Toad in the Shit Hole

Why should I let the toad work

Squat on my life?

Can’t I use my wit as a pitchfork

And drive the brute off?

It’s interesting just how quickly one can recover from a seemingly intractable series of crippling body blows, which presumably proves just how resourceful a human being can be. When my financial situation, partly caused by David Caisley ripping me off to the tune of £500, became so critical that I was left with no option other than to end up at the Newcastle East End Foodbank, what struck me more than anything else were the uncaring and inflexible attitudes and attendant regulations that all sources of authority hide behind. There was neither compassion for nor interest in helping those unfortunate souls down on their luck. Indeed, and I can almost laugh about it now, the adamantine incompetence of the malfunctioning and moribund benefits system is designed to make the situation yet more intolerable for the miserable claimant.

The maximum amount of Universal Credit I was entitled to for the month of September was £406, though I could actually earn this amount and more, if I found work, as UC is alleged to have replaced Working Tax Credits and also you to supplement your earnings by a staggering 37p in the pound up to this ceiling figure. Hence, this is why I kept up a few, irregular shifts at the Cricket Club, though I was astonished to be told, without any explanation, I would only be receiving £124 UC on September 28^th. I immediately queried this amount, and on October 24^th, I was belatedly informed it was because I had apparently earned £306 for working the cricket club bar in September. In actual fact, as I immediately pointed out, I’d only actually earned £106. Eventually I had the response this had been a “transcription error” and it would be “addressed in due course;” no apologies, no sense of responsibility or contrition and, in early November, no payment of the money outstanding. I did get £61 for October though, which will hopefully be the last dealings I ever have with Byker Job Centre.

You see, I’m proud to say that since October 15^th, I have been gainfully employed in the noble profession of distribution and logistics sending emails and making calls to shipping companies, warehouse workers and the occasional punter. My employers are a moral entity; they won’t touch Nazi memorabilia, though people in the office aren’t sure how to react when I ask if I can have any Third Reich bits and bobs they’ve got lying around. Arbeit macht versklavt, as the saying goes. The job isn’t brain surgery and I’m rather enjoying having a role with £18k pay and only £18k of responsibilities, compared to being worked to death and emotionally blackmailed 24/7 in my last job; Tyne Met, not the Cricket Club for clarity. However, and I can’t stress this enough, while it is bloody tough being out of work, returning to employment after a significant break is no picnic either. Being awake, being alert, sitting or standing for long periods of time, even interacting with people; all of these are difficult to get used to when you’ve spent nigh on 10 months in the house every day, enjoying the solitude and peace of your own company.

The Sunday night insomnia and Monday morning panic before any working week, never mind a new job, we take as read. Affecting an entry through the dense fog of exhaled nicotine produced by the legion of smartphone addicts thronging the front door, building roll-ups as they focus intently on social media inanities, is literally an essential rite of passage. I’m actually worried my bike will develop emphysema as the sheds are such a popular smoking spot. The shit general induction that consists of an intellectual pygmy with Versace boxers peeping over the top of his low-slung strides reading badly written power point slides that fail to explain what we are doing here, or why, is compulsory in such situations. Everyone is counting down the minutes to home time by half nine, silently urging the digital display to creep round to 10.30 for break time, so we can measure out our new working lives in plastic coffee stirrers.

Unions aren’t recognised here, but a dress code is compulsory. I read it carefully, in conjunction with a contract of employment William Wilberforce would have regarded as coercive, on the bus after being sent home to get changed at 10.45 on my first morning. Apparently shorts, of any length, are unacceptable. Polo shirts are ok though, providing the logo isn’t too large. I immediately resolve to buy a pair of matching Ralph Lauren pink ones; shirt A with the tiny polo player on the breast pocket and shirt B with the life size one in the same spot, then spend all day surreptitiously changing between the two of them. That’s if I ever come back.

The harridan from HR who gives me a public coating in the lobby, after dragging me away from ostentatious kex’s second familiarisation session, simply doesn’t hear me when I repeatedly tell her nobody has informed me of this policy before I started. I mean, we all know what I’m like, but would I be so contrary as to flagrantly ignore the dress code on my very first day? Precisely. It’s an important lesson though; immediately showing the difference between the private and the public system. There are no workers’ rights in the private sector, as the bosses hold every ace going. Everything about the job is a scene from Kafka on my first morning. It’s only once I mention the fact, I’m covered by the Equality Act that she shuts up and takes notice, changing her tune to slightly more understanding as she gets a whiff of legal complaints about discrimination in her nostrils. It’s still 50/50 whether I return after I head out the door, but I do, after stealing a quick hour’s kip back in the house. Method in my madness; I want to miss the rest of posh pants’ peroration.

I have worked in office administration before. Back in November 1986, my dreams of a career in music or music journalism having been cast aside within 3 months of arriving in The Smoke, I took a Clerical Officer’s role with the grandly named British Academy in Canons Park, between Kingsbury and Stanmore where NW10 morphed into HA1, allowing the middle-class denizens of Harrow to cast disgusted glances at the fetid Socialist swamp at the bottom of the ludicrously named Honeypot Lane that was Ken Livingstone’s Brent. The job was laughably simple, though it did have a socially responsible purpose; administering the post-graduate student grant scheme that had turned me down for MA funding when I didn’t get a First that Summer. The  working environment was the real culture shock; stuck at a desk doing menial, laborious admin tasks by hand, surrounded by half a dozen posh kids from the burbs who’d arsed up their A levels, two elderly, Zionist widows working part time and a demonic boss who looked like a female version of the Bernard Manning puppet on Spitting Image. All we were empowered to do was sign a pair of templates: “thank you for your letter; the contents of which have been noted,” when someone changed address or “thank you for your letter; the contents of which are being attended to,” when someone asked a question. Within a month I was no longer signing them but putting an inky thumbprint from the date stamp pad in its place. By the time I left, 6 months later, I’d graduated to full footprints instead.

The only thing I learned in that job was the fact work is the loathsome practice of making those who tell us what to do even richer. It’s a lesson I should never have forgotten. For the last few years I entertained the thought that the real problem with employment was the farcical structure and business practices of Tyne Metropolitan College but remembering those far off days at the British Academy, the wasted decade in schools in South Tyneside and now this, it’s refreshingly clear the real problem lies with me. I am the advanced section of the anti-work class. I strongly avow the aspiration of poverty as a transitional demand. I was a founder member and the honorary treasurer of the Awkward Squad.

At least I got away early enough to play the weekly game of 6-a-side that first Monday, which was a minor victory at least. I almost surprised myself when I returned the next morning to join the snake of defeated losers tramping down from Four Lane Ends to their stupid pointless jobs, where they will be bullied, cajoled and demonised by stupid, pointless people, many of whom look and sound like Alan Barnes; inadequate sneaks with delusions of adequacy who are puffed up by the mistaken belief they have sufficient talent, skills and above all, power, to behave like  wannabe playground tyrants. Indeed, the whole ambience of the “business park” location is contiguous with a school, albeit one where all the hard lads and fit lasses have left, meaning we are in a pink and porcine dystopia where the fat, the ugly and the stupid are allowed to dominate social interactions. The work is mindless, repetitive and predominantly futile, meaning the easily bored and intellectually limited call centre delta boys and girls thrive on a steady diet of trans fat invented gossip and social media inanity. Every lunchtime there are several people, old enough to be parents and own property, crying in the canteen, masking the banal motivational quotations that besmirch each and every bare wall, because of something someone has supposedly said on WhatsApp.

A pair of bong-eyed, cleft palate cretins with ADHD, who we’ll call the Barnes and Barnes Fishwives, take a couple of hours off work to decorate the office for Halloween, as there’s a “charity” competition. Somehow, I’m supposed to learn the minutiae of my new role in this environment, where I’m working with as many shemales and drag queens as Andy Warhol did in The Factory. If this place had a theme song, it would be Walk on the Wild Side performed badly by Alvin and the Chipmunks. If it was a film, it would be Legally Blonde shot by Derek Jarman.  At the same time as I’m being patronised by a passive, aggressive grass who tries to pull non-existent rank and belittle me at every opportunity, pulling such tricks as logging me off the computer I was on as her pal wanted to sit there, my son is doing a similar job 2 miles to the east, but for a quid more an hour.  

Frankly, it took until the 9^th day before I stopped being tempted to walk out and go home at every break. The change in my attitude had little to do with familiarisation or learning the job, but everything to do with that first pay packet hitting my account; I was getting as much in a week as I was in a month with UC. All the 6 am alarm calls and packed metros, full of slovenly women applying make-up, using their iPhones as makeshift mirrors, are worth it when, for the first time in months, you can meet your obligations at the end of the month and enjoy a couple of well-earned pints on a Friday after graft. Looks like Phillip Larkin was right when he revised his thoughts about work after all -:

What else can I answer,

When the lights come on at four
At the end of another year?
Give me your arm, old toad;
Help me down Cemetery Road.