a worthless existence

Atty and Goliath

Sunday afternoons in The Griffin were always busy but with the Liverpool V Man Utd game fast approaching the pub was packed to capacity. Most people had arrived early enough to ensure a good seat so by three o’clock the tills were ringing and the pub was singing.

Half pissed thirsty drinkers loaded their rickety tables to near breaking point, legs buckling under a sea of pints. The bar was three deep and the whole place a deafening clamour of drunken conversations battling like hungry seagulls to be the loudest.

Atty, a Griffin regular, was sat with Carl and Evo in an enviable position;

‘A spacious table benefiting from front and rear seating in close proximity, and with easy access, to both the TV and the bar. A desirable and much sought after location ideal for the first time drinker.'

Skin heads, Polo shirts, classic trainers and jeans, this was the uniform for seemingly 90% of the men in the pub, as well as a few of the ladies, and the three lads fitted the prototype beautifully.

The conversation was typically loud and crude. A good early start on the beers had ensured that the language would be as course and raw as any in the town. Atty was without doubt the loudest and at 32 carried a certain respect as the elder.

An hour to kick off and a salient air of both anxiety and anticipation mixed audibly with the already beer fuelled mercurial atmosphere. Atty and Evo were arguing over whose flash it was with the fags when a voice boomed in their direction;

“Oi! Didn’t you used to pick on me at school?”

Atty, always cocksure, turned round grinning with an unlit fag pursed between his thin, razor sharp lips to discover the question had been aimed his way. Stood before him loomed a mighty colossus of a man. Shaven headed leaving only the very merest suggestion as to his hairs natural blonde hair colour.

Atty’s head was as far back as it could get in order to take in the full magnitude of what was before him. His fag began to droop limply from his mouth as the seriousness of his predicament quickly took hold.

The creature had arms like great concrete battering rams welded together across a barrel sized chest. Atty’s grin drained smoothly from his face and the fag drooped and lolled flaccidly against his now sagging chin.

Trying to regain his composure Atty weighed up his options. Being of a light build he realised he had only one discernable advantage over this Goliath; speed. But penned into a crowded boozer he mentally concluded this was no option.

“Fuck off” He spat, removing the fag from his face “ As if id pick on you, look at the size of you”

“Yeah, you did, you picked on me at school, I remember”

Goliath came back. A sly smirk swept slowly across his moon like face, eyes narrowed menacingly indicating the impending danger.

Goliath took a step nearer to Atty’s table willing him to squirm, Evo and Carl blended seamlessly The Predator like, into the background. An apology or perhaps an offer of the beverage of Goliaths preference might go some way to mending the old wounds but Atty, not one for logical thought patterns, broke with usual protocol and rather gamely offered;

“Fuck off, if anyone’s the bully round here it’s you. Look at you stood there flexing your steroid pumped arms thinking your it, do us a favour and piss off!” Goliaths teeth clenched in rage.

I’m not sure to this day whether Atty saw the blow that swept so briskly across his face that day. His bottom jaw seemed to spring across the lounge bar like a till drawer and then savagely snapped shut. With a customary rolling of the eye balls into the back of his head, Atty’s seat suddenly became available and Goliath melted back into the throng of delighted on lookers. The perfect aperitif to the big match.

The Local.

Some of the most interesting, fascinating people I have ever met I have met in pubs. The public house is a place unlike any other. It is a place where to a large extent all men are equal. Solicitors, Doctors, factory workers and farm hands all frequent the pub. It is one of the few establishments where social class barriers are forgotten in the pursuit of a drink and a peaceful hour. It offers sweet solace from the trials of every day life. As a young boy the pub was an object of fascination to me. It was a dark, secret mystical place of wonderment, the high frosted saloon bar windows hiding the bustle of men and the clamour of voices. It held an attraction that even as a child I could not explain. Far from putting me off drinking, the enigma of it only proved to whet my appetite for the day when I too would be able to enter. The right of passage from boy to manhood for most men is to be able to walk into a pub and order a pint of beer. My first visit into a pub was something of a daunting experience. Sixteen years of age nervously approaching the bar with an unconvincingly deep voice that was as convincingly manly as a woman wearing a false beard and moustache. Sheepishly I order a 'pint of lager'as if it was the most natural thing in the world, careful not to catch the barman's eye should he detect the absolute fear I am trying so desperately to disguise. The whole pub must be able to hear the beads of sweat forming on my forehead. That piercing look from the landlord as he looks you up and down seems to last a lifetime and strips you bear of the last shreds of dignity and self confidence that you may have been clinging to. 'Please God let him serve me for Christ's sake' I can feel every eye in the place bearing into me like a bullet, they know, they can smell the fear oozing off me like an unwashable stench. But when the pint of lager is placed down before you and the money changes hands, suddenly you are twenty feet tall; you are the greatest man who ever lived. From that moment onward your whole life has changed forever. In New York there has been a total ban on smoking in public bars since the beginning of 2003, now Cities across the UK are also imposing similar bans. While I understand the health implications behind the proposals I cant help thinking what the hell is going on? Will this really work? Come on, a pub is a dark smoky environment; it's the nature of a pub, or at least as I know it. Surely it is a plan doomed to failure and only the pubs that ignore this ruling will be the ones with the tills ringing and the pub singing. But U.S bars and British pubs are worlds apart. There has been a trend in recent years to introduce 'bars' across towns and cities,bars that are that are bright and spacious, colourful and attractive. They more resemble gold fish bowls than boozers. The 'British boozer' is out of fashion; to me these plastic bars have nothing of the atmosphere of a traditional pub. Though I will concur that these bars have their place in the world. Whenever I have taken a girl out and gone into the kind of bars I like I have been given a look that lets me know she wants to spit in my face! Coupled with a fearsome glare that says to me 'do you hate me? Why have you brought me here?'

He belonged in a time gone by.

The Coach and Horses has always been there, and the people who frequent it always seemed to have been there too. It is an old-fashioned large red brick building with small leaded windows and the familiar, strangely heart-warming smell of stale ale and cigarettes. The dusty sign on the wall read ‘smart dress essential’ the one below it advertised live sky sports and below that ‘smoking permitted throughout’. Upon entering the bar it took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the dim lighting. The bar was directly ahead, cluttered with old men reading newspapers and rolling cigarettes slumped over half empty pots of bitter and lager glancing occasionally at the racing on TV. The landlord: John: a grumpy sort, gave me an inquisitive, disinterested and somewhat disappointed look. I ordered a lager, £1.50, quite reasonable. It was happy hour! John had been the landlord for as long as I could remember and was a unique character. He was the only landlord I knew who actually resented his customers. He resented the money they earned, he resented the cars they owned, he resented them coming into his pub. John was a huge, balding man in his fifties. He had hands like shovels and preferred to do as little as possible. In his prime he had been a professional Rugby League player for a top club and had even been to Wembley, but had earned little from it except a reputation. He was an insufferable gambler and not a good one. To win on the fruit machine after John had spent the day filling it out of his own pocket was playing with fire; it would be safer to have been caught in bed with his wife. Some of the regulars at the bar each day were younger than John and retired, John feigned friendship with them and they with him but when backs were turned there was a mutual loathing. He put up with them for the money they brought in and they put up with John, well, because they had to. John’s wife was Jean, she was often in the background and they seemingly made a good couple, on the surface. But deep down everyone knew that this was a guise they put on for the customers to disguise a marriage that had been dead for years. Johns gambling, drinking, infidelity and violent temper had taken its toll on their relationship and it was only that fact that they were too old, too ugly and too scared to go their separate ways that had held them together so long. Rumour had it that she had caught him in a compromising position with a bar maid on the pool table one night after hours and had broken a porcelain ashtray over his head. No one knows for sure. The only thing I know is that I never dared ask him. John was renowned through out the town as a man not to be reckoned with. Despite that side to him I still miss him.

The Workhouse

For those of you who have never worked in a call centre allow me to educate you. They are essentially a modern day Dickensian workhouse; the twenty first centuries’ ‘Do the Boys Hall’. Engraved above the electronic revolving doors that count the cattle in and out should be a quote from Dante’s Inferno ‘Abandon hope all you who enter’. In days gone by we had a northern landscape scarred by a carpet of chimneys bellowing their thick putrid smog over the industrial skyline. Today we are fooled into the misconception of a ‘white collar’ existence by the collapse of manufacturing and the rise of the service industry replacing factories with shiny new office buildings and call centre workhouses. The truth of the matter is that there is a serious blur in the demarcation between office and factory. I work in a call centre in the North West of England in a town nestled on the banks of the River Mersey. It is an area once proud of its working class heritage forged from the chemical industry. Today it is symptomatic of most other industrial towns and cities across the country that employs more people in call centres than in steel, coal and car making combined. A deplorable inditement on British Industrialism. As I file in through the doors each morning and the long skylight ceiling arches high above me, I scramble to find a desk and log in before I am registered as being one minute late. Four of these offences and it’s a disciplinary procedure! The call centre is a hive of activity and the clamour of a thousand voices is there to greet you each morning. Like most others, this call centre is ideally located in an ex-industrial area where unemployment is highest allowing the employers to dictate working conditions where there is a healthy feeding ground of low skilled and ill-educated people. There has always been a high turn over of staff and this is common place in the call centre environment. The lucky ones find jobs the rest, like me, are stuck there. Employees are strictly monitored in their performance and targets. Breaks and lunches are scrupulously regulated and we are even monitored on how often we visit the toilet and for how long! We have signs in our toilets pinned to the wall asking ‘do you know how many people are waiting to speak to you?’ Couldn’t give a shit is my honest hand on heart opinion before closing the cubicle door behind me. We have even received emails from the soft white underbelly of what passes for management at a call centre requesting that we ‘seek a managers approval before visiting the lavatory due to the high volume of calls queuing.’ It is not since the Victorian times of the workhouse that employees have endured such a draconian monitoring and lack of autonomy in the work place. Despite the ‘white collar’ guise, the call centre in reality is nothing more than a production line job in a modern day factory where every element of a workers day is closely scrutinised. How ironic that the firm I work for sponsor televisions ‘Big Brother,’ Orwell would have a field day. The hierarchy in the call centre is intricately layered. There are many levels of management and sub-management, seconded managers, trainee managers, management development, team coaches and trainee team coaches. These are the company’s sacrosanct, the list is endless. At the bottom of this pile is the shop floor worker, the call takers, the expendable masses, me. Our calls are routinely monitored and almost every move you make is observed and recorded. Quite Literally big brother is watching. The Team Coach is one of the most intriguing roles in a call centre. It is intrinsically his or her job to see if you are happy and have any problems (this gets asked whenever you are not on a call as a hint to resume with your work). The whole building is divided into individual teams; each team has both a manager and a team coach. Both roles are two a penny in a call centre and mean very little in the real world of business management. The manager of each team seemingly has one real main responsibility which is to monitor who is taking calls and who is not at any one time, and to bellow with breath taking monotony at advisors to ‘take some calls please!’ It is very much akin to the role of a coxswain bawling at his oarsmen to ‘row, row, row!’ But in this instance we feel more like the slaves in the belly of a giant Roman Galleon rowing to the whip. Conditions seem unlikely to improve in the foreseeable future. Recently the company I am employed by announced proposals to reduce wages and holiday entitlements to improve profitability whilst shamelessly rewarding its chief executive with a mouth watering seventeen percent pay increase. This suggests an ‘Animal Farm’ ethos of ‘some animals are more equal than others’. If recent speculation is to be believed though, the future of the service industry lies in India with 100,000 jobs being lost there over the next five years. My company already has a call centre operating there where the staff are instructed to advise callers that they are based in Leeds. I have a vision of low paid sweatshops, children sat stitching sports company’s trainers whilst also taking calls for mobile companies earning a Rupee a week. Perhaps this isn’t an image they wish to fervently promote. Stress and long term sickness are a huge problem as staff numbers are kept to the absolute minimum. Many call centres are aiming towards twenty four-hour opening with pressure on existing staff to cover these shifts with very little choice in the matter. Customers are becoming more and more irate as increasing call queues leave them waiting on the lines listening to Vivaldi or other popular classical favourites that help us forget that we are in a queue. This incessant demand is being met through the employment of agency staffing in favour of full time fully trained employees. The reason is obvious, they have no contracts, no access to the benefits of a full time employee, they can be paid less and more importantly they can be used until they are no longer required and released without a notice period. In effect they are the work house paupers with very little hope of receiving a full time contract of employment. If my experience in a call centre has taught me one thing it is to pursue a more remunerative course of employment with a sense of urgency. There are little if any career prospects and with more and more work being farmed out to India the future seems positively bleak. A position where permission to visit the lavatory is not a prerequisite of the job would be a distinct advantage. The more time I spend tied to the telephone the closer I come to forging my retirement carriage clock, cog by cog to carry like a burden of regret into my old age.