Tag Archives: work

The Jobs of the Future, Today

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The jobs people have and the work they do can tell us a lot about what it was like to live during different times in human history. The technologies and philosophies. The hopes and dreams. The haves and have-nots. But what about the UK now, today, in our machine-led age of brands, connectivity, the internet, and social media? What kind of work is out there, and what does it tell us about the experience of living and working in 2019?

Roving reporter Jamie Andrew waded into the workforce to find out.

Davey Johnson, 46, Salt-of-the-Earth Compliance Officer, Alloa, Scotland

I’m a no-nonsense, tells-it-like-it-is, salt-of-the-earth type, and my job is to make sure that the rest of the world knows it. I carry out most of my work on the threads underneath articles shared on social media by local news organisations.

It’s exhausting work. I’m there, first thing in the morning, desperately trying to find ways to put a right-wing spin on the more gentle and whimsical articles with which these outlets tend to start the day. It can be tough. You know, I might have to find something militant to say about, say, a wee boy winning a prize for drawing a nice picture of a rabbit at his school. I’ll do it in baby steps, start off with a, ‘Wisnae like that in my day’, maybe follow it up with a, ‘These snowflakes and their pictures – I was shooting rabbits at his age’, and before I know it, I’ve slam-dunked it with a ‘Wonder if they’ll still let us draw rabbits come the Muslim caliphate, eh?’

By lunch-time it’s easy. Me, I’m feeling like Neo fae the Matrix: whoosh, bam, kaplow! Everything’s just happening, like magic. I’m skimming the headlines or the wee prompts by the page admin, and the replies are just boomin’ out of me…

‘Should kids start school at 10am instead of 8am?’ BOOM! Should they FUCK! ‘What do you think about smacking children?’ BLAM! Dae it as hard as possible. Never did me ony harm! ‘Breast-feeding in public?’ SLAP! Tits oot for the lads, absolutely NOT tits oot at my dinner table, ya manky bastards. ‘What do you think about the government’s initiative to lower the murder rate in our cities? ‘BASH! Bloody pansies! My grandfather murdered me when I was 12. And it never did me ony harm!’

The trick is to sound a bit like you’re in that Monty Python’s Yorkshireman sketch, but eighty per cent more racist.

I’m bloody good at my job. Science, solidarity and compassion are no match for the angry, knee-jerk opinions of working-class, salt-of-the-earth types like me.

Randall McCallum, 31 Dinner Photographer, Bangor, NI

Not everyone can afford a new car or a dream home to rub in their followers faces on Facebook or Twitter. You don’t need that. These days, the battle to win over hearts and minds – well, the battle to make hearts and minds seethe with rage and envy – is being fought at the dinner table. That’s where I come in.

Forget fortune. You don’t need a new car to make Elspeth who used to be in your class at school jealous as fuck. The new signifier of social sophistication is food. Or, as I like to say, Duck L’Orange is the new hatchback.

All you need is a really snobby meal slapped on a dinner plate and snapped artistically, perhaps with some augmentation filter added in so the food looks like it’s glowing or glistening – just as long as you don’t use the wrong filter and end up accidentally attaching donkey ears to your Colombian goat-loin curry.

I’m so good at what I do I can make waffles look like a meal Gordon Ramsay might one day demand to impregnate. I drape parsley over them, sexily – so bloody sexy that it seems like Leo Di Caprio might paint it – then I tag it with something like #FreshPotatoGriddles, maybe even translate it to French first, because French makes everything shit sound really good, you know, with the possible exception of Citreon and Renault.

Before I got in to dinner-plate photography, I was in the wine business. I used to snap pictures of women’s hands clutching wine glasses, and then I’d add captions in post-production like, ‘WINE O’CLOCK’, ‘BEEN THINKING ABOUT THIS ALL DAY’, and ‘OBLIGATORY AIRPORT PHOTO’, you know. The work dried up, though, mainly because my clients didn’t. They all died of cirrhosis.

For the future, I’m thinking about going into business with my cousin, Tristan, the world-famous ‘Dick-Pic Stylist’. Super talented guy, he used to have Wayne Rooney and Leslie Grantham on retainer.

Jeremy Phillipston, 23 Professional Netflix Content Absorber, Cardiff, Wales

The best part about my job is when I’m talking to someone, and they’re telling me that they’ve heard about this great new series that’s just arrived on Netflix, and I get to cut them off with, ‘Yeah, I finished it last night, it’s great, you should watch it.’ I love that.I love watching their little smiles become hyphens.

The Haunting of Hill House, the Ted Bundy Tapes, the new season of Daredevil, sixteen new films that were only dropped on Netflix last night – before you’ve even had a chance to hear about them, I’ve fucking seen them. All of them.

Not everyone appreciates what I do. Parents with young children, people who work, people who don’t sit in their pyjamas for entire days at a time eating nothing but crisps – they all resent me. It’s not my fault they’re lazy, though. They should get their priorities straight. Problem they have is, they’re spending too much time playing with their children. Too much time talking to their partners. In short, too much chilling, not enough Netflix. If I can make people feel inadequate and excluded enough that they feel driven to binge-watch television to the exclusion of all else in their lives, then job done.You’re welcome, society.

This job was recommended to me because of my interest in my grandfather’s career. He was a Full-time Plot Spoiler, and he was bloody good at it. He’d walk out of elevators with a big mobile phone clamped to his ear shouting things like, ‘YEAH, YEAH, BRUCE WILLIS WAS DEAD THE WHOLE TIME, I KNOW, I KNOW, WHAT A FUCKING TWIST.’ He once took out a full-page ad in The Times that said, YOU KNOW THAT MOVIE ‘SAW’? WELL, THE DEAD GUY IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROOM IS THE BADDIE. PS: STONE ME, DARTH VADER IS LUKE’S FATHER.

They’re making the story of his life into a 12-part series on Netflix next year, which I’ve already seen last week.You should watch it.

Sharon Grantham, 35 Worker in a GIF factory, Huddersfield, England

Me mam worked in a factory supplying funny pictures of cats and husbands to Bella and That’s Life magazines from 1969 to 1998, so I guess this sort of thing’s in me blood – along with the diabetes.

I started off in the Meme Warehouse, but most of me friends ,last few years, said the money was in GIFs – well, they pay more, in them GIF factories, ’cause it’s more dangerous an’ that. Some of them GIFs – they don’t look big on the screen, or, like, when you use them on your phone, do they? – but some of them are, like, the size of cardboard boxes, you know, them great big ones. The big boxes you’d use if you were movin’ house and that. And heavy. I knew a lass who got crushed to death by a GIF of a dancing beaver, just splatted her face off, it did. Bits of her brains all over me shoe. Worse, though, them that ordered the GIF deleted it almost as soon as they put it on Facebook, cause what they wanted was actually a GIF of a dancing Diva, but the predictive thingy put the wrong word, so me friend died for fook all, which is a shame. Still, the boss donated a nice GIF for her funeral, it was a flower all growing fast in fast motion, like it were speeded up, so the flower started off hanging down then jumped up and out, you know. I thought it were nice, but Jimmy who works the line with me was like, Christ, Sharon, that’s the GIF me and me mates use if we wanna say a woman’s given us a stiffy, and I said oh my God, and he’s like, well, I guess she is a stiffy now, so maybe it’s alright?

It’s dead hard in the GIF factory. We can be on the production line, and the big horn’ll go off, and the boss will say over the loudspeaker, he’ll shout something like: ”ERE, YOU, YOU LAZY BITCHES, THERE A WOMAN ON A GROUP IN FACEBOOK WHO’S NOT ‘APPY ABOUT SOMETHING, SO SHE NEEDS A GIF OF A BIG BLACK LADY WAGGLIN’ ‘ER FINGER. NOT TOO SASSY IN THE FACE CAUSE SHE’S ANGRY, BUT SHE’S NOT ‘ANGRY’ ANGRY, IF YOU KNOW WHAT AH MEAN. ALSO, ‘OW WE GETTIN’ ON WITH THE BATCH OF GIFS OF ALL DIFFERENT PEOPLE BEING SICK? NEED IT FAST, PIERS MORGAN’S ABOUT TO GO ON AIR.”

I’m proud of it, cause the boss says most folk just talk in GIFs now anyway, like, cause it’s easier and more fun, and you can say lots more than you can with words, and there won’t be any words left by this time next year cause of Brexit, cause once we run out of words we won’t be able to get any more sent in from Sweden or wherever they come from. Where is it we get words from again?

READ MORE OF JAMIE’S ROVING REPORTS BELOW

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Is the billionaire superhero ‘fake news’?

 

The Hell of Work: The Call Centre

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If you’ve never worked in a call centre, then you’ve probably never stared at a monitor and thought to yourself, ‘Hey, I wonder if I could fit my head in there?’ and then drifted off into a pleasant daydream in which your bleeding, frazzled corpse is carried out of the call-hall to freedom on a mortuary gurney, shards of glass fringing your scalp with the last tiara you’ll ever wear.

I worked in a call-centre for six months in my early twenties. It was short and brutal, much like a stint in borstal, but without the exercise, and with even more drugs. It’s a totalitarian state built inside a nightmare; a One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest where the Chief has already been lobotomised by the time you arrive (he’s blowing bubbles, but he aint chewing gum). It’s a place that’s haunting, hopeless and sterile, yet also fierce, fascistic and frenetic; like somebody shoved a third-world factory inside a hospital and then started a war inside it. Time is money, and if you aren’t taking calls, you’re a liability. That headset’s got to stay clamped to your skull no matter what, even if terrorists smash into the call-hall and threaten to shoot anyone who even vaguely resembles Madonna. Every piss break precipitates an interrogation, and if you’ve got the runs and have to dash to the toilet more than once in any given six-hour period, don’t be surprised to find that senior management have empanelled a jury in your absence.

I was the guy you called to register your new mobile phone’s sim card, an indispensable lynch-pin and cornerstone of the company, and in no way just a lump of cannon-fodder. If a customer agreed to give their personal data to the evil corporation to which my marginally less evil company was sub-contracted, then they’d receive five pounds free call credit in return. Sounds like a good deal, until you factor in the endless torrents of bullshit marketing literature they’re about to receive every day until death, plus the £20,000 they’re going to lose when their personal details are inevitably sold on the black market.

In the previous paragraph I said, ‘I was the guy you phoned’. For the sake of accuracy I should have said: ‘I was one of literally scores of faceless, corporate drones you phoned’. I was a human robot; a tide-over until they could work out a way to make the role obsolete and save a few quid, which of course they did, because they always do, but in this case thank fuck they did, to save future generations from the artery-slicing hopelessness of this particular ‘D-Day meets Groundhog Day’ of the soul. Thanks, internet!


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It wasn’t just us drones on the call-floor who were warped and curdled by our environment. There was a world-weary female cleaner who used to greet us each and every morning with a cheery and heart-felt ‘Goan take a FUCK tay yersels!’, middle finger held aloft, before bounding off down the corridor like an angry St Bernard. She had the same perm as a 1980’s wrestler, little neck to speak of and big, bulging Popeye arms. She made the ladies of Prisoner Cell Block H look like Miss World contestants, and probably could have choked a whole biker gang to death with her bare hands. No wonder she was angry, though. For the whole six months I worked at the call-centre a toley terrorist was at large (if you don’t hail from Scotland, a ‘toley’ is just another word for a ‘jobby’). No gents’ bathroom in the building was safe from a battering by his bothersome botty by-product.

If the cleaner was angry, then this guy was fucking livid, and was venting his fury and hatred in the most hideous – but perhaps the most apt – way imaginable: by writing on the walls with his own shit. Fax that to HR. Sometimes he favoured the simple approach, eschewing the artistry by just shitting in the bin. We often wondered about the logistics of the act. Did he squat over the bin like some acrobatic cat, or did he manually lift his poo from elsewhere? And if he manually lifted it, did he at least observe health and safety protocols by bending his knees and not his back? To the best of my knowledge, the bin-shitter was never caught. And no, it wasn’t me. I have an alibi. I was jizzing in my manager’s coffee at the time.

I think I understand why the phantom shitter did it, though. What drove him. Twelve hours of reciting the same script, of repeating the same questions, of hearing the same endless rat-a-tat-tat of the keys, of enduring the same Soviet-era approach to employee surveillance, day after day after day after day, is enough to make anyone start behaving like a chimpanzee having a full mental breakdown.

So that was my day. The mantra. “What’s your name? What’s your address? What’s your home telephone number? What’s your date of birth? What’s your email address?”

As the boredom set into my skull like concrete, I chipped away at it with mischief. I started getting creative with the questions. This was my very own word-based version of shit-in-a-bin.

“Who’s your favourite member of the A-Team?”

“What’s your favourite colour of butterfly?”

“What are you wearing right now?”

And they’d answer, I swear they would. It’s incredible. As long as you maintain an even, professional tone and encase the daft questions inside more conventional questions, and don’t ask too many daft questions overall, most people will feel compelled to rack their brains for the correct answer, or at the very least try to give the sort of answer they think you’re expecting. Some people laughed and joked back, which was great, but most people adopted an earnest – almost imperious – tone, and answered as if they were tackling the million pound question on a gameshow.

“What’s your favourite jungle cat?”

“Em… now I know this one… em… Just give me a second… (Grins proudly) Lion?”

When you’re in a locked-down, oppressive environment like the call centre, you need a comrade-in-arms as a ballast for your sanity, even if you have to draw a face on a paper cup and spend all day talking to it, sharing your problems with it, gently stroking its plastic face – even taking it out to a club with you and then spending the early hours of the next morning making urgent, dirty, drunken love to it, which I absolutely, categorically state that I did not do, despite what my lying ex-girlfriends might tell you.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thankfully, though, my comrade in this case was a real, flesh-and-blood person (or at least I hope he was, or I’ve got bigger problems than I first imagined). I’d been in the same year at school with this guy – let’s call him Scott, mainly because that’s his name – and fate had conspired to unite us in yet another stifling, authoritarian institution.

We tried many tactics to keep us from cracking. We cut speech bubbles out of blank sheets of paper, filled the bubbles with incredibly childish and offensive chunks of dialogue, and then placed them onto pictures of people in newspapers and magazines in an attempt to make the other person laugh out loud while they were on a call. When we were in a less sophisticated mood, we’d just draw dicks on everything. We were usually in a less sophisticated mood.

We also played the word game, where you had to donate a word, or list of words, to the other person that they then had to somehow smuggle into a conversation with their next customer, no matter how incongruous or offensive the word. Jobby, testicular, orgy, shit. They all made appearances (many other words were vetoed, as I’m sure you can imagine). But we quickly grew weary. We needed to up the stakes, so we stopped trying to smuggle words in, and started forcing people adopt them as their security passwords instead. We usually told them that the password had been automatically generated by the system and was unchangeable, so go get a pen. “OK, are you ready? I’ll spell it for you. It’s B-A-W-B-A-G.”

So very immature, but so very, very satisfying.

My favourite time-squandering prank, though, was the millionth customer wind-up. It began as a day just like any other, with lots of boredom and dick-drawing. I answered the phone with my usual, achingly-polite mantra. On the line was a pleasant-sounding woman with a thick Yorkshire accent, who asked if she could register her sim card. So far so excruciatingly familiar.

‘Congratulations!’ I said, a few million mega-volts of happiness ripping through my words, ‘You’re customer one million, and you’ve just won free phone calls for life!’

First silence, then an urgent, jammering stammer, redolent of Zippy receiving a particularly vigorous blowjob. ‘Oh…I, uh… ah, ah, ah, oh that’s great, love, that’s great.’ She lowered the phone to share the news with whoever was in her vicinity. She sounded tinny and distant, but blatantly shell-shocked. ‘I’ve won free phone calls for life,’ I heard her say, to high-pitched chirps of excitement, and then ‘Hello?’ as she came back to me at full volume.

‘Oh my God, I am so, so sorry,’ I said, my words weighted with so much regret I could almost taste the Oscar. ‘I don’t know what to say, I feel terrible, I’ve made a mistake. A terrible, terrible mistake. I was looking at the wrong panel on my screen.’

Wait for it.

‘You’re only customer nine-hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine-hundred and ninety-nine. I’m so sorry.’

Silence.

‘I’m so sorry. You haven’t won those phone calls.’

There was another long, long, loooong silence. ‘It’s not your fault, love,’ said the woman who was now the most despondent human being in the western hemisphere. She sounded broken. Depressed. Just like me.

Yass! I’d never felt happier.

If you’ve got any memories/stories of working in a call-centre, please share them below so we can all feel better about our miserable fucking lives.

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FUNNY MOMENTS AT WORK: THE AIRPORT

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.