Tag Archives: the hell of work

The Hell of Work: The Toy Shop

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I once worked night-shift in a toy-shop in the weeks leading up to Christmas. 7pm to 7am. My job was to help unbox the day’s deliveries and re-stock the shelves. I suppose you could say that my hard graft was indirectly responsible for putting happy smiles onto the faces of thousands of local children. Aw! Sounds pretty magical, right? You’re probably imagining me and my twilight workforce moving in blissful synchronous, singing a jolly song as we form a human chain, passing parcels of dolls and dinosaurs along it, hoisting them up onto the shelves and high-fiving as we go, the whole happy endeavour overseen by a kindly old man sat behind an antique desk who’s busy scrutinising each and every toy for imperfections so that little Jeannie and little Harry won’t be disappointed come Christmas morn.

You’d be imagining it all wrong, though. Because working in a toy-shop at Christmas time is about as magical as being tied up and force-fed corned beef by a maniacal clown in an underground car-park.

It’s about as merry as weaponised AIDS being crop-dusted over you while you’re sunbathing, and only half as joyful as taking a cricket bat to the stomach, and then being stabbed in the face with pencils by fifty angry dwarfs as soon as you double-over, and then hit with the cricket bat again as soon as you straighten up, and on and on and on, until the dwarfs grow weary of their little game and decide to set fire to you instead.

And then being shat on by a pigeon.

Instead of imagining mirth and magic, try imagining a group of tired, miserable men – many of them with substance abuse problems and severe personality disorders (and that was just me) – desperately trying to reach the end of their shift without succumbing to the desire to leap head-first from the top-shelf of the board-game aisle down onto the cold floor below whereupon they’d swiftly be entombed by falling Cluedo boxes.

Imagine a group of guys muttering to themselves like lobotomised Lurches up and down the cold, deserted aisles as thousands of eerie plastic smiles beam out at them – only managing to preserve a faint sliver of sanity by occasionally stopping to boot a musical dog in the face just to hear it scream.

Of course, these days I’m a soppy, genetically-invested father of two, and would probably really enjoy a yuletide stint at the toy shop… although my colleagues most definitely wouldn’t: “You know who would love THIS toy, right? My kids! And do you know who would love THIS toy over here? THAT’S RIGHT, MY KIDS!”

You’ve probably intuited from the pronouns I’ve used thus far that everyone on the night-shift was male. These days my boss wouldn’t have hesitated to re-boot the shift with an all-female cast, but back then, in the late twenty-tens, it was XY all the way, baby. We may have had a woefully gender-imbalanced workforce, but at least we were ever-so-slightly ethnically diverse. There was one black Nigerian man among the crew, which certainly helped break the facial monotony of our miserable Caucasian countenances.

On my first shift I realised with horror that my fellow whiteys were referring to this man as ‘Teeth’, a nickname I surmised he’d been given on account of that offensive supposition that a black person can blend into total darkness and only have their position betrayed by their blindingly white smile.

The guys weren’t just referring to him as Teeth; they were calling him it to his face.

“Hey Teeth!” they’d say.

“Gimme a hand shifting some of these boxes, eh, Teeth?”

“Whit time is it, Teeth?”

I knew what time it was: horrible racism time!

‘Teeth’ himself didn’t seem phased by the racist moniker he’d had forced upon him by his co-workers. He never once reacted. He just accepted it, as if they were calling him nothing less innocuous than ‘mate’ or ‘pal’.

I went home at the end of that shift the next morning and agonised over what I’d borne silent witness to. By doing nothing, wasn’t I a racist, too? Or at the very least a shameless coward. I tried to come up with alternative explanations. Most of these guys had been working together for weeks. Maybe they’d bonded at the coal face and developed a friendly, no-holds-barred way of dealing with each other. Maybe context was king, and I’d misunderstood the dynamic. After all, I’ve said some hellish and horrendous things to my friends over the years, and had it back in spades. What if it was all just banter?

But what if it wasn’t? Or what if the white guys assumed they were trading harmless banter, but were really hurting this guy and he didn’t feel empowered enough to speak up?

The second shift began. I wondered what I should do. Call the guys out? Report them? I knew one thing for certain: I couldn’t just stand by and watch a man being marginalised and demeaned. Not this time. Not again. I had to do something. But first, I had to show the guy he had an ally; that not everyone on the night-shift was an unbridled monster.

We talked for a while as we sliced open boxes together: about life, love, childhood. I liked him. He seemed a nice guy, which only served to make me feel more guilty about my cowardice the night before, even though his agreeableness as a person was irrelevant to the injustice at hand. Even an asshole deserved my support.

I stretched out a hand for him to shake. ‘My name’s Jamie. I’m not going to call you ‘Teeth’ like all of the other guys around here, I don’t think that’s very nice at all, and I just want you to know I’m not on board with it. What’s your real name?

‘Latif,’ he said.

~~~

Have you ever wished for the ground to open up and swallow you whole? I quickly realised that the only racial abuse Latif had been exposed to in the workplace… had come from me. I’d bent over backwards to avoid being labelled a racist, and in the process inadvertently back-flipped onto a big fat crash-mat of racism. I was the closest thing the toy-shop had to its very own resident Klansman.

I sloped off down the aisle, and gazed up longingly at a stack of Cluedos that was teetering on the edge of the top shelf. Thinking that was maybe a bit of an extreme reaction, I decided instead to track down a musical dog and kick it in the face.

Ho ho ho.

READ MORE HELL:

The Hell of Work: The Airport

The Hell of Work: The Call Centre

The Hell of Work: The Airport

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I used to work as a baggage agent at the airport, meaning I was the person whose life you threatened if your suitcase stayed behind at your airport of origin, or ended up going to Kabul by accident. I was the scapegoat, the fall guy, because whatever had happened to your piece of shit bag was never, ever my fault – although your childish or psychotic response to the reality of having to spend three days without a hairdryer or favourite golf club often made me wish that it had been.

On one occasion, an Argentinian man who looked like an angry Postman Pat took exception to me ordering him to stop shouting at one of my colleagues, who was a tiny 60-year-old woman. He threatened to splat my brains against the wall, and called me an ugly bastard, which was a bit rich coming from a man who looked like a pube-headed puppet with a cat for a best pal. He seemed to calm down once a big Scottish copper with a machine-gun came over to speak to him, as people generally tend to do. Ah, machine guns: life’s great levellers. Nos vemos más tarde, Cartero Pat! I promise we won’t ‘accidentally’ send your bag to Kabul, tu feo bastardo!

I wasn’t hostile or cynical by default, although any job that puts you in prolonged contact with the general public tends to bring that out in you. I did feel genuinely sorry for a great many people who lost their possessions and/or souls in the great lottery of air-travel: among them, the band that was in town for a gig who had been separated from their entire collection of instruments whilst travelling on the airline that actually sponsored them; families with young kids arriving sans child seats; a guy whose actual fucking WHEELCHAIR hadn’t made it on to the plane. How do you even begin to excuse that? “Good luck, mate. Here’s some tokens for a free sandwich.”

I had no real power, responsibility or influence. I was just a guy who sat behind a desk waiting for all of you whinging, moaning bastards to be on your merry, bagless ways so I could slope off for a cigarette or six, or head through to the back office to put my feet up and read the paper. I used to work with a guy who made a habit of falling asleep in the FRONT, public-facing office, who was once actually roused from sleep by a group of passengers. Bold as brass, the fucker just opened his eyes and gave a dismissive and slightly irritated, ‘Yes?’ They ended up apologising to him, which is a level of greatness most people will never see in their lifetime.

When I wasn’t smoking or skiving, I’d while away the minutes rifling through the piles of unidentified bags in our store-room under the auspices of helping to trace the owner, but really just to hunt for funny or unusual stuff to help mitigate the monotony. Unfortunately, it’s a sad truth that most bags, like most people, are utterly boring: some jumpers there, a stick of roll-on deodorant here, an indentikit airport paperback there. But a small percentage of bags made all that rummaging around through strangers’ possessions (with its associated risk of AIDS-y-finger-pricks and the inadvertent grabbing of handfuls of unspeakably wet underwear) worthwhile.

Wonderful bags. Sensational bags. Bags that could’ve belonged to serial-killers-in-training. Bags that definitely belonged to seasoned perverts taking their kinks global.

I once found a bag that held such an embarrassingly large cache of dildos that they must’ve belonged to an international assassin who specialised in death by vagina. One bag was filled to the brim with whips, chains, clamps and tassels, almost certainly destined for a Tory party conference somewhere. I can’t convey to you with any degree of precision just how much niche wanking material I discovered over the years. Actually, there probably hasn’t been anything yet printed or filmed that the male of the species hasn’t been able to transform into niche wanking material, no doubt even microwave instruction manuals (“I’ll make you fucking ping alright, you dirty rectangular bitch.”), but you know what I mean. I once found a spanking magazine. An actual magazine about spanking, you understand, as in spanking ladies’ bottoms with paddles and assorted flat objects. It contained articles about the best materials to use, the science behind the best thwacks, vintage photographs, short stories, the lot. We managed to track down the owner of that bag, a local guy, and when he came in to collect his stuff he looked exactly as you’d expect a man with a collection of spanking magazines to look: absolutely normal.

Because the job requires you to juggle stress, boredom and death threats, when an opportunity for japes or laughter comes along you grab it with both hands, and choke the bloody life out of it. You come up with elaborate jokes and pranks to keep you from succumbing to the urge to rage-quit. Like the jape below, of which I’m still very proud.

Thanks, Schrödinger

Sometimes luggage is rejected at the aircraft, or doesn’t even make it that far, getting lost in the labyrinth of chutes and belts that weave spaghetti-like around the airport. When that happens, the luggage is sent back along a conveyor belt to the arrivals hall, where someone like me would pick it up, and send it to Kabul.

One day, a lone cat-box – the little plastic mini-jail that we all have so much fun cramming our cats into before a visit to the vet – appeared on one of our belts. We were initially horrified, imagining that a live (or hopefully still live) kitten was inside. It was empty. But the box’s appearance gave me a great idea.

At that time I had a mobile phone that thanks to some loose clips and connections could only stay operational through a very delicate balancing act between the battery and the handset. One bump – even an especially large quiver – could make the two pieces of the phone part company, instantly switching it off. I decided to make my phone’s most irritating characteristic work in my favour, by utilising it in the commission of the particularly cruel jape that was still taking shape inside my absolute dick of a mind.

First, I used the phone’s sound-recording function to make a 90-second clip of me miaowing. Next, I made sure the animal-loving woman who worked for a rival airline in the office next to mine was definitely at her desk. Then, I made sure my phone’s volume was turned up to max, pressed ‘play’ on the sound file, gently placed the phone inside the cat-box, and walked next door with a concerned look on my face.

“Can you believe that they’ve put this through on the belt with a cat inside it?”

The woman rose from her seat, horror moulding her mouth into an ‘O’. “Oh, the poor wee thing. We need to get it out of there.”

Before she could get out from behind her desk, I executed a perfectly-timed stumble and trip, throwing the cat-box up and out of my arms and into the nearby wall, whereupon the phone’s battery disconnected from the handset, and the miaowing instantly ceased.

Dear reader, I let that poor woman contemplate my imaginary cat’s snapped neck for an unforgivably long time before revealing the truth. And I loved every bloody second of it.

She tried to send me to Kabul.