Work: The Good, The Bad And the Ugly

I love my job…No, don’t insert “sarcasm” inverted commas there, I really do. I also wish to keep it and avoid the blog-themed fiasco of last time I let “work” and “blog” meet (think rubidium in a thunderstorm and you’ll be about right), so I thought I’d take a comic look at some of the things that make Generic Shop such a great place to work. Oh, and because I’m feeling anal, I’m going to do it in a list style:

Meeting people.
All the time. Incessantly. That’ll be £2.50… is it raining? I hadn’t noticed, and no, the twelve people before you didn’t say the same thing… They thought it was effing sunny!

Meeting interesting people.
Technically a subcategory of the above, there are several subcategories here: the odd, the weird, the mad and the casually racist. For example, an elderly gentleman smelling of urine opined to me, whilst counting out two pence pieces exceptionally slowly to the sum of about £4.56 that this recession was pretty damn bad, wasn’t it? I returned my agreement.

He continued that there weren’t any jobs. I confirmed that this was an unfortunate side-effect of the current economic slump (he was at roughly the £2 mark now and had uncovered a £2 coin so I hoped this might be the end of our exchange). However, resorting to his limitless collection of (alarmingly sticky) 5ps, he told me that his son had been laid off from the factory (I didn’t enquire which). I offered the due condolences (and considered offering said son my job). He then continued, without a blink or a pause for breath, that there were Polish and black people with jobs and it made him sick…

I paused. Having assisted him with the counting I’d secured the £2 coin and so now only had to make up the fiddly pence. I gave him the special “I work here so can’t disagree openly with you you racist scum” look of doubt and said noncommitantly that it was certainly true that some people had jobs when others didn’t. With his £4.56 in my hands I thought this exchange was over and I could go back to being sardonic about the weather… But no, where’s the sodding queue when you need one?

He continued in a mildly racist tone — opining that his Polish neighbours had a job and they’d only been here for five years, and reiterated that both his son (and brother it now seemed) were without work. At points like this, I wish the Panic alarm under the till had a second  ”rescue from nutjob customer” alarm. Finally, my boss emerged with some task or other for me and I disengaged from racist-wee man, only for him to turn around and interupt my boss and begin the whole sorry story again. I slunk gratefully away and hid in the back…

Actually, discussing the weather is quite pleasant.

Occasional Devastatingly Pretty Men
Oh, and the 97.4% of unattractive types that make up the rest of the population. Most unfair.

Cryptic instructions on pieces of paper:
Personal favourite from a friend in a similar business being a cryptic note from the owner when out for the afternoon saying “don’t forget to stack the shelves.” Also entertaining is the archaeological treasure trove of the stockroom where pens and lists of stock needed at some previous juncture can accumulate.

Tills:
You think an electro-mechanical system for the taking and giving of money is unentertaining? Think again. Try a till which has an incomplete barcode database (and a list of non-scanning items as long as your arm stabled to it) and manufacturers of certain (confectionary) products who see fit to print barcodes either incomplete/missing completely or over the top of other text.

Being able to say “next please” and everyone around you move:
Usually.

All views included in the above are entirely personal and do not in any respect reflect the opinions I hold whilst at work (and being paid!) or those of my Employer or any other affiliated or interested party. Direct any comments/additions/complaints to the comments section below.

12 Interesting (ish) Facts From 24 Hours (ish)

Like a fajita in a can, this post pretty much does what it says on the tin. Basically its the lazy mans’ blog post where I list 12 interesting (and sometimes related) things that have occurred to me lately and hope the Universe gives a shit…

Feel free to re-post with your own if you’ve had a particularly exciting/dull day!

1. Caravans should be banned: I missed 2 service stations during my drive home as a result of the solid line of caravans, coaches and other boxes on wheels blocking the left-hand lane. Bah humbug. Feel like Jeremy Clarkson, and as a dirty hippie liberal I don’t often say that.
2. New record for the 212 miles (yep, I counted them) door-to-door from 7 Bev Cres, HYL to 111 Wy Rd, CDF: 3.5 hours. Got cut up by: 1 x caravan, 1 x peugeot, 1 x smart car and 1 x caravan towing a smart-car (God those people must’ve been cool. “Look dear, we’ve got a car that looks like a shoe. I know what’ll go well with it — a box! Shoe-box-shoe, geddit?!”
3. Wages confirmed for this season (probably) £6.20 SCORE!
4. Just been for my first jog back home and surprised to find Cardiff is more aesthetically pleasing to jog around than Cornwall (well, the shit bit I live in anyway)
5. Cornwall is probably the dullest place in the Universe. And yes, I’ve been to Swindon.
6. Tidied and rearranged my room(s)! I’m not really posh, I just live in the attic. Of a bungalow. Confused, you should be?
7. Well, that was the plan. Actually spent an evening reading old copies of the Beano/Dandy/Sparky when clearing out a cupboard and found my old box of about seven years of said comics. Woop-de-la-woop!
8. Beat chess computer (at chess!!!)
9. First episode of ISIHAC on BBC Radio 4 tonight and I am thus spiritually fulfilled. If you missed it, check it out on iPlayer!
10. Writing this to avoid writing any of the other, serious writing things I’m meant to be tackling at the moment.
11. Trying to decide whether I should either upgrade my Mac or car or both and how the hell I could afford either.
12. Er… I had salad for tea… OK, perhaps 12 is harder than it sounds…

Tory FAIL

I have hesitated a moment before this final “Big 3″ parties fail for two reasons. Firstly because it would be all too easy to trot out the usual series of problems with the Conservatives, something which would be unfair given the emphasis on contemporanaeity in the previous two posts. Secondly, there is the temptation to wait till after the EU parliamentary election results have been announced, or to foreshadow them in some way. However, as anyone with the time and patience can scroll through back issues of this blog or engage me in conversation to find out my views of the Tories over the langue duree, I am going to focus here primarily on their ostensible re-invention.

So, where do Cameron’s cuddly Conservatives stand on what is (miracles aside) the cusp of entering government? The Tories have never been the greenest party, this has not changed. The only green thing about them is their new logo which implies the environmental credentials absent from a party in the pocket of big business.

Their dedication to the free market (a position which they share with both other main parties) seems to remain undented despite the “unprecedented” economic circumstances. Indeed, Cameron’s criticism of the government, when not vapid rhetoric, seems to rest on the assumption that crass deregulation is a human right of bankers. And Cameron knows all about bankers. Whilst its unfair to paint a whole party with one brush, the attitude that us poor folks are jealous of the rich chaps with their big houses (that look a bit like Balmoral donchaknow) does persist in some parts of the party.

This is similarly latent in the leadership’s at best luke-warm attitude to social justice and human rights issues in general. In this respect the Tories have not out-grown or out-moded the “nasty party” label. Indeed, Cameron has suggested that, in the European Parliament at least, the Tories are closer “ideologically” to the loose conflagration of extreme right wing parties which cluster round a loose collection of ideologies ranging from skeptical Europhobia, homophobia, sexism, a variety of forms of racial supremacy to a fringe Latvian party which holds an annual celebration of Latvian collaboration with the Waffen-SS. Is this really the modern, forward looking, open image of Britain that we really wish to present to the world?

The Tories Europhobia places them at the rough centre of a more generalised British anxiety about the European Union (some of it misplaced, some of it justified). However, this loose far-right alliance is something very different. It suggests that the modern day new hug-a-hoodie Conservative is fundamentally uncertain as to whether bigotry in itself is unjustified.

Couple this with economic policies which implicitly sanction cutbacks of public services (something that “Call me Dave” Cameron has touted several times now) and Britain does not face a rosy future. After all, the implicit caveat of “public services” is not just the bowler-hatted (Brussels-bound) bureaucrat, its also teachers, nurses, firemen, and thats before we consider the various things that public money goes some way toward – cf. roads, railways, protection of the environment, electricity generation etc. Low taxes may appear like a good plan — we’d all like to think Nozick was right  a little bit — but in the end they will be taxing on the services which the worst off in society rely upon (Hurrah for Rawls!)

In short, Cameron has performed an image revolution and that is all.