Strike?
September 10th, 2006 at 15:51

As I’m now a pen pushing bureaucrat, I’ve decided to join the union for people like me, PCS. Its free, as I’m only going to be there for six months, so I can’t really lose.

I was quite alarmed this morning to discover that my union is thinking about going on strike. This presumably means that at some point in the future I might have to defy my employer and stand about outside, next to a burning oil drum, shouting “SCAB!” at anyone who dares cross the picket. As the strike is a few months away, I think it gives me time to start growing (working class, ie: non-handlebar) moustache, take on a Northern accent and parrot some phrases about “working down t’pit” for “28 hours a day“.

According to the linked BBC News article above, its all Gordon Brown’s fault for privatising everything and causing massive job cuts- this puts me in a vaguely sticky position- sort of ‘hair/balloon static’ sticky as opposed to ‘pub toilet floor’ sticky, as Brown was apparently the guy who introduced Self Assessment tax returns, indirectly creating my job. I’ll probably still strike anyway as I like sticking it to the man and I don’t want my coworkers to hate me.

I just hope it doesn’t end up like the postal strike a few years ago…

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“I want that one”
September 6th, 2006 at 01:45

After work today I went to the pub with JD, Bouff and Holly. After that, we went to Dominoes Pizza.

Already sat down waiting for their order was two large, working class men. They were of a large build and had either a northern or a Welsh accent- they looked well ‘ard, basically. After we’d ordered and sat down next to them, it became apparent that they were agitated. They’d clearly been waiting for about ten minutes already, and were getting somewhat restless.

One of them commented loudly “I thought the sign said ‘express‘”, as if to try and hurry up the staff. Somewhat perplexingly, the sign just said “Dominoes Pizza“.

As time wore on, they continued to grow angrier at the time it was taking for their food to cook- “We’re on hunger strike”, they commented. Accompanying this was the occasional loud sigh and getting up and asking how long it would take.

There was a moment of light relief when for some reason, they started quoting Andy from Little Britain… “Yeah, I know”, they said to each other, over and over. And over. They must have parrotted it to each other at least twenty times continuously. After, they went back to being irked about the time spent waiting.

Eventually, their food was ready, and the Dominoes man gave them a tiny box containing one seven-inch pizza. For them to share.

To put this into context, its about the same diameter as a CD, or a dead baby’s head.

They seemed surprised too. “Are you having a laugh?”, they asked the Dominoes man… “it says one pizza for four quid here”. “Yes, one 7″ Pizza”. They grabbed their tiny pizza and stormed out- throwing their receipt away and spitting on the floor as they left. It was hilarious.

You probably had to be there.

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First day at work
September 5th, 2006 at 01:23

Today I started a new job as a taxman. I still don’t actually know anything about tax, you understand, but I at least now know all of the stuff about the mission statements and where I’ll be working. I’ll be working in an office.

I can’t disclose too much about what I did there, because this time around, rather than just talk about my job on the internet and nearly get sacked for it, I can probably be locked up in the Tower of London by a Beefeater. I’ve signed the Official Secrets Act y’see- which puts me on practically the same parr as two fictional characters: James Bond and Tony Blair. The former was created by Ian Flemming and and the latter Peter Mandelson & Alistair Campbell.

This tax office lark is just a cover for some serious terrorist bustin’. I’ve spent most of the evening popping caps into cardboard cut-outs in the shape of terrorists and Brazillians (I was told to aim for the head).

One of the first dialemmas that I faced was what to wear. Don’t worry, I havn’t gone all female on you- I wasn’t given any guidance on the dress code. Playing it safe, I turned up today in a shirt and tie, and some uncomfortable shoes that I can’t actually drive in. In the end, I resolved this surprisingly tedious fashion anecdote by changing to my casual shoes to drive with, resulting in an appearance not unlike an uncoordinated version of David Tennant’s Doctor Who, who has decided to jack in the time travel and take on a temporary contract handling self assessment tax returns.

When getting ready to go out I hit an unfortunate snag- I couldn’t figure out how to wear my iPod and headphones without looking stupid. I even asked the internet for help. Usually I’d just run the headphones under my t-shirt, but this was impossible because I was being choked by the most unneccessary fashion accessory since socks: the tie. In the end I listened to glorious silence whilst a thin piece of material flapped about in front of me as if it was looking for a purpose or a reason to exist.

Anyway, when I arrived at work, much to my horror, some people had turned up wearing casual clothing, like jeans and so on, and I felt distinctly over dressed. Of the 90 people starting (!), there were a few people who like me had assumed that working in a tax office is like attending a funeral, so I tried to stand near them as to not look out of place.

When we were split into groups, I asked my immediate manager about the dress code and he explained that “smart casual” is the way forwards. I’m taking a liberal intepretation of this, and assuming it to mean that I can wear what I usually wear: a black t-shirt with an offensive slogan, and some sort of combat-esque trousers. I’m not sure if “smart casual” covers the front half of a pantomime horse, so I’m not going to risk it.
The trouble now though is that because I’ve turned up on day one all poshed up to the max, I’ve created a sort of expectation, and if I was to turn up tomorrow wearing my George Bush “INTERNATIONAL TERRORIST” shirt, it might shock some of my colleagues- so what I’m going to have to do over the course of the next week is sort of gradually tone down the formality of my appearance. Perhaps tomorrow I’ll go in without a tie, and the day after I won’t tuck in my shirt either. The day after that I’ll wear a bright green Hawaiian shirt, shorts, sandals and stuffed parrot on my shoulder, and then by Friday they’ll be pleased that I’ve turned up looking like I normally do.

Aside from all of this clothing bullshit, it was an interesting day of training. At one point, my manager got us to go around the group and introduce ourselves. I toyed with the idea of inventing an entirely new backstory for myself- these people wern’t going to know any difference, for the time being at least, and I would have been able to make myself sound much more exciting than I actually am. Unfortunately, as you might have guessed, I’m not as excellently extroverted as I make myself seem on this blog, so rather than confidently announcing in full seriousness that “I’m Buzz Aldrin, and I was the second man on the Moon”, I told them I was James O’Malley and I go to University. Damn.

I can’t really say anymore about today, as because I’m an employee of the crown, its really all a big injoke between me and the Lizzy II. You wouldn’t understand anyway.

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Roller Skating Dream
September 3rd, 2006 at 15:22

I had a really strange dream last night. It’s nearly as bad as last time.
For some reason, my friend Matt and I were in a multi-storey car park. It was night time, and the area was bathed in yellow light from the sort of lights you get in every multi-storey. For some reason, I was wearing rollerblades, and I was pretty damn good at using them.

I was skating around the half full car park, jumping and landing whilst wearing rollerblades, occassionally grinding the motorway-style barriers around the side.

In one part of the car park, there was a man in a kiosk, operating a rollerblade hire shop, and he told me to make sure I didn’t hit any cars. I only had a few close scrapes.

The most annoying thing was that when I woke up, for a brief few seconds I thought I was a world class rollerblader, before realising where I was and that the most sporting thing I can do is spectate (badly).

What does this mean? Why am I dreaming about rollerskates? I want to know. And I really want to go rollerskating.

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Tube Violence
September 1st, 2006 at 01:30

Following my jaunt down to London just over a week ago, its got me thinking about one of the other times I went to London and used the Tube.

It was early 2005 (or 2004… everything prior to the start of this blog is more or less a dream sequence with blurred edges), and my family and I were going to see BBC Four’s excellent Late Edition being recorded. It was the episode in the first series where human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell and Barmy Aunt Boomerang Toyah Willcox were the guests.

I bloody loved the tube. I think its brilliant, and I like its colour coded and topographic navigation. This was before the July 7th attacks too, so I wasn’t running though defence scenarios everytime someone with a large bag got on the train. Unfortunately, it wasn’t international terrorism that caused me to dislike the tube a bit (that would have been a good blog entry), but something slightly more mundane.

On the way back from the recording (which would have been a blog entry in itself, but is a rubbish story told over a year after the event) we had to take quite a long tube journey back to Cockfosters at the top of the Jubilee line, where the car was parked. It was about half past ten at night, and yet the train was still packed with people, each more suspicious than the last. Sitting opposite me was a man who looked as if he was hard as nails. He was of large build, skin head, sporting branded clothing, and had his eyebrows set to “stern”. He was holding a single rose, presumably to either throw into the canal on top of his latest victim’s corpse, or for his wife, to make up for smacking her up earlier in the day.

When the train reached Holborn station, the doors swung open and stayed open for much longer than usual. On the platform behind my head, there were two men fighting- proper swinging punches and stuff. In the middle of the two of them was a woman, presumably the girlfriend of one of them (or both of them?), crouched on the floor against the wall, screaming at them to stop fighting. They were screaming at each other too, and fighting. For some insane reason, the driver of the train kept the doors open, and announced over the tannoy that we were going to stay in the station for a while, and “wait for these gentlemen to sort themselves out”. This obviously lead me to think that the fight could easily move into the train and on to my currently unbruised and unbloodied face.
There were no police around, although British Transport Police were apparently “on their way”, according to the driver. The doors were still open.

Being London, the general public cannot help but hate each other, and argue constantly. The burly man sitting opposite me suddenly got up and walked to the open door at the end of the carriage, and leant out. Unbelievably, he shouted in the campest voice I have ever heard “Oh do hurry up you two, this rose is going to dry out if I don’t get home soon”, and continued to antagonise them. This (figuratively) scared the shit out of me more than the fight itself- I was expecting one of the men to drag this guy into a fight, and for it to spill over into the train.

It was terrifying. To make matters worse, there was another couple on the train. They appeared to be achingly middle-class, and were dressed as if to say “I have a boring but well paid job as an accountant“, basically card carrying Daily Express readers, and they confronted the camp bloke, telling him to stop. Tempers flared. It didn’t result in another simultaneous fight, but it got pretty heated- to the point where the middle class husband had to tell his wife to calm down.

Eventually, after what felt like a terrifying lifetime, but was in reality a mere terrifying ten minutes, the police arrived and carted off the fighters, and the train got going. I bet if there was a Brazillian on the train, the police would have been there like a shot.

Its funny in retrospect, as it sort of confirms that all Londoners seem to be either unneccessarily angry or nutters.

That’s my tube story.

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