At work there is a free coffee machine for staff, access to toaster (free bread, butter and jam) and microwave incinerator and enough free food that, had I time to eat it, would save me buying any ever again. Especially since I’m there six days a week, lately seven.
Machine coffee is, of course, horrible. Most staff use the hot water function and the free tea bags. It produces something it calls espresso but isn’t. The best option I’ve found is the hot chocolate. But hell, it’s free. So is the chilled-water machine.
Some places have a kettle and a jar of coffee and you’d think that’s okay. At least they aren’t smoking, right? Smokers cost companies millions of imaginary money by taking five minute smoking breaks while real people take half-hour coffee breaks. That’s what I used to hear every damn day, over seven years ago, when I last worked for someone else. I don’t hear it in the new job. Not at all. Too many smokers, and not many breaks. Besides, it’s a shop. The staff can’t decamp en masse to the coffee room like scientists do. You take a break when there’s nothing to do and what you do in that break, nobody cares.
Well, it seems those places with kettles are now thinking ‘Hey, these buggers use our electricity to make cups of tea. They aren’t working while they do it and they’re costing us money!’
The precise made-up figure is 32 million fine British pounds.
Note the use of ‘selfish’. Remember that, antismoking coffee break people? It’s your favourite word to describe smokers, isn’t it? Well, it’s your turn now.
Coming soon – taking breaks from work hurts the economy, causes business failures, and by some tortured version of logic will no doubt cost the NHS money and be responsible for the recession. No breaks, Keep working, drone, work until you die. Oh, but if you live your life according to the British Standard Human blueprint you will never die. You will work without break forever but you’ll be fit and healthy and you will be happy because it will be illegal not to be.
Then when you are old you will be sent on the Pathway to Liverpool, a place of wonder and light where puppies and little lambs gambol and play.
Shit, I’m giving away a big chunk of Panoptica there.
Oh, what the hell. It’s all coming true anyway.
I must say leggy I must admire your style taking a job well below your intelligence level, I had to do the same when I moved over to Vienna, Austria to live with a girl I met. I was forced into pan bashing/kitchen assistant jobs because I couldn’t get a proper job as I didn’t speak any German.
They used to really look down on the pan bashers/kitchen assistants over there as they were usually Turks/Moroccans or very dim Austrians, they saw me as a bit of a novelty being a Brit and all the youngsters used to always want to talk to me to practice their English but by-and-large it was a pretty horrible experience, I admire your reasons for doing the job mate but don’t you find that kind of attitude over here now, especially from the younger generation?
In the shop, I’m a ghost. The customers won’t see me. I like that because those that do see me recoil in horror. I have already met shop workers who sneer. This amuses me because I have done things they’ll never do.
I have done all I wanted. I can call myself ‘doctor’, I have a long list of publications. I have invented things to cure horrible diseases. I have two novels published and am a called-upon author for a top-rated horror magazine. I have run my own independent lab for seven years. I’ve done it all. There are no more heights to climb.
Now I just want to pay the bills and go home from work and do what I like.
I clean things. That is 75% of an independent microbiologist’s job anyway. I could never have contract cleaners in my lab unless they were aware of what horrible nasties might have been spilled and if they were that well trained they’d be in better jobs. So I am now bringing Local Shop out of the filth of retail cleanliness and into Category 3 Path Lab cleanliness. It’s not well paid but it is fun. Recently I explained that while milk is safe, spilled milk is contaminated with bugs from what it is spilled onto so the spillage is dangerous. I get a kick when suntans fade.
I don’t care about career or advancement any more. Sure I could go for a job with high pay but I’d just pay more tax to the wasters. I’d rather do a simple job that covers the bills and have all the rest of the time to myself.
And I have found that I am a scary cleaner.
Thanks for the reply bud, you are a legend. You have a very astute outlook on life in general which is much to be admired.
Wonder how they’re going to tote up the hurricane and supposed super storm about to hit the US Eastern Seaboard?
It’s the price of doing business on Planet Earth. Same as coffee breaks are the price of keeping workers productive.
In fact all the coffee breaks taken over a year in Scotland don’t even begin to register when compared to a thumping good freeze. And the whisper is this winter’s going to be a cracker; just ask the folks in Moscow.
It’s certainly turned cold very suddenly this year. This winter looks like it’s in a hurry to get started.