I am going to post the various scribblings that contribute to my NaNoWriMo attempt into my blog. An hour this morning has seen the first 2000 words committed to paper, and I’ve not even begun telling the real story yet. I’m giving each chapter the imaginative name of “Chapter 1”, “Chapter 2”, and so on - thinking of anything clever seems a bit pointless for something that will in all likelihood never be finished, and remain on this blog until such time as I accidentally wipe it, or am threatened to remove it after saying the wrong thing about the wrong person. It goes without saying that any names appearing in my story have been replaced to protect the innocent.
May 1995
When you work in a dead end job for long enough, you enter a strangely static state. You turn up each day, get the bare minimum of work done, and trudge home. Rinse, and repeat, day after day, week after week, month after month. Your mind becomes junctified - any concept of escape or change becomes “something that happens to other people” - not that it occurs to you at the time, because your mind is more occupied with making another cup of tea or coffee.
Such was the situation I found myself in during the early months of 1995. I had left college two years previously to work for the family business “for a few months”. After studying computer science, art and mathematics at college, I found myself doing all the jobs around the office that nobody else wanted to do - and had no choice but to do them - I was the very bottom of the food chain.
Why invoices cannot be stored in invoice number order (the order they come off a tractor feed printer) is a mystery to me, and always will be. I suspect the job of re-sorting and filing them into alphabetic order by customer or supplier was invented as a sadist punishment just for me. Something to occupy a few hours out of each and every day.
Filing invoices was marginally better than doing the wages run, which for a manufacturing company consisted of filling in identical figures for three quarters of the workforce - all of which carefully made sure they didn’t earn too much. The economy of the time dictated that you could claim all manner of benefits as long as you didn’t earn above a specific amount. This turned the brainless majority on the factory floor into chartered accountants and analysts. They never put in too much effort ever again.
The workforce of most manufacturing companies tends to read like the crew of an average pirate ship just out of Neverland. Although payslips had real staff names on, co-workers only knew each other by their variously invented nicknames. Birdie, Fatbloke, Budgie, Noddy - the list went on. Being the son of a director, and working in the office most of the time, I was of course treated wonderfully to my face, and no doubt labelled “wank face” or some other such impressive name to which I was supposedly unaware.
At various times during the summer while factory floor staff were on holiday, I would take somebody’s place in the production line. This invariably caused consternation from the foreman who would quietly take you to one side and explain that you were working too fast - making the regular workers look bad (due to their benefit induced work rate). This all happened of course due to the boring nature of the various jobs. How best to keep sane when taking bricks off a machine and stacking them on palettes ? Try to break records. Time for 1 palette - 10 square yards of bricks, if you’re interested. Number of palettes in an hour. In a day.
While working on production-line machinery you come into contact with one of the wonders of the workplace - the forklift truck driver. While we may think of Formula One, or Rally drivers as the pinnical of driving skill, this is of course rubbish. At least in their own mind, Forklift drivers are the fastest, bravest drivers to ever walk the earth - and they like to display their talents at every opportunity possible. Unfortunately they also lack a good deal of the common sense that your average 5 year old seems to develop naturally.
I watched one driver with particular interest one afternoon - let’s call him Kevin - his real name, as it happens. His entire vocabulary consisted of phrases lifted from one comedy television show called “Bottom”. Trying to communicate with him in terms of anything outside of the script of the show was particularly difficult, so you just didn’t bother. Kevin had not learned that the forklift blades were longer than the palettes he was carrying. While stacking palettes of cement bags against a brick wall one day, he carefully punched letterbox sized holes in the brickwork at regular intervals both vertically and horizontally along the entire wall. When his boss found out (a particularly wankerish director, who may or may not appear in this memoir), his disbelief was such that he didn’t know how to punish him - so didn’t.
To combat the enviable skills of the forklift drivers, one of the more dangerous high speed bends in the track / workplace was re-designed by the track owners / directors. One of the bigger buildings had been the scene of a pretty spectacular head-on collision between two of the championship contenders, punting one of them through the wall of the building. A week later the wall had been rebuilt, and massive iron railings bolted to the wall and the floor. The presence of safety features in the track switched off any fear in the leading driver’s mind, which unfortunately resulted in the next spinning protagonist taking out the new railing, along with the entire section of building it was bolted to.
Trying to communicate with forklift drivers was best done in writing. Living within the private world of their cab, they seemed to develop a unique language - comprised of a strange high pitch accent, and unintelligable temper. You had the sense you were hearing a stream of expletives, but weren’t exactly sure. You might occasionally make out the odd work - “kinkyboots”, or something similar.
The very important business of the family business was quarrying stone to sell on as various products for the construction industry. Explaining the concept of the work to anybody uninformed could be particularly difficult. In order to make natural stone, you start out by blowing the crap out of a rock face. You then turn what you blew to crap into dust by grinding it to oblivion. The then add cement, water, and a couple of chemicals, and pump it into another machine that squashes holy hell out of the mixture. The resulting lego bricks are then left out to harden. Later still, the blocks are fed into huge machines that snap them into brick shapes - the bricks we see houses built from.
Yet more processes are performed on some of the bricks in order to make them look more like the stone you started with. One of the more humorous was “tumbling” - tipping the bricks into a huge inclined, rotating tube so they bash into one another and end up looking much older than they really are. Another finishing technique chopped the top and bottom from the face of every brick - a process performed manually, and roughly akin in skill level to “ding it goes up”, “ding it goes down”. Such work requires a very specific kind of person.
Working in the office often exposed you to the great unwashed masses who drove in from the road looking for a few rocks for their rockery. Trying to explain what happens to stone that has been blown from a rockface when rain hits it was particularly frustrating - and usually resulted in the same people returning after the first heavy rain to complain that their wonderfully twee rockery had dissolved before their eyes.
While busily filiing paperwork, an occaisional moment of interest happened when a heavy goods vehicle pulled in from the passing road to use the weigh bridge. For the years I worked there, I automatically drew the short straw in terms of trudging over to weigh the various loads. I learned something ratherimportant for later life during those brief interactions though - heavy goods vehicle drivers are the best at swearing in the known universe, and they are proud of it. I expressed genuine admiration of their ability to put so many expletives into a single sentence, and it still somehow make sense. They swore, cursed and ranted with the ease and artistry of an operatic tenor. When confronted with any form of obstacle, the colourful stream of dissatisfaction burst forth like a firehose.
This tour of the various facets of the dead end job I found myself in is perhaps important in terms of establishing a base. A dark place from which a ray of light might penetrate, and finally illuminate a world outside of the one I inhabited. The messenger from that world turned out to be the company acccountant.
Describing the accountant as “the messenger from another world” is perhaps fortuitous. Accountants are generally thought of as boring - people who keep their posessons in alphabetical order. People who like things to make sense. The family business somehow ended up with an accountant who promoted the idea of past lives, aliens, spirit guides, and little folk to anybody who might listen - which was quite a shock given his stereotypically “accountant” appearance. Sensible pinstripe shirt. Glasses. Moustache. Sensible car. Sensible shoes. Belief in, quite frankly, bloody strange ideas… Hmmm…
Given my open view of the world at the time, and endless tales sucked from the early internet and bulletin boards of secret documents, little grey men, zeta reticulans, and craft powered by exotic elements, we got on famously. While he tried to make me believe in little invisible people who accompany me along my way each day, I tried to open his eyes to the global conspiracy surrounding us all - that an alien invasion was imminent - the bulletin boards said so, and stuff on the bulletin boards was always the truth.
(in reality, the bulletin board systems that predated mass internet take-up were filled with lonely people who never left their houses - purporting to be be far more socially aware than they really were. Hidden behind impressive sounding pseudonyms, authorities on official government leaked documents such as “MJ12”, “Project Red Book”, and “The Robertson Panel” had names such as “Hax0r”, “L33tD00d”, and “DrWH0”).
So. A background has been established. A place within which I often found myself sitting on rainy afternoons, putting bits of paper into folders, while looking forward to the highlight of making everybody another cup of tea (usually asked for by one of the directors, who were busily completing their thousandth game of solitaire on the office computer that day).
The phone rang, and I answered it.
“Hi Jonathan, it’s Neville” (the accountant)
“Hi, the Aliens haven’t abducted you yet then?”
“(polite laughter) Nope. Listen. I’ve got a question. How about you getting a real job?”
“Eh?” (my mind starts to lurch in the same manner as you might if just learning that the world is in fact round, and not flat).
“I do the accounts for a company in Witney who are expanding, and they need somebody who knows about computers, databases, and such like to help them grow. Interested ?”
“Yes
“Okay - I’ve arranged for you to come and have an informal chat with the managing director next tuesday - okay?”
And so it was that the opportunity presented itself to change the course of my life - delivered by a spiritualist accountant over the telephone to a moron stuck in a dead end job from which he considered no escape. An opportunity to start a career that should perhaps have begun two years previously, but had for various reasons (including laziness, easiness, and a terminal leaning towards procrastination) never happened.
This book is the story of the first job within that career. The story of a small company learning to grow, the people that made it happen, drunken nights out, bizarre characters, ridiculous situations, and of visits to the local nightclub that always seemed like a good idea at the time. It will also tell the story of how I bought my first place, more drunken stories, and quite frankly some more really quite improbably bizarre characters (some off which are family members, and some of which frequented one of the local pubs that we fondly referred to as “The Cantina Bar”).
You’ve not lived until you’ve shouted “My friend doesn’t like you” to a weird looking chap at a pub, only to discover that the 7ft tall fat hairy biker the other side of the bar with studs on his forehead got your joke and isn’t very pleased with you at all.