issue126lastofthe

                                                    ZYGOTE IN MY COFFEE.COM

Last of the Shmucks

by Trevor Mitchell

I’ve lost count of the number of shitjobs I’ve had. If you’re looking for a pot-washer, a ticket tout, a fruit picker or an order packer, a vdu clerk, toilet cleaner or factory worker I have failed to excel in any of them.

I was the king of the casual job. When a job finished I’d go back on the dole and take it easy, but beer money, drug money, rent money; these things would often trouble me. I didn’t care too much about the rent, there was always another landlord, another flat, but money for alcohol, money for drugs – that was more of a problem.

And so eventually, and with great distaste, I would find another shitjob.

I drank cheap wine and cider during the week, then gorged myself on vodka and acid and speed at weekends. To make the cider go further, when I was down to the last glassful I carefully topped it up with whatever spirits were to hand. By the end of the night the cider would be completely displaced by the spirits. Of course the taste was awful, absolutely foul, but by that time I no longer cared. White Lightening with Teacher’s or Bell ’s became my usual evening tipple, and although as a mixer Advocaat was a non-starter, cider with cognac, cider with sherry or vermouth or gin was not uncommon.

I always knew that sooner or later the shitjob would come to an end and I’d be back where I started, but it never seemed to matter. I was the clown prince of failure, the last of the shmucks. It’s true that once or twice during those years success would flirt with me but on each occasion I easily managed to avoid it’s serpent charms, for I knew people who were successful and all of them were even more ridiculous than I was.

All roads lead to Rome , it’s just that failure seemed the easier route.

The people I knew who had the careers, the cars, the holidays and flats that looked like flats rather than squats; none of them appeared any less miserable than anyone else. Their earning potential and disposable income merely afforded them the luxury of masking their unhappiness. This was one of the few things that I held to be immutable.

My longest period of continuous employment was 11 months, the longest period of continuous unemployment, 5 years. I felt this to be a reasonable ratio. The duration of each job varied; some lasted months, others weeks, sometimes only a few days. Whether or not I went in depended upon how hungover I was, but with most of these jobs if I didn’t show I didn’t get paid.

Occasionally I worked from home. I landed a gig as a market researcher and a boss came over from Manchester to hand us our questionnaires and explain how to stop strangers in the street and ask them such vexing questions as “what radio station do you most often listen to”? She also warned us not to make up the answers ourselves as the company would spot these immediately and not only would we not be paid we’d be blacklisted from ever working in the industry again. She didn’t actually explain how they would spot these fraudulent questionnaires; I assumed it must have been down to an extra 6th sense that all high–ranking market researchers possess.

When I woke up the next morning it was pissing with rain and I had a hangover. It would be madness to go outside and stop 30 different people to quiz them about their radio listening habits. The sensible option would be to leisurely falsify the answers over a bottle or 2 of red. How long could it take? A couple of hours in the relative comfort of my own home most certainly beat standing around outside feeling like death trying to converse with morons.

I felt sure that anyone caught making up the answers had made a fundamental error in their approach. It was all a question of demographics and telling the company what it wanted to hear. The middle-class housewife in her 50s was more likely to listen to radio 2 than anything else, and the Rachmananov loving ex-brigadier was a dead cert for radio 3.

As I worked my way through the questionnaires and the wine and rattled off the stereotypes I began to have second thoughts. There were still 20 questionnaires left. I’d been at it for 4 hours and the alcohol was beginning to warp my judgement. Why pander to social expectations, I asked myself. Why shouldn’t the ex-brigadier get it on to a pirate garage station? I decided to make my answers stunningly individual.

More hours passed and I started to feel completely pissed. I realised it would have been quicker to have gone out into the streets and do the job properly. I was sick of the whole thing. A couple of the papers had wine stains down the front, others were smeared grey with cigarette ash. I didn’t care. I bundled the lot of them into the pre-paid envelope and posted them back to the company where they would be analysed, cross-referenced and converted into statistics to sell a product. Or torn up.

I bought 3 litres of cider from the shop and went back to bed, contemplating the fact that a career in market research probably wasn’t really for me. I’d have to think of something else.

To my amazement I received a cheque through the post a couple of weeks later along with a letter congratulating me on the successful completion of my first assignment and an offer of more work. But by this time I needed a break.

I never enjoyed going to the dole office, although obviously it was preferable to working. One of the problems was that the place was always lousy with malingerers; work-shy bastards who gave people like me a bad name. And you were always expected to do something for your handout; jobs applied for, interviews attended. Back then if you were unfortunate enough to actually get an interview all you really needed to do was have a drink beforehand - nothing extreme mind, a pint of lager or beer normally sufficed. This ensured that due to the smell of alcohol on my breath they never offered me the job no matter how well I answered their questions, although there was always a fine line between making sure you didn’t get a job and hiding the fact that that’s what you were doing.

It couldn’t go on for ever. My days of brief periods of work punctuated by long, barren tracts of unemployment were numbered. Eventually I was caught out. A permanent job offer. Take it or lose all benefits. And if you asked me how it happened I wouldn’t be able to tell you. I fell for the sucker punch, that’s all, just like everyone else, just like all the other shmucks. There are so many traps, it’s impossible to evade them all. You change, grow careless, and then it’s too late. They have you. You become a company man in spite of yourself. I have no more money now than I did 15 years ago, the only difference is that now I can see the cage from the inside and when I wake up at 6:30 every morning for the rest of my life I remain perplexed; where did I go?

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Oct. 2009

126