Life parades its conveyer belt of human bastardness before your eyes in twisted Generation Game style. The catchphrase is not, 'Didn't you do well,' but instead, 'Aren't they complete wankers?' And although society's undesirables whizz past you in huge numbers as you go about your daily business of commuting or walking round town or driving, these people are not the ones you remember. Bruce won't ask you to list them to win them. The ones you remember most, the ones you experience on a deeper level, who grind sluggishly past you - as if that conveyer belt has a sticky turbine - thereby leaving their stain indelibly on your mind, are the ones you have the misfortune to work with. We are all afflicted with work colleagues who cling tenaciously to our existences like unwelcome clagnets round a hairy bottom. You don't like them, but they're just there.
I've had the good fortune to work exclusively in secondary schools since I was 22. Teaching tends not to attract many bastards (there are a few exceptions) and the same is true of support staff in schools as well. But in the 6 years of doing part-time or temporary jobs prior to this, I endured the company of several objectionable cunts.
Topping this list was the assistant manager at the Turk's Head pub in Reading when I was at university. His name - at least as far as the bar staff was concerned - was 'Shithead'. There's nothing like granting a slither of authority to someone with a chip on his shoulder on account of being a general failure in life, to transform that person into a petty, power-wielding despot, reigning over his kingdom of irrelevance. Shithead looked down on us students serving behind the bar with all the disdain of someone who had fucked up at school and claimed to have more common sense than us sorry academic low-lifes. It's true to say that life is full of people with far more intelligence than someone who is university-educated; but Shithead was not one of them. Throw in his vain and sleazy behaviour towards women and you have someone whose tick-list of qualities remains forever tick-less.
In second place was Mr J, the manager of Palmers Green Tesco, where I spent a year working while doing my PGCE/ teacher training. The J was short for Janus - he was Polish - and really, it would have been more apt not to keep the J from his name and drop the rest, but to do it the other way around. Mr J maintained a sneer that suggested that there was a constant smell of shit under his nose - unsurprising since his mouth was in that area - and he seemed incapable of understanding why any of us part-timers failed to match his level of consideration for a poxy, 5-aisle, fucking supermarket. He paced around slimily barking out orders in a voice much like Boycie from Only Fools and Horses, suffixing every command with the word, 'yeah'.
'Face up cereals, yeah.'
'Clear away those boxes, yeah.'
'Get that mopped up, yeah.'
This streak of piss totally failed to comprehend my level of indifference when issuing me with a formal warning for some misdemeanour or other, I forget what, but I was training to be a teacher, I was actually teaching during the day for parts of that year, and he seemed to expect me to give some small crumb of a shit about his small crumb of a shit supermarket. What a cock.
In third place was the foreman at a sauce factory in Edmonton. He and the factory were like something out of the 60s. The white and black workers had segregated social areas. Not by rule, of course, but down to the fact that none of the black workers smoked and most of the white ones did, so the existence of smoking and non-smoking staff rooms created a situation much like a Mississippi diner in 1955. The foreman was just as much an anachronism, looking like Jack the conductor from On the Buses and to match that face and voice he had a similar personality. We'd been sent to the factory - where we spent the day placing jars of condiments into plastic trays - by an employment agency, we being myself and my mate, Fabio. When we arrived, the foreman's first words to us were, "Oh that's a shame, I thought they'd send me a couple of dolly birds." Dolly birds. Jeez.
But I think I got off lightly overall. Any of you reading this and anyone you know, no doubt, have endured these sort of people in your time. Perhaps you are doing so now. I had other part-time or temporary jobs in which everyone was a delight to work with... The Beefeater Restaurant in Enfield, two different branches of Coutts Bank. I suppose that 3 out about 100 ain't bad. It should almost restore your faith in human nature. But let's not over-react, eh.
