, it strikes me that all these youngsters have tapped into some kind of cynical Zeitgeist. All we can do is encourage them and hope that the results are as good a read as ‘Jessica’s Trap’.
Oops! careless editing; 2nd para should read ‘I don’t think it’s about the work ethic’
Encouraging comment, Macheath. It’s good to know that there are at least some young people out there who have developed a healthy cynicism towards “the authorities.” I thought it was only us “oljuns” who no longer believed a word that the powers-that-be or self-proclaimed experts on anything said.
Maybe this is the way the next generation will do their rebelling – not by marching in the streets or by sit-ins or by “dropping out” and going to live in ashrams in the hills, but just by getting by as they best can (which is often pretty well) whilst refusing to join “the system” as a fully-paid-up and suitably-monitored member. It’s quite a good ploy, really, and rather clever. They’re not doing anything “wrong” enough to merit the authorities reacting with anything much more meaningful than an irritated frown, but they’re not doing enough “right” for those same authorities to really get their hooks into them.
Long may it last. Perhaps there’s more hope for the next generation than we older folk give them credit for …
The Artful Dodger has asked me to say that the tipping point for him and his friends was the 12-week period after signing on where graduates are not permitted to apply for anything requiring lower qualifications.
Rather than waste 12 weeks waiting in vain for jobs requiring an arts degree, they preferred to look for real work at once.
So if I had signed on, it would have been illegal for me to take this job?
Well Local Shop is happy. They had been working to retail standards of cleanliness. I work to pathogen lab standards. Today I cleaned the cleaning implements. No point cleaning with contaminated brushes. Damn, people are filthy things.
Some have said (those who care about status) ‘But you’re a microbiologist. Why are you working as a cleaner?’
Who else would you trust with that job? Someone who sees ‘dust’, or someone who knows what can grow in it?
Not sure what the puritans would make of this:
http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/features/reader-offer/reader-offer-3-2012100944287
It is endorsed by a ‘Doctor’ should should be fine
Heh! Where would we be without the likes of “The Daily Mash”?
You should forward that link to the Dreadful Arnott.
I have an MA but many years ago I worked for a while in a factory assembling printed circuit boards and it was the most relaxing job ever, even paid quite well. After a couple of weeks I had it all organised and did it automatically leaving me to daydream with no stress – wonderful. I figured out a way to do it in half the time but they wouldn’t pay me any more.
Leggy, is there any chance you might do a little something in time for halloween here in the Pendle area? That time of the year is especially painful around here as the locals seem to delight in celebrating the judicial murder of a few mosly harmless (if decidedly malicious) old biddies a few hundred years back.
The pity of it is that the morons out “celebrating” the time of year when the barriers between the living and the dead are thinnest are the sort of fools without enough imagination to worry about what might just be out there listening and lurking. The absolute low was when a TV company paid a local farmer (a Mr Nutter, who is nobody’s fool) to invade a local rustic barn and cottage and use it for the set of an investigation of the local ghosts. Listening to their pet psychic fluffing his lines and getting names wrong was just painful in the end.
Already done. Jessica’s Trap references Chattox and Demdike, and the Crowe book ridicules the gadget-laden ghost hunters of today. Send me an address and I’ll send you copies.
One of the accused was Alice Nutter. I wonder if that farmer is a descendant? She was the one who started the whole shebang, so it’s only fitting that another of her family should profit from idiot gullibility.
“… if you want to go outside at night, you have to go at least in pairs. Not alone. Local Shop is looking out for smoking staff safety.”
Hahahahahah…. Hardly. I think you’ll find they’re looking after their stock.
Its commonly assumed in the retail world that the only people who want to work nights are either gipsies or thieves. That, and the long tradition of ‘popping out for a fag’ also involving filling your car boot with groceries or whatever. You’ll learn
Oh JP, what a cynic you are! Surely it would be easier for two people to sneak stuff out than just one working alone? One to cart stuff out whilst the other loads it into the car boot? Or one stashing the stuff away out the back, whilst the other stands at the door keeping a look-out?
Stock control is positively demonic these days. Even as a part time janitor, I can’t have cash or even bank cards on me and anyone can be searched at any time. Outside and inside, CCTV keeps an eye on everything and that’s just in small Local Shop. The big supermarkets record every move everyone makes!
Besides, so much stock is available dirt cheap to staff because it’s close to its use-by time that there’s no need to steal anything. I am reliably informed that Christmas brings bounties galore in the staff sell-off area. Enough wine to keep me clear of reality for a long time.