Things I've Tried To Do For Money: Part 1
1999-2003: “Are You There God? It’s Me, Honest Labour”
Since quitting my corporate video job last year, I’ve been thinking a lot about work. Where is it? How can I get it? And, do I even want it?
Life is 100 times more expensive than it was the last time I was out of work, yet every employer seems to want more for less, with the average job posting reading something like this:
“Are you an enthusiastic shooter-producer-editor-TiTok superstar with 15 + years experience, who loves working 16 hour shifts in a chaotic newsroom environment for minimum wage and no benefits?! Apply for an unpaid 2 week trial here!
*Must know Adobe Animate, Mandarin, and Salesforce.”
I have long-held suspicion that work is a scam.
And because of inflation, it’s getting scammier.*
All you have to do is look at the career aspirations I've had throughout my lifetime to see that the reality of a career is at complete odds with the very concept of “aspiration”, a word that embodies feelings of enthusiasm, imagination and hope:
♥️ Katy’s Career Aspirations by Age ♥️:
Age 5-6: Perfumer.
Age 7-8: Children's Book Illustrator.
Ages 9-10: Vet / Horse Whisperer.
Age 11-12: Stop-Motion Animator.
Age 13-14: Academy Award Winner for Best Supporting Actress.
Age 15 Onwards: Lying down in a corn field where no one can find me.
(Aged 15 was when I got my first job.)
Let’s be real, there’s nothing dignified about working for money. We’re the smartest animals, yet we’re the only species that has backed itself into a culture that demands we earn tokens to survive. It's so embarrassing! Like grown men shooting water pistols into a clown's mouth at a county fair just to impress their girlfriends. And sure, the ream of paper tokens looks long and plentiful, until you ask the carnie what 4000 tickets gets you, and he points to a soiled neon pink bear that has “I ♥️ Orlando” on its belly.**
I’m not saying that work can’t be enjoyable, formative, enriching and educational, but that rarely has a direct correlation to the amount we get paid. Connecting money to what we love to do is so gouache - so tacky! And in America they've linked employment to their ability to access healthcare too! Is everyone ok?
There’s nothing like a few months of unemployment to make you question everything. Capitalism, careers, money, rent, hobbit life, van life, my value and place in the world, and the price of Haribo. I look at my CV - which is really just a list of all my major life choices - and think, “Is this……..utter shit?”.
So, as a way of reacquainting myself with my actual skillset, and reminding myself what I like, and don’t like, about work, I’ve started to flesh out an unofficial record of every job I’ve ever had. Proof that I am employable, and that work can be enjoyable.***
If this secret work history tells you anything, it's that while I may be confused, unconventional, and possibly suffering from ADHD, work-shy I am not. I literally love work so much I’ve tried all the jobs! If you’re a potential employer reading this, just know that for the short time you have me, I will be an absolute workhorse; strong, talented, enigmatic, and somewhat skittish. I’ll be your confidante, work-wife, little bitch, and right-hand woman, and I will fight tooth-and-nail for your corporation until I get bored or decide to leave the continent.
This week’s installment explores the period 1999-2003: The Girl Power years, an erratic, and confusing time of young women high-kicking, and karate-chopping their way through life dressed as sexy babies, with no real coherent mission other than to make a lot of noise, and flash their tits at old men in suits.
1999-2003: “Are You There God? It’s Me, Honest Labour”
During my Provincial Job Era I could be found shuffling around supermarkets, pubs, and frickin’ boats (!), doing the type of manual labour that has kept the youth of South East Kent off the streets for 100s of years. It was a time of great schlepping; clomping about in steel-toe-capped shoes and sweating through ill-fitting, polyester uniforms. A time of name badges and hair nets, lowest in the pecker order, sent out to collect the milk, load the ice bucket, or drag a heavy bag of trash up an alleyway. Everything was a mix of bucolic and disgusting. I was always cold and in the elements, staring wistfully at a strawberry field or pebble beach, but only because I had just dumped something into a skip, or was on a cigarette break.
Any physical scar I have on my body is from this time.
In my late teens, I worked night shifts at Sainsbury’s, Britain's third best supermarket, where my job was to swap out the Buy One Get One Free labels. In the hierarchy of entry-level roles it sat somewhere in the middle; above Freezer Boy, below Kiosk Girl. Whilst the job was not overtly grueling, it was a form of low-level torture. Working night shifts under flickering supermarket strip lights as I fumbled paper slips into poorly designed plastic covers that would splinter and crack, meant my hands were always covered in cuts. I had a headache for the entire summer of 2001. I was also pretty unliked amongst the rest of the staff, regarded as snooty, or perhaps pathetic, because I was allowed to sit down on the job while the label printer ran. It didn’t matter that my chair was stationed in front of a walk-in meat locker.
For a brief time before college, I had the deeply lucrative gig of “working the boats”, well-paid shift work for P&O Ferries. Before starting, I had to go through a tedious 4-week training program conducted by an ex-army type out of a prefab building near Dover docks. Another test of endurance, we would sit for hours on end staring at slow moving power-points and VHS videos that all hammered home the same singular, salient piece of nautical wisdom: “Don’t fall off the boat!”. I was given the role of Junior Plate Scraper, my only job was intercept plates before they slid off the tables, and decant the cold, slimy remnants of Full English breakfasts into trash cans. Unfortunately, you cannot fake or phone-in sea legs. After my first shift, during which I crossed the choppy English Channel six times over 9hours, gagging at the smell of vomit mixed with Duty Free perfume that someone luckier than me got to stand in front of a shop and spray, I graciously forfeited my position.
But going all the way back to age 15, my very first introduction to the world of work started in pubs. It was here that I learned the subtle art of not getting a glass smashed over my head. Being a teenage glass collector in pre-#MeToo times meant Catherine Zeta Jonesing it round the groping hands of football fans who were sometimes the dad of someone you knew at school. I learnt that bars are delicate ecosystems operating under the guiding principle of “Don’t upset the cook or the regulars”. They were a crash-course in fawning, knowing when to grin and nod as slurring men educated me on what was wrong with my generation, insinuating they fought in WW2 despite being only 59 years old, and very much my postman.
The closest I came to any kind of drama, or work-related stress, was when I worked in a pub near my school in Sandwich. It was part of a dodgy franchise run out of Thanet and the rumour was that the husband and wife owners, we’ll call them Gordon and Sheila to protect their identities, had already been disciplined after head office obtained CCTV footage of Sheila having sex on the snooker table with multiple men, who were not Gordon while Gordon watched. Gordon would take any opportunity to remind me that he knew the Kray twins, the only men capable of terrorizing from beyond the grave. Trust me, if you ever meet someone who knew the Krays, or worse, pretends to have known them, please understand that the person you are talking to is fucking PSYCHO DOT COM.
Gordon was approximately 1000 years old and had the leathery face of a Spitting Image character. Sheila, who looked like King Charles II’s ghost, would drift around the B&B above the pub drinking Bacardi miniatures that she would extract from her giant white wig, leaving the empty bottles for me to find behind the radiators. My goal was always to make it through a shift without Gordon drunkenly cornering me to tell me I was part of the inner circle ( or The Golden Circle of Trust) meaning I could call on him, and all the men he knew, to violently attack my enemies or procure very cheap meat. All I had to do was say the word. As a vegetarian and pacifist, I never said anything. When I would open up in the mornings, the first people to come in were the gambling addicts, obsessed with winning big on the rigged fruit machine (the most profitable thing about the pub) The place was tinged with casual violence, dusty fryer grease, and defeat. Once, a regular smashed his hand through the window of the back door and told me he loved me.
But besides the addicts and the maniacs, I loved being a bar wench. I loved the attention ( being the gatekeeper of alcohol in a room full of British people practically makes you a god!) I loved opening up The Bohemian, a pub on Deal seafront, on Sunday mornings, jangling about with my heavy bunch of keys while the rest of the town slept. I loved unloading a steaming hot glass washer as the low sun cut across the dusty air, and bounced off the over-varnished table tops. I loved being in charge of the music, and the coffee machine. I loved saying “I’ve just gotta change the barrel” before disappearing mysteriously into the basement where I’d frantically inhale a stolen packet of cheese and onion crisps. I loved closing down, “You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here”, shaking my head, flipping a dirty rag over my shoulder, and corralling men out the door like a world-weary madam despite being a fresh-faced virgin. I loved lock-ins with a select few, swaying to Jeff Buckley and Red Hot Chili Peppers, smoking indoors, and making out until the early hours. It was Us vs The World, at the end of the world, huddled in a dark corner of the bar, in some dark corner of Kent, as the smudged light at the end of the pier flickered through windows murky with seaspray.
These memories are not rose-tinted, they really were good old days. Because I was young, liberated and at the precipice of life. I hadn’t failed at anything. I hadn't had my heart broken. My parents were still together. I had no debt, no real responsibilities, and I was gaga in love with my high school boyfriend.
I would return to The Bohemian throughout my university years, and early 20s, whenever I was home for the Summer. I met my second boyfriend there. He took months to ask me out. Whenever he would enter the pub on a Saturday night, I would feel a cold jab in my stomach, and do everything I could to look preoccupied, deep in conversation with some sozzled regular. Then it would be “countdown to conversation” as I would spy his head get closer to my end of the bar, bobbing over a sea of people. When he finally asked me out it was over text, long after he’d left and I was closing up the pub. I vividly remember standing alone in the dark hallway about to set the alarm. His text lit up the green screen of my Nokia 3410 “Would you like to go out with me? I’m asking because I think you’re lovely”
It was also during a shift at The Bohemian that I ate my first avocado, given to me cut in half with salt and pepper by a South African mega babe called Leisl.
This was good, honest work. Pubs are one of the few places I’ve felt community and belonging. It was all so deeply simple (apart from when my boss told me he had to start taxing my tips).
OK, so let’s recap: What did I learn during my Provincial Job Era?
Sitting down on the job is fine, but not if it’s by an open freezer or makes you a social pariah.
If the job involves standing, it must be on dry land.
Bar work is fun, until it’s not.
I prefer a workplace that allows me to have complete control of the music and be the main focus of attention (Oh god, do I want to be a fucking DJ???)
If you smoke, you get more breaks.
Big bunches of jangly keys are cool.
The fruit machine always wins.
Get out at the first mention of the Kray twins.
Only young boys and lesbians can be pot washers.
Only good-looking older sisters can be kiosk girls.
It’s possible to meet a romantic partner at work.
It’s possible to meet a stalker at work.
No amount of money is worth skidding in vomit and baked beans for.
Avocados are the bananas of my generation.
Look out for next weeks’ newsletter when I cover 2003-2006: University (otherwise known as “The Wilderness Years”).
This is incredible. You ARE a poet.
So brilliant! If healthcare is going to be tied to employment in the awful country that is America, at least give us free Haribo!