Читать книгу The Men Commandments - Christian O’Connell - Страница 16

Saturday jobs are the first taste we get of the dullness of paid work. And wearing an ill-fitting polyester uniform. But you learn valuable lessons. Firstly, that people who work in management are often from the shallow end of the gene pool. A gene pool someone may have pissed in. Secondly, you learn the importance of skiving and that if you’re given a good job to do, you make it last as long as is humanly possible.

I was lucky in that after a few jobs waiting tables and washing up, I was headhunted from the groceries aisle of Sainsbury’s by Marks and Spencer. That’s not strictly true, although I did work on the groceries aisle at Sainsbury’s. There was a stunning girl who worked on the till who I was besotted with. My affections were sadly never returned. I guess it’s hard to be won over by a streak of piss in a three-quarter-length brown overall and matching Stay Press brown pants. That were three inches too short. In movies, a mental person is usually the one wearing pants that are too short for him.

One of my best mates, Kevin, and I both managed to get jobs at Marks and Spencer. This was the place to work as they paid well and had a great canteen. That and the fact they had a lingerie section you could gawp at.

What happened next was the stuff of novels and movies. Two friends enter the same institution but are given vastly different jobs and their lives and fortunes change for ever. I was put straight on the tills. The best gig. Ten items or less. I became something of a hotshot, famed for my rapid scanning technique. The ‘Maverick’ of Winchester Marks and Spencer. My friend Kevin, my ‘Goose’, however, was put on trolley collection. This is a role usually reserved for people who enjoy licking windows. He was not happy about it. I was.

Sadly my time there came to an end as my Saturday hangovers got worse. Most mornings I would excuse myself to the store sick bay to sleep off the effects of a night on the cheap cider. Or the ‘24-hour flu bug’, as I told them. Things really came to a head one Saturday morning when I didn’t turn up and went to a big party for the weekend instead. The personnel department feared the worst – that I’d suffered an accident – and called my home. (I should point out here that I used to ride my motorbike into work. When I say ‘motorbike’ I mean one of those 50cc hairdryers on wheels.) My younger sister happily told them where I really was.

Upon returning to work the following Saturday, I was quizzed by the personnel lady and I’m afraid to say a very bad lie came out. I told her I had been at a beloved aunt’s funeral. Dabbing my eyes in a performance De Niro would have been proud of, I was thrown off when she then said, ‘That’s odd because when we called you your sister told us you were headed to a party.’

I reflected momentarily on this before replying. To this day I’m ashamed of this even more shocking lie: ‘My sister, yes, she has something wrong with her… Her brain… Retarded… Very sad.’ The poor woman in personnel looked at me with a mixture of utter disgust and pity. Pity, I guess, about what would become of a young man who could lie in such a fashion. A DJ, obviously.