OS Map of a Paradise Lost

I was actually planning out a whole series of blogs a few days back, where I would document the torment of my new job in the fast food retail sector. Every post would be a gushing pouring tsunami of bile, where I would write under a vague pseudonym and discuss my exploit in painstaking, horrifying detail. It would be like a combination of Thompson's gonzo journalism and A Child Called It. But, much to my annoyance, and of course to the detriment of any gritty social realism ever being featured on this blog, it's not that bad a job. The hours are fairly long and they can be late, which obviously sucks. Apart from that I can't really poke any fault in it. I'm going to be earning minimum wage for whatever I do before my PGCE, so I might as well accept that and just try and work full time.

It's busy, and time passes relatively fast. If I'm pleasant towards customers, they're usually nice back (lolz shock). My co-workers are all nice people. Even the dreaded managers, while still somewhat of a formidable presence, are surprisingly toothless, seemingly are too embroiled in whatever business they may be engaged in to harass me too much. And anyway, it’s head down, work hard as the mantra to embrace if you want the shift to pass quickly.

The smell of Detergent 1, 2 and 10 will be permanently inscribed in my cerebral cortex, and it’s certainly preferable to the smell of chip fat. Wash table, wash table, wash worktop, polish chrome service, wash worktop, wriggle toes (…) and now I am somewhat autonomous within the monotony, no need to take command (there’s no real commander anyway (everyone has their own way of doing things. Me? I heap as much Ice Cream/Cheese onto whatever I’m serving as possible as some kind of neutered Machiavellian subterfuge against my fairly benevolent oppressors) drifting of my own volition from one explicitly set task to another; my shift might as well be represented by a series of significant hexadecimal figures (16 tasks being the optimum number to keep you entertained, evidently).

Never at any one point do I actually consider the true nature of the building I wilfully visit when I feel like it. On a crafty freezing air break, I can hear the distant rumblings of torture or explosions or talking CG animals or explosions, but aside from these “oh yeah” moments, my food court might as well be located at a portal leading to a golf course, limbo, Cromer, a bus station, that awesome freak show we went to, something potentially cool yet obviously easy to blot out through drudgery.

Sometimes I wonder how the ushers cope; their worlds mingling with the worlds of others in unprecedented ways, their sweeping broom brushing against the toe of a patron, the distant rumblings of torture or explosions or talking CG animals or explosions altogether more palpable, their eyes, ears nose constantly having to adjust to the continually malleable circumstances they are thrust into? While I of course have my ketchup smeared (better clean it quick) work top as my neat surgical divide between I, my motley companions, and them out there going to see films. My apron is my shield, my baseball cap is something else protective; I smile and laugh with people on either side of the incision and frankly I don’t give a shit/I’m attentive, hard working.

During the inevitable lulls in patrons wafting in, a kind of magic 20 minutes descends, and staff from every dept. flock around the food court, lean on the incision and tell me how drunk they got last night, and what managers are getting married and how bored they are and that they had college all day and will do tomorrow as well. After this, I may reward my hard work by briefly resting on a work top, a celebratory re-cleaning of something that’s already clean, wash table, wash table, 4, B, 0, 9, 3, 7, 7, E (…) whereupon I walk outside into the wet grass, shadows formed by rushing lorries, the empty train lines, tracts of concrete, the hum of the red lighting strips, the inky black of the canal, the faces formed by wispy fog and then I get back and laugh at Charlene ‘til it’s time for bed.