[“Work Experience” at The Photography Shop: May 1999] I should at this juncture mention The Posh School–mandated two weeks I spent in The Photography Shop in The Cathedral City so that I might "Experience" what it was like to "Work"—but without Remuneration. Of course, I already knew what it was like to Work, with and without Remuneration. But I had to find out what it was like to Experience Work, so that The Posh School could provide me with paperwork to prove to Prospective Employers that I’d Experienced Work—just in case I was Cunning, Workshy, or an Unreliable Narrator.
The Photography Shop wouldn’t have been my first choice for Work Experience. Indeed, it wasn’t my first choice; the Jobs Programme on the computer at The Posh School told me I should become a social worker; so—being nothing if not Obedient—I probably opted for whatever on the list most closely resembled my admittedly very limited understanding of social work. I also put that I wanted to shadow a journalist at a Local Paper, due to an interest in newspapers which I'd picked up during the course of my Paper Round Jobs; which I didn't and hadn't, and am glad I didn't, and still haven't. As for photography… I had a camera; but I had no interest in how it worked because I could simply remove the film from the camera when it was finished and get on a bus to The Cathedral City to take the film to a chemist’s to have the film developed and my pictures printed, at which point I would find out whether any of the pictures had worked. It was really quite simple. Besides, I hadn’t fancied photographing anything much since my somewhat maudlin leaving party at The Villa, because I already had a photo of Tigwillow in my wallet, and a photo of my favourite abandoned quarry off The Toll Road outside The Village We Didn’t Live In stuck to my bedroom wall.
Nevertheless, by the time the form came my way, almost every other Work Experience option had been taken, so I was given my third (or possibly fourth?) choice. Probably for the same reason that I was still sitting on the ends of other people’s desks in most of my lessons; and the same reason I was still one of the last to be picked for football teams at break or during PE—even though I was a genuinely slightly-above-average player; and for the same reason my English teacher completely forgot to make me do the class presentation I’d prepared toward the end of my final term—even though she’d said it was important to build up our confidence in public speaking, and even though everybody else did one, and even though she’d also said it would form a significant part of our final GCSE assessment.
A year and a half in, and my classmates were still calling me “New Boy”.
The Role
When I arrived for my first day of Work Experience at The Photography Shop, I noticed a Fish symbol on the door.
Oh dear, I thought.
Now before you adjudge me to be Bigoted, Prospective Employer, please let me reassure you that I’m not. Because if I’d seen a Wheel of Dharma on the door, or a Star of David on the door, or an Om on the door, or a Torii on the door, or a Star and Crescent Moon on the door, or a Triskelion on the door, or a Nine-Pointed Star on the door, or a Mjölnir on the door, or an Eye of Horus on the door, or a Khanda on the door, or a Yin-Yang on the door, or a Unicursal Hexagram of Thelema on the door, or a Radiant Crown of the Roman Imperial Cult of the Sun Gods on the door, or a Pentacle on the door, or a Sigil of Baphomet on the door, or a Faravahar on the door, or a Swastika on the door, or even a Crucifix on the door—yes, even if I’d seen a simple Latin Cross or Crux Immissa on the door; any of those would’ve been fine. (Apart from the Swastika, actually, now that I think about it Prospective Employer, because I mostly associate that symbol with the Nazis…) But when I saw a Fish symbol on the door, I could hear the ominous tone my mother used to adopt whenever she saw one attached to the back of a car:
“Uh-oh. Fish Christians.”
I feel I must very briefly digress here to discuss my religious upbringing, Prospective Employer. I hope you won’t find this Inappropriate, or think that I’m Rambling; I gather it’s actually very important nowadays for Prospective Employers to know which “Ethnicity” I belong to (Anglo-Welsh with a dash of Slav), which “Gender” I identify with (Gender is a social construct we apply to the sexes as part of a Patriarchal power game that demeans us as a species and thus I reject the very basis of the question), and which “Religion” I subscribe to (which is where I’m going with this). Weirdly, as a digression within a digression, nobody ever seems to want to know from which “Class” I hail, Prospective Employer (Working Class heritage, Lower Middle Class upbringing, Middle Class youth and middle age; but now unemployed long enough to be in danger of backsliding).
But back to the Religion question: I’ve said that the limerent feelings I’d developed toward Tigwillow were something akin to a Religion to me—albeit one with significantly less institutionalized sexual abuse than I was given to understand existed in most major world Religions. But my actual Religious upbringing had been broadly Christian; which is to say that the assumption of the teachers at The Little Welsh School was that we, their babanod, were all Christians. And the assumption of all of the kids at The Little Welsh School (whether Welsh, English, French or Other) was that they were all barmy. The West Midlands coal-mining part of my family had presumably been Anglican, at least until the invention of television. But my father’s father’s family were definitely Catholic, so my father was nominally Catholic, and took us once or twice to The Catholic Church in The Seaside Town. My mother had briefly been a Mormon, for some reason, but had later wanted to become a Catholic; and wasn’t allowed because she’d married my father in a registry office, not a church. So my brothers and I were never confirmed as—although we were often suspected of being—Catholics. When we lived in The Rented Cottage by The Big House outside The Wooded Village there was a Catholic priest who visited our home once or twice, presumably by invitation. He pretended to be able to remove his thumb; but even at the age of... five, I think it was, I fancied I could tell an illusion from a miracle.
No, we were never church-goers. And I didn’t really know why. So, at the age of 15, I didn’t really want to talk about it; which I was given to understand they—i.e. Fish Christians—would. Having been bequeathed no Religion as such, I’d consider myself an Atheist by definition well into adulthood. But I’d often say I was “Agnostic” to anyone who wanted to know, which I thought might sound less confrontational, and thus provoke less interest; but which actually tended to encourage further discussion. Over the years I’d be given (or persuaded to buy) all manner of holy texts by Evangelicals, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Hare Krishnas. But I wouldn’t learn the word for what I really was—and probably always had been, deep down—for many years yet.
I spent the first few days of the fortnight’s Work Experience learning to use my second till and to talk to my second lot of Customers, and which buttons to push on the massive machine that developed the photographs (but not which chemicals to put in it, because I wasn’t allowed to do that) and deflecting the leading questions of the nice young man who worked upstairs, who was indeed a Christian—as was the proprietor, and many of the regulars who visited The Photography Shop. We listened to the nice young man’s Christian Rock CDs (mostly Michael W Smith) and he talked about the immeasurably positive impact that finding Jesus had had on his life’s course—his Curriculum Vitæ. I don’t remember his name, but we’ll call him Dave; which may well have been his name. Dave wouldn’t talk about Dave’s past except to say that he had been lost (though he didn’t specify whether geographically or metaphorically) and that he had found himself in, or possibly through, Jesus. He asked me if I knew Jesus and I said yes, I think so, and he said “Do you though?” and I said well, yes, I think so, and he said that I was welcome to come to his church some time if I wanted to get to know Him (i.e. Jesus) better. So I said thanks. And I asked him what his favourite Michael W Smith song was, and he said this one—and he cranked up the CD-player; but not so much that the Bossman or the Customers downstairs would hear it.
The song was called “Missing person” and it was pretty good. I’m listening to it now, as I write this sentence, Prospective Employer, to help me cast my mind back to that Job so that I might better communicate to you what if anything I learnt from it.
I learnt that if you notice images of hardcore pornography or drug abuse among people’s photographs, you should refuse to print them—and that if you observe suspected criminality or wrongdoing of a particularly egregious nature (e.g. child- or animal-abuse) that you should tell Dave so that Dave could tell Bossman to contact the police. There was nothing especially disturbing—or even noteworthy—to be found among the majority of the film-reels I helped to develop. There were some poorly executed photographs of what looked like a birthday party in a pub in town to which a female stripper had been invited in a Professional capacity. These were somewhat… unpleasant, I felt; but when I bashfully brought them to Dave’s attention, his unconcerned—even underwhelmed—response suggested that as a seasoned developer of photographs taken in and around The Cathedral City, he was used to more sinful sights than these. He didn’t even unpeel any of the “CENSORED” stickers I’d noticed in a pile on the shelf to cover the stripper’s bare breasts (the first I’d seen that weren’t in the newspapers the weird old man on The Little Welsh School bus would hold up against the window to display to passers-by, or in one of my oldest brother’s “lad’s magazines” left open on his bed, or being fast-forwarded in an American film on television). I wondered whether the “CENSORED” stickers were solely reserved for downstairs use—by which I mean, for use by the Bossman, Prospective Employer. But I didn’t ask.
I also learnt that the church Dave attended was the one that looked like it used to be a cinema; and he confirmed that it did in fact use to be a cinema—so I learnt that too. And I already knew there was a cinema at the top of town that used to be a church (on the road we drove down to get to and from The Suburban Culdesac) so this new revelation seemed to imply something akin to a Productivity Issue on the part of The Cathedral City, and raised numerous questions; but questions that Dave was either unable or unwilling to answer. He wasn’t interested in the architectural style of the building in which he worshipped. He was much more interested in his (and, at the time, my) relationship with Jesus. This was, I supposed, what differentiated Fish Christians from other types of Christians—for example: Catholics, I knew from my parents, favoured gothic and mediæval architecture, but often had to make do with converted municipal buildings, modernist monstrosities—or, if they were lucky, gothic-revival buildings; which looked nice, but which were of negligible historical interest. Anglicans (AKA Church of England, or Protestants) also liked old buildings, which was why they’d stolen them all from the Catholics. Methodists, Baptists, and other Nonconformists, about whom I was dimly aware, tended to favour broad buildings with an austere agricultural or industrial character: akin to sheds, barns, or workshops.
I also learnt that Fish Christians don’t like being called “Fish Christians” because they were, according to Dave, “just Christians”.
“But there are lots of different types of Christians,” I said. “Like Catholics, Protestants, Methodists, Orthodox… erm… Greeks, I think…?”
He shook his head and said that those weren’t all necessarily proper Christians. I asked if they would go to heaven. He seemed dubious, but didn’t want to commit.
“What if I live a Christian life—as in, morally—but I don’t actually go to church?”
He shook his head. “No.”
“So I’ll go to hell?!”
Solemn nod.
“And what about animals?”
“What?”
“Do animals go to heaven?”
“No.”
“What if you've regularly taken the animal to church?”
Dave had to go downstairs. And the next time I tried to bring up the subject he said that if I wanted to find out more about Christianity I should really come to his church and talk to his friend, by whom I understood he meant the vicar (or whatever). As the week progressed it became clear that there wasn’t an enormous amount I could talk to Dave about except Jesus; because he was a fair bit older than me, and we hadn’t got a lot in common. And Jesus was the main thing he was in to, so he didn't really listen to music that wasn't about Jesus. I didn't mind talking about Jesus; but I’d also inferred by now that as far as Dave was concerned, I was there to Experience his Work, not to Test his Faith—or indeed his Patience. So after those first few days we mostly talked about the weather or what we were planning on having for lunch. As I came to need less supervision, Dave was happy enough to leave me upstairs with the machines while he chatted with Bossman downstairs. I don't know whether they talked about Jesus, but plans for lunch definitely got a mention.
Good Job or Bad Job?
I learnt little in The Photography Shop that I didn’t already know; which is why it only took me five pages to describe the role to you, Prospective Employer. No doubt there was Solidarity between Bossman and Dave—who were both Christians, and both being Remunerated for their Work. And while they were both quite pleasant to me for the fortnight I was with them—and Bossman would write me a decent report to take back to The Posh School, and a short letter of recommendation when I applied for my next Job—it was, and remains, my view that to truly Experience Work, one needs to be Paid for it. Okay, I acknowledge that Bossman gave me £20 in cash when I left, which he was not contractually obliged to do. One could reasonably interpret this as an act of Christian Generosity. Perhaps one should. But I didn't; I saw it more along the lines of treating one’s Slave to a nice ice cream. If the amount of work I did over those ten days had a market value equivalent to what he gave me, fair enough. But I very much doubt that that was the case. Maybe my Productivity wasn’t up there with Dave’s or his; but I worked at an adequate pace and incurred minimal costs to the business. I didn’t break anything; nor did I lose The Photography Shop any Custom (as far as I know) through Rudeness, Ineptitude or Slovenliness. Indeed, my Productivity was never once called into question—it was even verbally commended on my feedback form—so the shop must surely have experienced a net benefit from my presence not too dissimilar from that of having a full-time, entry-level, third employee. Except in one key detail! Perhaps there is an argument to be made that had I wanted to set up a competing Photography Shop (which I didn’t) this “Job” would have set me up perfectly for that Journey. But I don’t believe that the Bossman would so readily have taken me on as a temporary Slave if he thought that this scenario was even remotely likely. Much less treated me to a nice ice cream.
Running almost any shop is a Dignified pursuit. As is any Work where you’re demonstrably Supplying a societal Demand without visiting Indignity upon others. But “Experiencing Work” is inherently Undignified. This wouldn’t be my last Unpaid position, nor was it my first. And it wasn’t to be the worst Job I would ever have. But I’ve not found such “opportunities” carry much weight when it comes to securing a Proper Job. Nobody's ever told me they hired me on the basis of something said to them by somebody I worked for unpaid. And unpaid positions invariably carry far less weight on CVs than paid ones. Moreover, the notion that somebody’s Labour is inherently worth paying (them) for hardly seems Revolutionary to me, Prospective Employer. And while notions like “Work Experience” and “Internships” are considered to be different things altogether to “Indentured Servitude” and “Slavery”, for my money (of which, when weighed against my debt, there is precious little) they have more in common with those than they have with anything that I might call A Good Job.
So The Photography Shop Job was A Bad Job. [Next chapter.]
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