Yes, yes, greetings. So much for what I said last week when I kicked-off the last blog; praising the glorious weather. In true British style, it’s all gone a bit taters and mould, mate. It was snowing earlier on, but not that type of snow that gets you all excited, it’s that light, muggy snow that doesn’t settle. Just gets you cold and miserable. At least it’s familiar.
Seems a little convenient, mate; the sharp turn in weather, coinciding with the sharp turn of the heating dial, coinciding with the sharp rise in energy prices. I occasionally flirt with conspiracy theories, often for my own my amusement but this one is just too coincidental. Someone’s making some dough out of this, surely? Shouldn’t have opened my mouth.
So this week, I’m uploading the third story, from Make Your Own Bed and Hope for the Best, this show I’m developing about my experiences of employment. This one is based on my time as a trolly-boy, at Waitrose, in Horley. Imagine that last sentence was just said in the style of an old veteran, regaling another war-story to his eager Grandchild, whilst dipping his grubby mist into a bag of Werther’s Originals.
TROLLEY BOY
Friday evenings, Waitrose, every shift would start the same.
‘Paul, can you do the trollies for me?’
‘For me’
They always said it like it’s was a personal favour that I was doing them, like it wasn’t part of the job and like I ever had any choice in the matter.’
‘yea alright’
So I’d grab the horrible fluorescent jacket that made you sweat and stink of the weird geezer that did the day shift and make my way out into the car park, where I’d be greeted by the sight of a load of uncollected trollies, all spilling out the trolly bays, like a 5pm Primark sale-rale. Because, no one would’ve done it since the weird geezer on the day shift clocked off at three o clock.
The trolleys came under the jurisdiction of the checkouts, where I apparently worked, but aside from a few old boys and a handful of spotty part-time strings like me, most of the checkout staff were female, yet they never have to do the trollies; unless there’s was no males to do it.
Geezers weren’t even allowed to have ear piercings, so I had to put a plaster over that shiny gold stud I had in my ear that I’d recently had done. How would the checkout girls notice my stud? Hold tight Linda, though, she stuck up for the boys when she supervised and let me have longer on my breaks when it was pissing it down.
Despite the mug off, I quite liked it. It was a simple job, collect the trollies, scattered around the car park and take them back to the main trolley park by the entrance. It was a little bit like those Wildlife documentaries with the big orchestral sound-tracks, providing a score to the Lioness, with a fresh batch of new born cubs, who keep trying to scamper away, only for the Lioness to carefully scoop them up in her jaw and bring them back to the loving embrace of her bosom. Sometimes, to amuse myself, I’d imagine there was a big orchestral score sound-tracking me, as I collected the trollies and bought them back to the loving embrace of the shop front-trolly park.
I got to be on my own and think about stuff, like girls on the checkouts that I fancied and ideas for putting on music gigs, and random lyric ideas that would pop into my head. I’d started MCing, on Drum and bass and Garage and was trying to work on my double-time Skibbadee flow. The carpark had this overflow bit at the back, where only a few local winos went, it was a good spot to kill some time and practise some bars.
I got a lot of thinking done out there, but there was always some prick, like a customer, or a supervisor, that disturbed my train of thought, in the same way teachers did at school, or college, where I was by that point.
I’d come to the realisation that I was shit at most things. I was already way behind at college. Like school, I was ok at some things, like PE and English and crap at everything else and though I hated maths, I knew that okt+crap=shit. At Waitrose, I was ok at the trollies and that was it
I’d clear the first few trolley bays, bring them of the front, sneak a look through the big glass at my checkout colleagues, bleeping and scanning, or idly chatting to each other during quiet times.
Often, as soon as I’d cleared the first few bays, they would quickly refill before I could get to the next lot of bays, like that arcade game where you had to repeatedly bash the monsters on the head. They just keep reappearing
Customers would get in my way, pricks, or did’nt look when they were reversing out of a spot, just as I'd carefully be snaking a train of fifteen or so trollies back to the front of the store. Or, they were just plain-lazy and didn’t even bother to wheel them back to one of the, several, trolley parks, strategically located, equi-distant from each other, around the car park; it's not that difficult, yet some of these nobs, would just dump them anywhere, sometimes in the middle of the road or in a trolley-bay, taking up a valuable parking space, bellends! Sometimes, they’d wheel them all the way to a parking bay and then just toss the thing so it's at some obtuse angle and therefore makes it difficult to fit more trollies in, then some other cock-piece will follow suit and do the same thing, so you’d end up getting a trolley bay with five carelessly placed trollies, when there should be twenty five in that one space, is it really that difficult? Wankers!
Sometimes I’d leave the trollies that were randomly scattered about, they served as stark examples to customers, that some of their fellow customers had no respect for the delicate eco-system that was trolly-collection and that everyone had part to play in that cyclical drama, not just inept, day-dreaming part time timers and weird geezers on the day shift.
Once I’d got on top of the whole operation, I could swan round at a leisurely pace, keeping everything in order, I got a sense of satisfaction in it all, I was knackered after most shifts.
As most of the supervisors often seemed to forget I was even out there, on my own, doing the trollies, I took massive liberties on my breaks and despite feeing like I was the dick-head doing the shit job, if I’m honest, I think it suited me. I didn’t have to talk to anyone or deal with numbers and customers the money was better than Smiths.
