No. 7 - A psychiatric unit in North London

Being fired has not been a rare occurrence in my occupational history, although you’d struggle to find a trace of this on my CV. I was fired from my first job after graduating and I think it did me the world of good to get that kind of experience so early in my occupational career. I’ve met many people who’ve taken being fired far too much to heart. Shit happens. Read The Fall by Camus and get over it. Roger Federer loses the occasional match from time-to-time, and he’s still the best tennis player in the world.

But from an employer’s perspective, firing an employee can be a potentially explosive situation, and my multiple experiences of it and comparisons with others have revealed certain parallels: some employers definitely have it down to a fine art. Firing courses are undoubtedly run (by firing squads?) to help employers deal with bolshy and recalcitrant fuckers like myself. Booking a room about two miles from where you actually work to inform you of the decision seems to be a popular tactic…

While I’d like to keep today’s entry to the theme of being fired, I have to digress to mention the woman I had to work with for most of my time there, by virtue of her being one of the most awful, self-aggrandising fucks I’ve ever met. Within a few minutes of meeting her she’d told me how she was an ‘actress’ (I think extra was what she meant – actors being the people who say stuff) and had been in a Bob Dylan film (Hearts of Fire, although she was old enough to have been in Dont Look Back), and was a published author etc. She told me how she’d ‘lectured’ on a ‘dictation ‘course’ she ran, which I later found out consisted of her telling junior doctors how to dictate into a dictaphone… I think her follow-up course was how to drink out of a bottle.

She was also work-shy and permanently on the sick as only NHS employees can get away with. If the phone rang it would induce tachycardia in her, so to get her valves pumping I used to put my mobile phone in my drawer and dial her about six times an hour. She also used to ring her husband a couple of times a day and rip into him in the most savage way possible. Hey, it wasn’t his fault you weren’t a contender. He at least returned your call.

She eventually left when she secured a promotion, but on leaving found she’d actually have to do some work so tried to get her old job back. Unfortunately for her I had now occupied her post so she was shit out of luck, as I would be after finding out that even the most valiant pawn gets taken when it comes to Endgame.

I won’t go into why I was fired, mainly because it’s not so very interesting when compared to the way I was fired. I received the full-on Piers Morgan treatment – the escort round the premises while you grab and bag your possessions into a binliner. I think getting the binbag treatment is a badge of honour to be worn with pride, and my great regret was more people didn’t get to witness it. It was also symptomatic of the cowardice of management that while they made the decision to sack me they got the two of the people I worked with for the past eighteen months to perform firing squad duties and escort me around the building. I know, they were just following orders. My managers had also concealed the decision from almost everyone there, who were a bit shocked as I popped into their offices to say ‘bye’ and to have to do so with my two-woman escort. There was even an incident when they tried to stop someone talking to me for more than one minute, and it looked like things were going to kick off. Drama! Two women fighting over me! It was like something out of a 1980s Australian afternoon soap.

Still, what goes around comes around. A few months ago I found out that one of the secretaries who’d escorted me as I bin-bagged my possessions had typed her final letter, so there was at least some belated comfort I could take from the experience: I may have been fired, but at least I’m not dead.

Next week: No. 6 - Adventures in Conservative country

No. 8 - A media sales firm in Paddington

Watching the Badger's pyrrhic victory at the boardroom in the Apprentice last night (a definite case of dead badger walking, methinks) set me ruminating about my own ill-advised dabble in the world of sales, at a time before I'd managed to clerically corner myself. Having watched all the US and UK series of The Apprentice it’s quite clear that, based on these characters, I’m not sales material. Sales requires a degree of self-delusion or lack of self awareness possessed in spades by the likes of Paul (Peter Kay) or Ruth Badger (Pauline Quirke) from the current UK series. All self-deluding bullshitters to a man, or badger, as the case may be.

I should have known from the start of my training that my career in sales was going to be short-lived, especially as we were being trained by one of the most self-deluding tossers in London. As if his genes hadn’t been cruel enough to leave him looking like Jeffrey Archer, I*n Sl*ra's mission in life was to indoctrinate us with his Gordon Greco ‘greed is good’ bullshit. As part of our training we had to say to the rest of the training group what we most desired. A big fuck-off car? Holidays in the sun? World peace? But who would want world peace compared to a 20k company car and its own spot in the company carpark? The Archhole lookalike would bang on about he was living the capitalist dream (and look what that did to Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling) and so could we: “I got myself a Jag but that wasn’t enough. I wasn’t satisfied with the Jag; I wanted a Bora.” Or, as he pronounced it, “a Borraaaugh”. The balding fat fuck.

And how were we going to secure these riches? By using The Script, the Holy Grail of sales. The first rule of The Script was that you do not deviate from The Script. The second rule of The Script was that you do not deviate from The Script. Thing was, at least to me, The Script was bollocks. As was standing on my feet all day having to read it (apparently your pitch is more focussed when you’re standing up, although I found this wasn't the case by 3pm in the afternoon).

I also had the unenviable job of pitching to companies and getting them to advertise their disability products in our magazine. Sounds good, except our magazine was being marketed in the third world. Increased obesity rates and an aging population in the first world mean good business for wheelchair firms so, surprisingly, the firms I cold-called were saving their advertising budgets for these particular markets. Nothing personal, just business. But I tell you that when the third world gets its economies going and their people start living on more than a dollar a day they’re going to love the Jazzy 4560 lazy-boy wheelchair. Live the American Dream, baby…

Once my ‘deal’ with Stannah Stairlifts fell through (If they hadn’t been paying Thora Hird so much I would have got my commission) my motivation dipped. And for someone of a self-conscious nature, having to hear my own voice for hours at a time reading the same ol' lines was terrible. It was like Glengarry Glen Ross meets Groundhog day, and after a while I even started to dissociate as I pitched; it was almost like I heard a schizophrenic third-person commentary running through my head (“He's pitching again. He's not going to close. Doesn't he sound very Welsh when he says ‘pressure sore management!'”).

Looking around and hearing everyone pitching from the same script made it feel as if I was in a human battery-hen farm, all competing to lay the most golden egg. But as I came to realise, that’s exactly what it was all about. If they could get enough of us going through The Script on a daily basis, getting people to hang on the line long enough for our Top Bookers to close the deals, then they'd get the business in. It was a numbers game, all about playing percentages. And self-delusion. Remember: quitters never win, and winners never quit.

Not being a winner I quit – just an unmourned death of a salesman. And yet to learn my lesson I re-registered with my old temping agency. But without wanting to sound like Jack Lemmon in Glengarry Glen Ross I wouldn't have minded getting some of the 'good leads', although maybe there was more to it than that. A Portuguese girl who started there on my last week got a deal on her first phone call. Then, amazingly, she got a deal on her second. The thing was, she was calling Portugal. That's where they went wrong with me: they should have got me cold-calling Wales.

Tomorrow: No. 7 – Back to the public sector.

So no entry today. End of!

No. 9 - Connexions near Baker St.

As anyone who’s ever temped or watched the current series of the Apprentice knows, people who work in recruitment are bullshitters. I learnt this the hard way through 2-3 years of temping and wish the Apprentice had been around then. That way I could have just watched ‘world-class presenter’ Mani in action and the equation would have formed instantly in my head: person in recruitment = bullshitter. Instead I made the mistake of putting my earning potential and career development in the hands of these tossers, which explains why I’m broke and they’re largeing it up on the Apprentice. The amount of times I’d get a phonecall about my latest booking to hear, ‘they’re such lovely people, it’s a nice place, you’ll really enjoy it’, and then you get there and find yourself in some kind of occupational Camp X-ray.

The only thing lacking in the Connexions place I ended up at for 48 hours was the jumpsuit. On arrival I found my fellow enemy combatants had had their spirit broken long ago and were in a permanent state of learned helplessness. The reason: Fat Female Public Sector Manager From Hell (FFPSMFH). She used to sit behind her desk - actually, I don’t think she sat behind it, I think the fat fuck had trapped herself behind it years ago and it had now became part of her (I never did see her walking while I was there) - barking orders at everyone. She resembled Davros from Dr. Who, if Davros’s original motivations had changed and he was now really into making piss-poor posters from clipart and getting them laminated.

She really was the worst type of FFPSMFH. The kind who has to have ‘all the packages’, irrespective of whether they’ll ever be used. Generous budgets are blown on computers and software that will never be properly utilised. It can make you cry to see how public sector money can be wasted. A Trident nuclear submarine I can take; computers RAM’d to the max and being used to produce graphic design genocide I can’t.

All Davros used to do during the day was eat, shout and and flick through the Dell catalogue. After flying through the work duties I’d been assigned, she tried to get me to spend my remaining four hours there creating empty folders on all the computers on there (I simply checked who else was authorised to sign my time sheet and went back to surfing the Net). I probably cost her £150 for my two days there and she was determined to get every penny’s worth – shame she couldn’t have done the same with the IT mountain she was building there.

Thursday: No.8- A media sales firm in Paddington.

Many things can make a job hell - your pay, your working conditions, your job duties, your colleagues. Get all four in one post and it's the motherlode, the bomb, the fuckin' Baghdad basement of jobs.

No. 10
A North London Hospital in Hampstead
Child & Adolescent Psychiatry Department

Mercifully my stay here was brief (3-4 weeks or so) but it was Christmas at the time, so more like no, no, no than yo, ho, ho. In this case it was my colleagues who drove me mad. Being a temp means being right at the bottom of the occupational food chain, so even your post-it notes think they can boss you around.

I'm not sure what was worse: the chastising I got from one colleague whenever she caught me sending an email ('Always, Chris, with the private things!' A tad hypocritical, in that she'd usually be in the middle of texting someone as she issued her reprimand.) or the hairdryer treatment I'd get from another if I failed to drop whatever I was doing and answer the phone (remind me, what were answerphones created for?). These two also hated one another for what each wanted but lacked (looks in one case, a family in the other), which meant I'd get caught in the office crossfire between them.

But what really secured this job its place in my Top 10 was the boy-child of a consultant I had to endure. If William Hague was turned into a matryoshka (Russian doll) then this guy would have been the doll at the bottom. It must be hard to go prematurely bald and also be as diminuitive as he was, and I'm sure it had no implications for the development of his adult personality. At all.

However, it made his cringeworthy attempts at flirting with his statuesque secretary a delight to watch, something akin to Alan Partridge with his secretary from Partrige Productions, but minus the chocolate. And the owls. I hope for his sake he was never successful; the woman was so talentless yet status hungry (she planned to translate the collected works of Jung into Serbo-Croat - no doubt the 'collective unconscious' would have been translated as the 'pissed stag party' or something) his illicit fling would have ended up with him being shagged so far into the desk he would have become one with the wood, a place i believe all matryoshkas start from...

Tomorrow: No. 9 - Connexions near Baker St...

Today is my birthday, and on this day were born Hitler. And Nicholas Lyndhurst. Great. Sharing my birthday with a genocidal dictator and a plonker. I've just done some research to find if anyone halfway decent shares the same day and thus far have found Luther Vandross (although he won't be celebrating much today as he's dead), Bill Cosby (although his birthdate is listed as 1905 so that's probably wrong)and Joan Miro (one of my favourite painters).

If I'd been a bit more prompt and come out the day before then it would have been my shared birthdate with Dudley Moore (short and dead) and Kate Hudson (brain dead). A day later and it would have been Iggy Pop (certified flasher) and Tony Danza (Joanie loves Chachi!). Is there a day when only cool people were born? Probably not. Fuck it. I'll have lunch and then invade Poland... it's what us April 20 men were made for!

I ponder this as I try to mark time for the rest of the working day. I have just over one more hour to 'kill' and emailing people just ain't hitting my neural reward centres like it used to. I gradually became less interested in the responses I got and, like a chess grandmaster, was starting to plan out my replies six emails ahead. Of course, if your recently emailed colleague takes ages to consider how to react to black knight to K4, or has some work to do, then the day can drrrrrrrrrrrrraaag.

So my newly minted blog is an attempt to resolve the time killing quandary, and to document creative ways in which the working week is filled when there just ain't much to do.

If killing time is a sin then my most blasphemous act of the day was to start a sword fight with an upturned crucifix made of light balsa wood. An annoying priest visits the office and leaves all his religious paraphernalia around the place. No doubt he will become a regular figure in my work blog. His perspective on time must be weird: I only have this lifetime to kill; he has eternity. Bummer!