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Obligatory update about work.
April 30th, 2005 at 22:11
What you might not know about me, is that behind the facade of elitism, superiority and pwning j00, I actually have a job. I’m a till monkey. I spend eleven hours a week standing behind a till, talking to morons, selling them deodrant, paint and hanging basket linings.
The intellectual stimulation is minimal- for the sake a comparison, every week I go to Sainsburys and buy The Independent, whereas my co-workers tend to read Pick Me Up. Whilst there’s nothing wrong with this, as such, it’d be nice to have a conversation with someone who knows as much about politics and foreign policy as I think I do.
It’s not a bad job, really. (Lie). I get £4.31 an hour, which is considerably more than some of my peers who work in other menial labour camps, and I get double time for the three hours I work on Sundays. The thing that annoys me is the repetitive nature of the job, and how I could make a flow chart of everything I say and do. I’m merely an extension of the IBM POS system that works out the totals. It has gotten to the stage where I don’t need to be fully concentrating and can go into autopilot.
Today I was thinking about what questions to ask all of the different candidates should one of them try and canvass me whilst I was on my break. Whilst doing this, I probably served around thirty people, without remembering a thing about them.
“If you just put your card into the top of the machine…Noo, the other way around…That’ss it…Iff you just press ‘OK’ to confirm the amount and then you can enter your pin number and press ‘OK’…Anyy second now…Theree we go, and you can take your card!”, I say with a smile on my face, whilst actually thinking about flags and treaties.
It’s annoying when something happens that causes me to break my lack of concentration, because I look down on to a till full of things I don’t remember scanning, and not knowing what stage of the transaction I am in. I’ll often say “and if you could sign here please” whilst handing someone their receipts and card, and gesturing for them to get out of my sight.
On the rare moments when I do have to engage my brain a little, I try to be creative. Calling people down from another queue to come and be served by me, I try to say something slightly edgier than normal company policy might like. “This till’s open if you want to come down… aww, c’mon… I’ll be your friend”.
The infuriating thing is, the job could be made so much more interesting for everyone involved, at no extra cost to the company. Why can’t they rotate the till monkeys and the shelfstackerss regularly? How I’d love to be one step back in the supply chain, and be given the freedom to roam the store, pricing gun in one hand, box of Cillit Bang in the other.
I keep wanting to quit- I say to myself on an almost weekly basis “I’m going to resign”, but then I remember how much money I’m making, and all of the consumer electronics I could potentially buy. There’s a lesson in this, kids. Please, never get a job. You will regret it.
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