Shop Soiled: Clutching at Straws.
Since I was a small boy, replete with the obligatory scabbed knees and snot trails emanating from my little nose, I was told to respect my elders and listen to their sage like advice and experiences. But it turns out that old people are generally a little confused and infuriating with a generous dollop of idiocy over how modern life works, like dealing with video recorders and ceefax.
They have forgotten how to shop for a start. They can hold a queue up like no other with their excruciating behaviour. First off they will queue in the wrong place (no amount of signs help), then they will spend five minutes after you ask them for payment trying to find their purses or wallets, then they will spend another five minutes trying to fish coins out, another two trying to remember how decimilisation works, then they will drop the coins everywhere and be too stiff to pick them up. However, this is all much more preferable to other method of payment: plastic. What bright spark decided to let the elderly possess credit cards and actually let them use them? An obvious road to frustration to all.
‘The card goes in there. No, there. Look, there. At the top with the chip facing down. No, the top. At an angle.’
At this point you give in and insert it for them. Then comes the arduos task of them painfully recalling and entering their PIN, generally pressing one button every thirty seconds. Then they fail to grasp that to get the PIN accepted one presses ENTER so you will be staring at the receipt dispenser in vain for a long time (two out of five of these transactions will be terminated because of the forgotten PIN thing). Then they have to remove their card even though they won’t because the words REMOVE CARD are a bit cryptic. Then the hallowed words that all of my colleagues know and hate and hear every three transactions will be uttered:
‘They’re all different aren’t they?’
We all wince visibly when this happens and try out our best fake jovial laugh before the true disdain shows through.
So, what except for ‘Take A Break’, ‘People’s Friend’ and ‘Kittens and Booties’ magazines do the elderly buy? Lotto tickets. Lotto Lotto Lotto. Wednesday draw, Saturday draw, Daily Play, Euro-Millions, Thunderball and several different varieties of scratch card. I hate the Lotto. I hate it because it’s strangely mainly played by the over sixties and if any of them end up winning big they will more than likely give it to the Cats’ Protection league. What the hell will our coffin dodging friends spend fifty million quid on? That is a hell of a lot of Murray Mints and doilies. That isn’t why I hate it really. I hate it because even though the olds are utterly obsessed by their gambling they don’t know how to effing well play it. They mark the sheets wrong, fill in the wrong form for the wrong draw, put marks in the wrong place, screw it up so it won’t scan, and then never, ever check the results beacuse they don’t know how their TV works. So they then ask you for the results which takes a lot of jabbing at the touch screen so you can inform them that they are still as skint as ever and those cats will have to fend for themselves for at least a while longer and that they’d better suck that Murray Mint a bit slower. Roll-over weeks are the worst as the world and his wife decide to do the lottery as just winning twenty million would be a waste of time wouldn’t it?
I have two Lotto customers who excel in the annoyance stakes. They are ‘Wassname’ and Silver Snake man. ‘Wassname’ is so called because he cannot remember how to talk. Everything is ‘Wassname’.
‘Can I have the results for wassname?’ He asks. ‘You know, the wassname that wa drawn on Wassname, errr….’
‘Daily Play?’ I ask.
‘No. Wassname, you know yesterday’s.’
‘There was no draw yesterday, it’s Monday.’
This will carry on until you finally just print everything out and thrust at the little blighter so he might leave you alone. Nope. Then he’ll bring out a huge wad of old tickets and ask you to scan every single last one of them to check for wassnames. I will scan sometimes around twenty tickets. And you know what? He presents the same tickets every single time. We know this because my colleague marked them. Arghhhhh. This happens every single day. Every. Single. Day.
Silver Snake Man is younger, with an unrecognisably strange european accent and an addiction that should lead him to ask for a job with us so he can fulfill his destiny of making as much mess and losing as much money as possible. He is called Silver Snake due to his habit of buying handfulls of scratch cards and scratching at them until little wormy slivers of silver accumulate around his feet and on our carpet. He goes round and round every day. Queue, buy, scratch, rip, throw cards on the counter. Queue, claim mediocre winnings, spend winnings on more, move off, scratch, rip, dump, queue, scratch etc. This can last for up to an hour, sometimes two or three times a day. Painful is the word. And what does he do when he isn’t in my place of employment? He does exactly the same only elsewhere as I have seen him in other shops too. If you ever think you are wasting your life then just take a moment to remember these chappies and allow yourself to feel just a little self satisfied.
One last thing. If you insist on buying a lottery ticket, never ever say to the vendor: ‘Can I have a lucky dip? Make sure it’s the winning one!!! I’ll split my winnings with you!!’ You are probably likely to get the ticket inserted up your wassname. How’s that for a lucky dip of sorts?
Shop Soiled.
I thought that small scale independant retailing was tough. I thought that finally tearing myself away from the weirdness of second hand record retail was a release; coming up for air after long being submerged in its murky, cloying waters. But upon surfacing, gasping and blinking into the air, my eyes open I find myself in familiar surrounds: in a shop. Surrounded, once again, by bastards.
I couldn’t keep away for ever. I have spent the last year away from this blog thinking that I’d never need or want to write about working in retail again once in the safe haven of a leading high street stationers/book shop. Christ knows what gave me that idea for once again my days are filled by the inane, the bizarre, the downright iritating and the hilarious. So join me in my new adventures as a book seller where I try to survive the onslaught of life on the minimum wage whilst dodging the recession and the foibles of the human condition. Huzzah.
’You’re that bloke who used to work in the record shop.’
Damn. The past is not so easily escaped. I have a new job and still the people that recognise me want to talk about the old one. Still, it is nice to be remembered and at least I have a legacy because on my first week in the book selling section of my new job I’m swiftly taught that I’m nobody now; just a grunt. I look around and spy that the large majority of staff are children. School leavers or the yet to leave on their way to bright futures, enduring the ignominy of retail awaiting their real calling. Oh.
Still, I have escaped the nutters and the customers I didn’t like, such as Peter – my arch nemesis from the record shop.
Ringringring. That’s the bell we use to summon more staff to the tills when there is a queue or a problem. It sounds a bit like being chased down a country lane being pursued by an irate vicar on his bike. I’m at the other end of the shop doing something or other and I, still on my first week and trying to get to grips with everything, respond. I turn and J, who I’m convinced really doesn’t like me, says that this gentleman wants to place a customer order.
Oh look. It’s Peter. Fuck.
It turns out that he is an avid shopper, sorry, I mean time waster and irritant at this leading high street retailer too. Obviously as we sell CDs and DVDs and he, as established in my previous blogs, just hangs around music shops all day spreading his fetid smell and endless charm. This time he has the upper hand. It is not actively encouraged to tell customers to piss off when working for a large chain. For some reason this is a sackable offence. It turns out that everybody safe guards their own positions at this shop by running and hiding when Peter turns up so they don’t fall into the ‘piss off’ trap. This particular gauntlet was mine so I picked it up.
Awkwardly we pretended not to know each other, although any dogs nearby would have heard the snarls that are inaudible to the human ear. He wants to order a film. He wants to order something called ‘Helvetica’. He wants to spell it for me. I inform him that I can spell helvetica. I type it in to the ultra frustrating ordering system and come up with nothing.
‘Do you want me to spell it for ya?’ He asks again, the words dripping and glistening in delighted sarcasm. I spin the screen round so he can see how one spells helvetica. Crestfallen, he asks me to substitute the c for a k. Hey, the customer is always right so here I go. There we are Peter, I’ve mis-spelt it for you just like you wanted and we have only gleaned one thing from this exchange: you are still a cock. He turns tail and leaves and I bemoan the injustice to my colleagues. Incredulous with rage as that man invades my life again.
But it isn’t just him that has been sent to destroy me. There are one or two blasts from the past that have discovered my whereabouts and haunt me. There is also a glittering array of new talent to frequent my days. In due course I shall introduce you to them. There is the Sleeping Ninja, Lotto Man (we have a lotto machine in the books department – bloody thing) A.K.A Wassname, Cat Piss Lady, Crazy Crutch Lady, Silver Snake man, this bearded grumpy old man who doesn’t have a nickname, Tony, Nigel Havers (yes, the real one from the telly and films…and panto). There are others too: the ugliest, most nasty new mum whose hobby is causing distress, the ‘Five Children and It’ boy and, of course, there are the staff – each with our own wonderfully differing natures, and we can be bastards too.
It’s good to be back.
