The First Word Blog

I was met as I came in the door by a woman with a name badge who remembered my name.  She took my card and I sat down and waited for my name to be called.  I looked around there was a woman in her early twenties staring at the wall with her hand inside her shirt absent mindedly adjusting her bra strap oblivious to the hormone charged  youths oggling her casually exposed cleavage.   The chav next to her was making obvious attempts to cop a sly look down her front and sniggering about it with his similarly gibberring, spotty, chav, friends.  They smelled of cigarettes and vinegar.  Like other youth cults they looked ridiculous to most people who saw them with their little duck billed baseball caps, mobiles, and baggy trousers and all labouring under the bizarre mistaken belief that they appear cool or attractive, presumably only to others of their kind.  What government scheme could possibly move these young people into paid employment. 

Wanted by no sane employer ’chav’ type person, no experience, skills or obvious redeeming qualities. To be given money for doing absolutely nothing whatsoever without anyone checking you have done anything.  Must be able to shout across town squares at other chavs and know how to operate a mobile phone whilst doing so. An interest in ringtones and the ability to converse in what is mistakenly thought to be a rough incomprehensible approximation of Jamaican patois would be an advantage.  Please continue to sign on at your nearest Jobservice indefinitely as there is no way you will ever actually apply for a job.

An older guy beside me was muttering to himself something about locking them up, giving them a bloody good hiding or putting them in the army.  I noticed hate self-tatooed on his knuckles indicating a less than squeaky clean past.Another man was being interviewed and he kept repeating the same phrase over and over. ‘Would you give me a go, well would ya?’  I looked at him and at the same time became all too aware of the source of the smell that was reminiscent of a foetid combination of stale sweat, decaying fish, trainer odour, and dog shit halitosis -a potent ey watering crap cocktail.  If ever a person wanted to make himself unemployable by the deployment of noxious odours alone this guy would get an award.  The man interviewing winced every time the malodorous man spoke to him. He was short, fat, and bald and his greasy dandruff encrusted hair was combed over a milky white scalp like a messed up Bob Hoskins clone.  I guess he had to work on his interview skills, presentation, personal hygene, and a multitude of other social graces before he was ready for the world of work.  I had a brief slightly disturbing vision of this man naked being roughly depilated by small people and scrubbed in a mixture of orange disinfectant whilst someone in a white clipboard shouted questions at him.  ’Lemme go I aint done nuffink’.  His screams seemed to echo on in my head until I realised there was a baby crying nearby.

I remembered a story I had once heard about a man who worked as a bacteriologist in a yogurt factory.  He worked alone at night stirring in the cultures into the warm vats of milk to make the yogurt.  One night he leaned too far over and fell in.  Finding that it was quite pleasant in the vats he decided that instead of using the paddle he stripped off and simply swam in the warm milk.  He did this every night for several months until one night he was caught by the management who simply walked up to the vat where he was at the time floating on his back and told him his services were no longer required.  Now there were a couple of things I haven’t told you about this man.  His entire bloated body was covered with unusually thick black coarse hair.  He was also prone to sweat profusely at the slightest exertion.  He blamed his job but he stank of more than just sour milk and admitted to his friends that he had not been looking after himself so well since his wife had run off, apparently taking the washing machine.  A well known supermarket chain had contacted the factory management when a customer found what appeared to be a 4″ male pubic hair in her Peach Melba Surprise yogurt.  She secured the hair together with the yogurt lid to some lilac note paper with a question ‘Was this the surprise?’ I hoped that the other man was not going to be employed anywhere near a food preparation area. Mr Peach-Melba-Surprise must have ended up in a place like this too.

Another woman with a name badge called my name and I was invited to sit in a seat in front of her desk.  She asked me how my job hunting had been going in a monotone that managed to convey such bored disinterest that I was tempted to say ‘you first’.  I told her everything I had done to find work in some considerable detail.  Then I looked at her and I could see that she wasn’t really listening to anything I was saying and we were just going through a process that neither of us really wanted to engage in.  I decided to do a small etnomethodological experiment that Harold Garfinkel himself would have been proud of. She stared at her computer screen then typed ‘actively seeking work’ on my record as I told her I had phoned ET but HMP said that UNCLE had no vacancies so I might as well be a poor writer.  I paused to see if this nonsense had registered a smile but not a flicker of a response as she navigated to the close record tab.

After I had stopped recalling the genuine efforts I had made she told me to sign my name and that was it for another two weeks and by the way my signing on time was changed to 3.30 and was this OK.  I said it wasn’t ok but she told me that was the only time available.  She smiled weakly to indicate that I was now occupying the seat beyond my alloted time and that I should vacate it so that she could get on with processing the rest of the human flotsam now backed up behind me.  You aren’t supposed to actually talk about what you’ve done because after a while you become like all the other lost souls and just tell them you are trying to get a job sign the paper and go.  What I don’t understand is that they put temporary staff on this one job that requires face to face contact with the punters whilst the experienced ‘qualified’ staff sit around surreptitiously surfing the internet. Noone wants to deal with the public really.

 I got out of there as fast as I could, away from the people whose paths now intersected with mine, away from the air of hopelessness, away from the complete lack of genuine interest in human struggles however unique they might be.  Outside people in black sobbed in the street a reminder of how fragile this existence of ours really is and even when you think you are becoming less you are a lot more than someone who has nothing left at all.