[Previous chapter] [The Conference Company: January–October 2007 (full-time)]
I moved in with my oldest brother in The Tiny Flat in The Gentrified Periphery of The Great Wen in autumn 2006. The random snapshots of my early-twenty-first-century History preserved by The Wayback Machine do not include the months leading up to the end of that year, so I don’t know the exact date. I know my oldest brother was still working at The Music Website because he’d roll out of bed sometime around mid-morning, and would usually have showered, dressed, and disappeared by mid-afternoon. I’d look for Jobs on his internet-enabled computer, find none, and then get on with the more pressing—and more immediately Rewarding—task of listing his second-hand CDs and DVDs for sale on Amazon.
The Tiny Flat was absolutely packed to the rafters (or ceiling joists or whatever) with stacks of promotional plastic Products, ingrained with data to reproduce recorded audio and video to entertain the discerning Consumer. All of these Products were cadged from the jiffy bags that piled up daily in my oldest brother’s in-tray at The Music Website. Judging by the Santa-Claus-size sacks of fresh entertainment he’d return with each evening, I got the feeling that The Music Website Job was much more about populating the Amazon marketplace with promo copies of new records and films than it was about music journalism by this stage in my oldest brother’s Career. He was much more interested in smoking weed and recording hip-hop mixtapes with his friends than he was in writing about music. He’d stopped working that Job a few years back to go to America and become a pop-star. That almost, but not quite, worked out; and the Dream was very much still alive. His debut solo album was finally released by a small independent UK label. It was meant to come out on a US major, who’d flown him across the Atlantic, put him up in hotels, paid for the recording, and got some big-name producers involved. But then the US major did some Market Research or something—maybe listened to some of the lyrics—and decided to park it; showing no sign of being willing to give the album the backing my oldest brother felt it deserved. So he’d bought himself out of his contract, somehow. (Maybe by raising funds selling knockoff Products on Amazon?) And after what seemed like a Lifetime to him—but was only the time it took to get me from my one-night-only DJ set in The Great Wen to The Former Communist Country to Pennycomequick and back to The Great Wen again—my oldest brother’s debut album finally “dropped” that autumn—to ambivalent but net-positive reviews. I thought it was great. And I was especially Proud that my oldest brother—who, as far as I could tell, had no more actual musical ability than I did—had somehow managed to write and record a whole album full of pop-hip-hop songs, and to persuade a Bossman to manufacture and distribute them in CD format. When we were young, our parents paid for violin lessons for my oldest brother; and he hated these so much that he ate soap to make himself sick so he wouldn’t have to go. (I never had violin lessons, Prospective Employer; so, I don’t know: maybe I’d have done the same.) But my brother had since learnt to play numerous modern musical instruments—AKA software packages—on his computer. And he would now never look back, or indeed learn to play a violin.
I think we split the winnings on the Amazon sales about 67/33. I certainly got the lesser fraction of the loot; but my oldest brother was paying for the postage. We didn’t make a fortune; but it was just enough to keep me in bread, cider, and the occasional tube ticket into town where University friends or Sixth Form friends or anyone else I could find who’d also moved to The Great Wen might mercifully buy me a pint or two. I was feeling pretty useless, Prospective Employer, and felt the Debt weighing down on me like the certainty of death. I wrote some record reviews for The Music Website, but there was no Money in that. Not for me. The Job Centre Plus was good for food for a while. But they couldn’t get me basic temp work in anything vaguely to do with copywriting. There were copywriting Internships. But no copywriting Jobs. Not for me.
I’d paid eight grand of The Co-operative bank’s money for a piece of paper that said I was a Professional Writer. And now they wanted twelve grand back—as they kept saying in letters they sent to my mother’s address. Regardless of what that Work Experience Agency Bossman had said, the fact that I “could” do a Job “tomorrow” seemed to have no bearing whatsoever on me being able to find such a Job today—or being able to persuade an actual Employer I was worth paying to do that Job. Had I done the Job before? Well, no. Then I surely couldn’t do the Job. I felt like a spare part. I kept my head down. Sold CDs and DVDs. I don’t think I even got a single Interview at a single Agency that autumn. I might not have been the most proactive job-seeker in The Great Wen, Prospective Employer. And I was not signing up for no Unpaid Internship when I’d 25 grand of Debt and needed Money like never before. I was meant to be moving in next month with my oldest brother and his friend, co-worker, and touring guitarist, Jory: an ageing music journalist who’d made his way to The Great Wen from a hometown near Pennycomequick a decade or so ago.
Good old Boots got me an Interview with his Employer. A research company in The City that published legal guides, whatever those were. “They’re always taking on new staff” said Boots. He even used the immortal words “They’ll take anyone.” After an afternoon chat with a pleasant South African man whose apparent sole responsibility was ensuring a constant influx of entry-level researchers, there was a psychometric test—bit odd, that; never had one before or since—followed by a polite, ambiguous Dismissal. I waited a few days for the verdict: no thanks; it’s not us, it’s you.
It was my oldest brother’s then girlfriend—now wife—who’d be my eventual salvation. (Or damnation, depending upon your Point of View.) She’d made noises before about openings at The Conference Company where she worked in some kind of marketing capacity. But they didn’t want copywriters, or indeed marketers; they wanted “list-researchers”. She admitted it wasn’t “the best work”. But it was a Job; and it’d pay me enough to get by till I found something more befitting of my Skills, and my Hopes, Dreams and Ambitions—not to mention my apparently worthless, 25-grand Academic Certificates. I agreed that if I’d not found a Job by the end of the year, I’d go for an Interview. Apart from selling CDs and DVDs on Amazon, the only thing I did for the rest of that year that vaguely resembled Work was a one-minute stint at a New Year’s Eve gig, south of the river as a backing vocalist for my oldest brother’s band (whose only non-computerized members were my brother, Jory, and a female vocalist sister of a friend, who we’ll call Kate). Jory, whose hands were occupied by a musical instrument, made a head-gesture to summon Shandy and me onstage so we could help him shout the word “BOOM” at appropriate times during the song’s chorus—thus alleviating the stress imposed upon him by the necessity for both playing guitar and shouting “BOOM” at the same time. With Shandy and Jory either side of me, I’d just about started to get it right by the time the song concluded. Later that night, after further revels, I lost my University friends, and they went back to the place in The Burgundian Quarter where some of them lived, and where I was supposed to be staying. Everyone was asleep by the time I arrived, and nobody came to answer the door; so I rang in the New Year (2007) on my own, wandering up and down tube platforms in a daze, looking for tube mice and muttering—and being cautioned by suicide-watch station Staff for being too close to "the gap".
The interview at The Conference Company was a doddle. The Bosswoman was nice, and seemed to like me. And the barrier to entry for that Job was pretty much turning up for the Interview, not being naked, and not being dead. I moved in with my brother and Jory to The Misery Flat in The Gentrified Periphery, where I had A Room Without a View. There was a window in this room, unlike in The Cupboard in The Former Communist Country; but the window looked out onto a brick wall on the other side of an alley—where folk would come after sundown to piss or be sick or to buy or sell drugs—in which there was a window in the wall of the first-floor of a women’s gym. So I kept the net-curtains down all the time, so as not to distract the women, lest they should see me in the nude. I certainly didn’t want anyone thinking I was watching them while in the nude. I didn’t want to get a Reputation as a Pervert while Living in The Shadow of My Brother, lest it reflect badly on him.
Sexual matters were on my mind at the time, Prospective Employer. I’d already been sexually assaulted twice since I got to The Great Wen. The first time was on a tube train going north, when a young, south Asian businessman kept rubbing his briefcase-holding hand against my crotch. The tube was busy, so I thought it was accidental, and tried to shift away a bit. But it happened again. It kept happening, even though the tube-train was getting less busy. I moved again, and he followed again, without it looking deliberate at all, and managed to get his suitcase hand back against my crotch. It was Weird and Threatening. Like a nightmare. I couldn’t say anything. Because I didn’t know what to say. The train stopped again, so I just got off the train—even though it wasn’t my stop—and rushed off up the escalator without looking back. I ended up walking a mile and a half, just to get a different tube from a different station. The second time was a drunk old Irish guy in a kebab shop just down the road from our flat. He was much less subtle: grabbing my arse and feeling me up while I was queueing for a kebab—who were these people? Not so much as a bit of verbal foreplay about Ancient Greece... I wrestled myself free and ran off, without a kebab. “Fuck off” I shouted behind me. And he staggered out the shop in half-arsed pursuit, yelling homophobic slurs in my general direction. I don’t remember what I was wearing; but I don’t think you need to know that anyway, Prospective Employer—because it shouldn’t make any difference, should it? (Whatever I was wearing, you can be damn sure it came from a charity shop.)
On the first night after we moved in to the new flat, my brother's friend and my new housemate, Jory came out drinking with me and my university friends, Boots and Olaf. He interrogated us one-by-one about why we weren’t vegetarians. I probably said I didn’t feel a moral responsibility to not eat other animals. We came back late together and drank in my room, and listened to the new Handsome Family album: “Last Days of Wonder”. Jory fell asleep on my new bed, with the brand new never-washed covers my mother had bought me, and pissed himself.
The Role
My introduction to the world of Full-Time White-Collar Work came in the form of my “list researcher” Job at The Conference Company in The Royal Borough of The Great Wen, January 2007: just as the Global Financial Crisis was bubbling beneath the surface, preparing to spout out hot fiery retribution for baseless financial speculation all across the globe—including in my face. My collars, whether white or otherwise, were mostly worn through by their previous owners: dead men who’d lived in or near Pennycomequick. And my trousers were my old school trousers, and my younger brother’s old school trousers; which were a little too short for me.
I didn’t see my oldest brother’s girlfriend much in my new Job, because she was in a different—and better—department. My new Team consisted of my continental Bosswoman, who placed me near to her desk because she liked me, and somewhere between ten and twenty Colleagues on my level. Bosswoman—I gradually gathered—arranged her department according to how much she did or didn’t want to hear the voices of each Employee. The Team were mostly foreign nationals and mostly hugely overqualified. Almost everyone had a Degree, and lots had Postgraduate Qualifications too. But we were for the time, by way of our occupations, and for want of a better term, phone pigs.
I don’t know how, Prospective Employer, but I’d somehow got to the grand old age of 23 (soon to be 24) and finally managed to land my first full-time Job, only to find my days occupie d by doing perhaps the one thing I feared most: picking up a phone and calling people on it. So it was, the horror: my Job, all day, every day, was to talk to people on phones. Okay, that’s not completely accurate. My Job, as a list-researcher, was to research lists: lists of datasets including people’s names, phone numbers, email addresses, postal addresses, and other pertinent details. But while these details might be researched online, they were only officially allowed to be confirmed by phone. Once tidied up of typos and mistakes, thus confirmed by the individual to whom the data pertained by way of an “opt-in”, the records could be submitted. Whichever list-researcher submitted the most records in a week would get—I forget what: something really, really crap like fifteen pounds’ worth of Pizza Hut vouchers. (I hadn’t seen the “Jeremy at JLB” episode of Peep Show back then, but would later find it startlingly accurate in its portrayal of phone-piggery; except that my Employer unfortunately didn’t fold on my first day, and I’d spend nine months of my Life there.)
I never got the most names, and never came close. It was almost always a Spanish woman (Maria) that got the most; even though she never seemed to be on the phone. There was a league table on a white-board that was updated weekly with the top ten list-researchers and their respective figures. I was rarely on it, and never in the top half. To be quite honest, we all played the same game: the datasets took plenty of time to tidy, so it wasn’t possible to be on the phones all day. And if one or two slipped through without you actually speaking to the individual whose name was on the set and securing that all-important “opt-in”, was that really so bad? Well, yes. Because you weren’t supposed to do that. You were supposed to speak to the actual person whose name was on the list, and get them to confirm their name, their contact details—each line of their postal address—and then get them to agree to be sent marketing communications or receive sales calls on behalf of The Conference Company, with a view to securing, in the dim distant future, the sale of an actual ticket to an actual conference. There was a frozen conflict between sales and marketing involving Competition for the Commission that came from a ticket sale: if the sale was deemed to have been the result of a sales call, the salesperson got it; if it came about primarily because of a marketing communication, the marketer got it. There was no question of commission trickling down as far as our Department; so the sum total of our motivation was the crappy vouchers that were impossible to get anyway because Maria could press “submit” quicker on incomplete datasets and lie much more brazenly than the rest of us put together. The only apparent ways out of the phone-pig-pen were Promotion to sales (which a few of the team tried while I was there, and one even managed) or Promotion to marketing (which department had a lower staff-turnover than either sales or us, so good luck with that). One unlikely third option: becoming the Bosswoman or -man of the list-research Team itself. That was what Bosswoman did a year or two before my arrival, after a couple of years’ worth of Time in the pen, when the position had become vacant.
It wasn’t hard to get someone on the phone. And even though I hated and feared the phone, it was physically possible, I discovered, for me to use it. So use it I did, every day, at least a couple of times an hour. But it was hard—nay, nearly impossible—Prospective Employer, to actually get the actual person on the list—the sort of person deemed important and wealthy enough to be wanted at a conference, and who might actually want to go to a conference—to spend long enough on the phone to confirm all their details with you, and confirm they were happy to be contacted at a later date. It probably happened the way it was meant to about twice a week. But we were supposed to be aiming for 50–100 times per day. I spoke to plenty of receptionists, Colleagues, assistants, and people who happened to be near the phone when it rang; and if they were happy to confirm the individual’s details—and to suggest there was even any likelihood their friend, Boss or Colleague, might be interested in finding out about a conference—then I was happy to take their proxy “opt-in” and submit. I felt no Qualms in doing so.
Most of the companies I spoke to could be broadly categorized under the umbrella term of “pharmaceuticals”. Certainly my lists were categorized under “Pharma”—a word I’d never heard before. Before I saw it written down I was imagining conferences on combine-harvester innovation and robotic livestock-milking machines. So I was disappointed when it turned out to be nothing of the sort. Whatever the nature or concept of the upcoming conference itself—and we often had nothing to go on there but a Working Title—I found considerable variation in the reception I could expect from people who answered the phones in the numerous different countries. The big companies were absolute bastards for refusing to put you through to anyone unless you already had all the information you might be phoning up to get—usually because of “policy”; but sometimes out of the sheer difficulty of finding the individual or the Job Title you were looking for. Multinationals with several different offices (in several different countries) often had comprehensive website directories listing all their employees’ details; which was fortunate, because otherwise none of the b uggers would ever have ended up being invited conferences.
The smaller companies were a better bet. But you could get put right through to the man you were after (and it was a man about 90% of the time) without having time to mentally prepare. And that was bad, because he was often annoyed that you were phoning him; and then you had to ask him how to spell his name and address, and beg to be allowed to send him direct marketing. So by that point he often wanted to be on the phone to you even less than you wanted to be on the phone to him. To generalize, Northwestern Europeans tended to be the most accommodating. Swedes all spoke perfect English—better than me, because they rarely lisped—and they were unfailingly helpful and polite—even friendly. The Danes and Dutch were a bit gruffer and less likely to speak perfect English; but were usually at least willing to help. The Germans were brusque but functional; even at the bigger companies, they’d often put you straight through to the Bossman, who’d then ask you punishingly detailed questions about the particular conference you wanted to invite him to; which you were—obviously—unable to answer, because you were just a list-researcher. But the German Bossmen wouldn’t opt in without answers upfront; and if you put ne through to anyone who actually knew—supposing you knew how to do that—you’d no hope of ever getting him back and thus being able to add to your tally. The Irish were nice, but rarely came up on my Pharma lists. Brits were a mixed bag, but suspicious on the whole. The Americans were the worst; but they made up so great a proportion of so many lists that you had to try them. East Coast by early afternoon; West only right at the end of the day, and you’d be lucky to catch them at all. You’d get a willing one now and then—usually one mad scientist and his secretary/wife/lover in a makeshift lab in the back of a Winnebago, parked off a desert highway somewhere. I found the French, the Swiss and the Belgians hopeless. I’d attempt little bits of French (half remembered from my GCSEs) to be polite, but this usually fell flat. I got the impression that they had their own pharmaceutical conferences in French, and probably only invited each other. As for the south and east of Europe… I found the Italians rude, because they answered the phone by saying “pronto”, which I thought meant “quickly”. And neither the Spanish nor the Italians ever seemed to speak any English, or to have much interest at all in finding out why I was phoning them. The Spanish receptionists tended to listen to your spiel, not understand it, breathe deeply and say “Yest a minit” then cut you off. The Italians would just put the phone down on their desk and walk away. You’d hear general background noises—lemon trees swaying in the salty wind, gondolas being gently punted past an open window, opera; that type of thing—but they’d never pick the damn phone back up. Once—and only once—I had the opportunity to ring a company in Belarus (which I’d never heard of, and imagined to be somewhere near China). The phone was answered by a guy who sounded like a drunk janitor. I greeted him with what I’d read online was “hello” in Belarusian (but, being delivered by me, probably sounded more like Czech) and delivered my 30-second, English-language list researcher spiel—with little hope of getting what I’d phoned for in return.
There was a long pause after I stopped talking.
“Let me say first thing,” he finally responded, “it is honour for me to speak with you today, because my name, it is also Alexander!”
He went on to explain in pretty good English that everyone in the country was at home because today was some kind of national holiday. (It was probably Tuesday, July 3 2007: Belarusian Independence Day, celebrating the Soviet liberation of Minsk from the Wehrmach.) I’ve wondered once or twice since then whether I might have phoned an unstaffed Belarusian state-operated R&D department, and been transferred right through to the President, Alexander Lukashenko—but there’s probably at least one other guy in Belarus who shares my Christian name.
Such moments of humanity were rare in the Job, and treasured. I did like to talk to people—just not, ideally, on a phone. But if you spoke too much or for too long to your deskmates the Bosswoman would have to intervene. Considering the Drudgery of the Work, the atmosphere wasn’t terrible; and I think that was mostly to Bosswoman’s credit. But nobody wanted that Job, Prospective Employer. Each and every one of us had come to The Great Wen with something very different in mind—with the possible exception of the solitary local, who seemed happy with his Job, and was in no apparent hurry even to rise from the ranks, much less to desert.
I kept a pad next to my keyboard on which I’d sometimes make work-related notes—but mostly just doodle. Every single day I worked there—something approaching 200 by the end—I doodled a line-graph of the names-per-hour I’d confirmed (to the standard that satisfied me) and submitted. I’d illustrate the day’s A4 page around the graphs with whatever was in my head: insects, aliens, superheroes, mythical creatures, Celtic knotwork, vegetables, the logos of pharmaceutical companies, brains in jars, characters from The Novel I was writing… There was no discernible pattern to these graphs over the months; I didn’t improve or get worse at my Job. I seemed to typically perform my best around mid-morning, and slacken off a bit toward 5pm. I’d take my lunch as late as I was allowed (2pm) so as to leave as little of the day left as possible when I sat back down at my desk. One blessed day the phones went down and we couldn’t do any proper work for three hours; I drew storm-clouds and lightning bolts over those hours; but really they were pure, unfiltered sunshine. One day I was ill: I drew a skull on that graph. One Sunday (June 10, 2007) I got so drunk in the local park that I locked my brother and Jory and me out of our flat. Eventually—after my oldest brother had borrowed some tools from a neighbour to break the lock—I got to bed really late, and slept through my alarm in the morning. Having no credit on my pay-as-you-go mobile phone, as usual, I emailed Bosswoman at 10:45am to say “I feel very ill today and won’t be able to come in. I’m very sorry.” That's the one time in my life I’ve ever done that, Prospective Employer; and I was ill, but it was still perhaps a White Lie. In my defence, if I’d hated my Job just slightly less, it would never have happened. But drink was my only reliable escape from the Sunday dread of returning to Work. So when drink was offered, I took it.
Some time near the end of the Job I cut out a load of those doodled performance line-graphs into little squares and arranged them chronologically on a corkboard I’d nabbed from my oldest brother with a view to using it as a makeshift canvas. In the week in the middle that I’d taken off for my birthday and Graduation trip I wrote “HOLIDAYS ARE NICE” in cut-out letters made from printed lists of potential-conference-attendees’ names. The title of the piece was taken from a song by the band Sophia; but the concept was all mine. And although it would never end up on the wall of a gallery, it felt good to have processed all that Drudgery and Pain into Art—however abstract. I knew I wasn’t getting a novel, or even a poem, out of The Conference Company Job.
I had these Weird steel-toecapped Work shoes that my West Midlands uncle had given me some years before, which I’d never had occasion to wear till I started this Job. I don’t know whether they’d been improperly stored, or what; but a few days in to the Job, when I was walking back to my desk through the massive, open-plan office, I noticed I’d left a little a trail of rubber crumbs from my perishing soles on the worn-out carpet—a metaphor, perhaps, for my perishing soul, Prospective Employer? A cheap pun, sure; but I thought of it right there and then, and it turned a miserable moment into a mildly amusing one. The soles failed entirely within weeks. I borrowed some ill-fitting shoes from my oldest brother until I could finally afford a pair of discounted £15 slip-on laceless black trainers. I know I always say “I had no money” at any given juncture of my life, Prospective Employer; but working in The Great Wen, commuting for an hour from northeast to west, earning pretty close to Minimum Wage, and with the Career-Development Debt to repay every month—all of this meant that I really had no Money. To the point where I could only really afford to Work. My weekends, my blessed weekends, began with a big plastic bottle of Strongbow at the desk in my bedroom, and turning on my PC, and writing. Writing chapters from a new novel that wasn’t really a novel, about a miserable, skint, sexually inadequate young man with a foreign-sounding name who hated his Job. Writing a volume of old-fashioned narrative poems set in a fictional village in North Wales with a plot based on Thomas Hardy’s “Return of the Native”. Or, when I really couldn’t be bothered, writing record reviews for The Music Website—or just some bad-tempered blogging about Life or shit TV—which I’d watch when I visited Boots and Olaf in The Neglected Flat above The Pharmacy in The Burgundian Quarter. Boots and Olaf both had decent Jobs, and invited me out on Fridays. But I could rarely afford to go; so I more often saw them on Saturdays or Sundays. Shandy and Gilbert had moved into a flat—that Gilbert was inexplicably able to buy—south of the river. Gilbert had got a Job at an Agency as a copywriter, despite only having a 2:1 in Ancient History and a TEFL certificate—and no Professional Writing MA at all. Details about which, Prospective Employer, I felt he was insufficiently apologetic.
Various other old friends from The English Cathedral City or Pennycomequick were scattered around The Great Wen by this time too. We were living in the same city, but none of them were anywhere near me. And those that were the nearest (about half an hour away) had all got Proper Jobs and girlfriends or boyfriends, so they’d no cause to be thinking much about me. Me, languishing in Drudgery. I could have got another Job. I should have got another Job. But how? Poverty and Debt are traps, Prospective Employer; and neither is conducive to pursuing a Dream. I couldn’t look for a Job at Work. And by the weekend I felt resentful even thinking about Work. I’d have loved to quit. But I couldn’t quit; because even without rent and bills (which I was with, not without) I had the Career-Development Debt coming out on the first of every month. I had no clothes I could wear for an interview—even if I was able to get one. No suit but the charity-shop one, three sizes too big, that I’d got from my oldest brother—which made me look like a low-grade mobster. I’d no portfolio of writing Work. Just Work Experience, Voluntary Jobs I did for my course, and record reviews.
I was functional by day for the most part, but Bitter and full of Regrets by night. The weight of the Debt I’d accrued and the Disappointment I felt with my Life was delicious food for Existential Dread: crushing and asphyxiating what Potential I once believed I had. As the months went by it became apparent that it was perfectly possible to Exist like this. To hate the Life you’d made and yet to live it. I suppose that writing was my saviour. Writing and cider on Fridays. I’m sorry if that sounds trite, Prospective Employer. But the truth can be trite.
By July, my oldest brother and Jory and I had moved from The Misery Flat in The Gentrified Periphery to The Two-Storey Flat in The Linear Slum. I was five minutes closer to my Job, so the hellish Commute was less long, if no less hellish. I had a view—of a noisy cosmopolitan high-street, rich in crime, congestion, and fried-chicken shops. Buses blared past throughout the night. Why the hell do people choose to Live in places like this? I wondered. But not everybody gets to choose, Prospective Employer. I turned my single bed sideways in The Box Room, so I wouldn’t have to look out the window, and doubled the height with the addition of another, unused, single bed base, thus achieving the amusing—or so I thought—effect of necessitating climbing over the waist-high bed in order to get to either the window or wardrobe. So what if my new room looked like a child’s room? It wasn’t like I’d have to worry about sharing it with anyone. And the bed being that much higher at least made it harder for Jory to fall asleep and piss on it.
Graduation
I didn’t attend my MA Graduation Ceremony, just like I didn’t attend my BA Graduation Ceremony. Casting my addled mind back across the chasm of fourteen years, I’d supposed that the event must have taken place before I even moved to London; but no; according to a scrap of blog that’s yet to be digitally erased, I booked time off from The Conference Company Job around the time of my 24th birthday (on St John’s Day) to journey to Pennycomequick just in time to (deliberately) miss the Ceremony, but to make the post-Graduation drinks with my coursemates and my noncourse mates. I was told that Penny, who I’d not seen for a year by then, turned up for her BA Graduation Ceremony dressed as a duck. I was so embarrassed about having nothing more than a bog-standard data-entry Job to show for my allegedly “distinctive” Professional Writing Qualification that I actually ducked down a side-street in town to avoid bumping into one of the lecturers who’d been responsible for the highest mark I was given for any Work on that course. (It was the first chapter of a piece of experimental chick-lit set in The City of a Hundred Spires. I never wrote a second chapter. And the lecturer, a dope-smoking eccentric who’d said my creative work was “genuinely exciting”, died shortly afterwards.)
I drank cider with friends. I stayed with my younger brother. I lay on the beach. I walked on the cliffs. I wished I too still lived in Pennycomequick—or back in Wales, or anywhere but The Great Wen, where it seemed that everyone (of my Socioeconomic Group) these days made their way in Time, to Live, to Love, to Labour—and where everyone but me seemed to be doing something vaguely meaningful with their Lives. I heard on the grapevine that Winston, my old landlord, was retiring from his long-term Job at the Pennycomequick University College, and was going to move to the south of France. Good for him, I thought. I wonder if he’ll take that cat?
On my way back to my mother’s house, where I’d rest for a few days before returning to my Job in The Great Wen, I changed trains in The City of Crushed Dreams. There I Volunteered to help an old lady onto a train with her bags. And when I asked her which was the train to the east, she duly directed me to a train that was going north to Barnstaple, which I promptly boarded—consequently adding three hours to my journey.
Good Job or Bad Job?
There need be no artificial suspense in weighing the worth of those nine months to my Professional Development, Prospective Employer. I learnt quite literally nothing at The Conference Company, and felt myself getting stupider, meaner and more wretched by the day. I was heckled on my way to Work one morning, while walking down King’s Road, by a bunch of posh boys in a sports-car who called me a “jerk” and told me to “buy some decent clothes”. As unlikely as it sounds, that was exactly the sort of thing that happened to me on a regular basis. I’d little doubt The Great Wen hated me, resented me; maybe hated and resented all humankind, and only wanted to consume and digest them, as it so reliably had before penicillin was invented, and it ceased—at least in literal, mathematical terms—to function as a Population Sink.
That Work was Undignified, Prospective Employer. It was Fake Work; because to do it exactly as one was told to would have destroyed you, or been impossible. And to do it and know one was always doing it wrong, incorrectly, deceptively conferred no Dignity. I wondered how many office Jobs were as Unproductive as mine. How many people were sitting at desks being paid paltry Salaries to do useless things than any imbecile could manage, but which not even the meanest would deserve. I would have missed the blistered fingers and soap suds of my pot-wash days, or the nervous flushed excitement of arriving just on time for an English class with strangers in a bank, or even the collapsing boxes and faced-up baked beans tins of my teenage years; but those seemed like Lives lived by another. As accessible as passages in a book I’d once read, but no longer owned. This was what I did now. Sat at a desk. Stared at a screen. Got up to go to the toilet or make tea, by way of a treat. Chatted to the Inmates. Smiled at the Boss. Glanced nervously up at the clock.
Such situations boast one minor consolation, if one’s lucky, in the form of Solidarity. Mercifully, I liked the Team. Bosswoman’s role made it impossible for her to be our Peer as such; but her Nature, and her Knowledge of our plight—because she’d worked the Job herself for years, after all—made her Friendly and Sympathetic, at least to those of us whose voices she liked. I liked the Poles, who were numerous. And the funny, serious Friulian. There was a young Russian woman, who I helped once with some college work. A Chinese guy who asked me, appalled, if English people really ate a Full English breakfast every day? A Nigerian-British guy who wanted to be a lawyer, and had facial reconstruction surgery to fix a Speech Impediment. (Seemed a bit extreme to me, Prospective Employer; but he escaped the place before I did...) And a Frenchman who introduced me to the concept of “Casual Friday”—a day on which he dressed exactly the same but without a tie. He was one of the most serious people I’d met, and I nearly fell off my chair when he told me he was a stand-up comic in his Spare Time. There was a Kiwi called Andy who’d moved all the way to The Great Wen to become a successful house DJ; but he’d made little Progress in that direction and had decided by now—like me—that he hated the place; that The Great Wen was only for the lucky few to enjoy, and their enjoyment only made possible by hundreds of others like Us being trampled underfoot. Andy was a nice guy; and really positive about everything—except the Place in which we both lived. We went out once or twice, when we could afford it. We popped some pills in his living room and danced to house music, and I woke up on his sofa with no trousers on, and very little recollection of the night before. I met his wife, who was also nice. He read The Novel—which I’d just about managed to finish—and offered me some constructive criticism. I could tell he thought it was shit; because so did I. Everything he said I could do to improve it I took into account when I finally rewrote The Novel—ten years later.
We passed the Time at Work by writing down all the best names we’d come across in our list research. I can still remember a few of them: Rick Music, Alf Game, Beat Sax, and—last but not least—Mick Bollock. We used to phone Mick Bollock when we were feeling down, just to hear his answerphone message where he spoke those two words and no others: “Mick Bollock”. That would always lift our spirits enough to make a real call. Mick was American, you see, so never in the office before lunch. And because he was American, apparently, he’d never thought of changing his name. I was thinking of changing my name, Prospective Employer, from what it was then—with my Polish surname. My parents were divorced now, so you couldn’t call it a family name. I’d no connection with Poland. My younger brother had just had a Job Interview for a cleaning Job in a hotel in Pennycomequick; when he turned up and they found out he wasn’t Polish they wouldn’t have him. They didn’t think he’d Work Hard enough. What do you call that, Prospective Employer? I know what I call it. So I told the Poles I was thinking of changing my last name to Velky, having seen that terrible Colin Farrel film when I lived in The Former Communist Country where they called it “Alexander Velky”. The Poles thought this was a Great Idea. The Superior Pole—who’d ultimately go on to oust Bosswoman in a coup—said I should call myself “Alexander Gromny” because instead of The Great that meant The Huge. The Superior Pole was nice, but a bit more serious than the other Poles—the women, and the one from the East who hated Russians—because he had his eye on a Career at The Conference Company, or at least a better Job. The Superior Pole and Bosswoman, before the coup, when they were still friends, organized an after-work event in The Park in The Royal Borough. We lay there together, the list-rsearch team, overlooked by so much glorious Wealth that was not ours, and ate our crisps and sausage-rolls and salads; and we shared jokes and anecdotes and Life lessons with one another in various Indo-European languages, and maybe a word or two in Chinese; and most of us stayed around to get progressively more smashed on continental lager and shots of Bison Grass vodka. And our laughter rang out and echoed against the walls of The Royal Borough’s fancy houses that night. And it was a good evening.
But it was A Bad Job. A very Bad Job.
Concluding notes
Kiwi Andy went back to Kiwiland as soon as he could persuade his wife that they’d “done” The Great Wen. I think he became a teacher, and I bet he’d make a good one. I also think his flat got destroyed in an earthquake in 2011; but last I heard he was alive and well and DJing house music, so I reckon he’s probably happy.
I saw Bosswoman socially several times after I left the Job. She liked my University friends, and they liked her. And she knew my brother and his girlfriend already—because she worked with the latter. I think I was out with her and The Mexican—a recent addition to the list-research team—the day I went for my first date with Girlfriend # 3, a good half a year after I’d left The Conference Company Job. But Bosswoman was a bit wild for me: a bit intense. One time I was invited out with her and The Mexican, and The Mexican’s Mexican Friend—who was visiting from Mexico—took a shine to me. They all said I should go back to The Mexican’s house. The Mexican lived south of the river with a husband and two kids. There was some sort of spare room in the house where The Mexican’s Mexican Friend—about the age I am now, so a decade and a half my senior—was staying. And I was being invited there too? At bedtime? I wasn’t sure, Prospective Employer. It just didn’t make sense to me—any of it. That might have been how they did things where they were from (Mexico). But I wasn’t from where they were from: I was from The City of a Thousand Trades, via one or two other places, which I’ve already mentioned. And that just wasn’t how we did things where I was from.
I got a lead about a new sort-of-writing Job from my brother’s friend. I got an interview. I had a “dentist’s appointment”. I got offered the Job, and I handed in my Notice. The next bit’s slightly confusing because I was doing that one Job for a bit, then two Jobs at once, then just that first Job; but I start with the second Job, because I ended up doing the first for much longer once it went full-time. Bear with me, Prospective Employer, and you’ll see I’m making the best of A Bad Situation—just like I learnt to in the following Jobs: