Authors: Alan Carr
‘Where are your specs?’ he said.
‘I’m wearing my contact lenses,’ I replied.
He tutted and muttered under his breath, ‘Vanity, vanity, vanity.’
I cast one eye over his beige slip-ons and his teeth that looked like a brown Stonehenge and put the key in the ignition. I was going to make sure that this was going to be our final drive together, Len.
When I arrived back at the test centre, Len was chain-smoking. I got out and deliberately looked sad. He tutted, and then I screeched, ‘I’ve passed!’ Months of contempt and abuse fizzled out in front of our eyes and we hugged. Neither of us could believe it. I had been a little bit out on the reverse parking, but not enough to get me failed. I had been a bit more focused this time; the erratic driving had been replaced by carefully controlled movement. It had killed me at points. A low-flying pigeon had dipped in front of the windscreen, and where previously I would have screamed and driven the car into a shop window to avoid killing it, this time I applied the brake and took control.
It was the happiest day of my life. No more expensive lessons, no more reversing, and no more Len.
‘Things are looking up,’ I told Len.
‘Yes Alan, they definitely are,’ he said, as he pressed his beige slip-on to the pedal and we drove back to Overstone.
* * *
With Agnetha gone, and daily 6.30 a.m. pick-ups in the temps’ minibus becoming a permanent fixture, I started to resign myself to this existence. Even as the minibus snaked its way around Northampton’s various council estates collecting more and more miserable temps, for some strange reason it didn’t dawn on me that my life was spiralling out of control. Nor did I understand that the longer I did these jobs, the more they were having potentially devastating effects on my CV.
Don’t get me wrong, gearbox degreasing was an integral part in the well-oiled machine that was paint-spraying. I had to wipe the grease off carefully with a cloth that I would soak in a massive vat of methylated spirits. Once the metal part was clean of any grease, the sprayers would coat it with paint. Then I would hang it up in a kiln, so it would dry and set. Take it off four hours later and – voilà! – a nice new painted piece of metal. Don’t ask me what they were for – I didn’t know and I didn’t care. All I knew was that they were something to do with cars.
The novelty of earning money and living with my parents was beginning to wear off, and ‘professional Alan’ was starting to reminisce about ‘student Alan’. The temps’ minibus was picking ‘professional Alan’ up at the same time as ‘student Alan’ would normally be stumbling through the door from a hard night’s clubbing. The only positive thing about the job
was that you were your own boss, you went at your own speed and didn’t have to talk to anyone. It was only when the bell went that you’d have a cup of tea with the sprayers, and have a chat about, more often that not, spraying.
Working all day with an open vat of meths without a mask was having strange effects on me, I realised. Like most of Britain’s workforce, I would turn up bored and tired at the beginning of the day, but by the end I was happy. No, not just happy, hysterical, and not just because home time was nearing. I would start giggling at the most mundane things and dancing at all the tunes that boomed out of the stereo, filling the cobwebbed corners of the factory. The Pet Shop Boys’ ‘Go West’ was the anthem of the summer and was never off Northants 96.6 and, believe me, that song wasn’t lost in my little outlet. I would be laughing hysterically, dancing away, pointing west and singing along with all my heart, while my brain was being reduced to mush, ravaged by the toxic fumes. Everyone left the factory shattered, but I always seemed to leave the place buzzing, only to endure the worst comedown with Mum and Dad over tea hours later wondering why I had a splitting headache and had lost the will to live.
Days turned to weeks, weeks turned to months, and nothing had really happened in my life – of course nothing had happened, you’d chosen to degrease gearboxes for a living, you dickhead! It wasn’t
The Apprentice
. I was feeling really low, nostalgia and meths had clouded my vision, and in a bolt from the blue it hit me: university isn’t going to interrupt this hell, this is your new life now! If I went on a game show my occupation would be ‘degreaser’. My introduction would be:
‘My name’s Alan Carr, I’m 21, and I wish I were dead.’ I was becoming a statistic. I’d started socialising with the other workers, been invited to the Christmas party, barbecues, you name it. For the first time in my life I was one of the boys, and I didn’t like it.
‘I’ve had enough,’ shouted Cracker as he burst through the canteen door. It was a bit too early for histrionics, but no one was going to tell him. He marched past the poster of Linda Lusardi, grabbed a chair and told us what he had had enough of. He’d found out that his wife was having an affair with the landlord of the local pub, the Wellington. Cracker had always informed me about his marital shenanigans, whether I wanted to hear them or not. Bored of telling everyone else in the factory, he must have seen me dancing the jig, off my face from the fumes of methylated spirits and gurning, and thought, ‘I’ll tell him about my troubles. He seems like he could put an upbeat twist on my predicament.’ I’d always smiled and nodded and agreed with whatever he had said, avoiding the tattooed fist that he would often waft in my face as he described what he’d do if he ever found the man who had been pumping his wife. After finding the culprit, he had a plan to get revenge on the accused and, as you can imagine, it wasn’t psychological mind games.
‘I’ve got balaclavas and baseball bats,’ he shouted aggressively.
I started looking at Linda Lusardi.
‘Who wants to smash up the Wellington after work with me?’
Most of the men got excited and said, ‘Yeah, Cracker, count us in!’
There was a pause, and then he asked, ‘And you, Alan?’
Well, I nearly spat my tea out. After I realised that this wasn’t some sick joke, I replied, ‘Oh yes, count me in,’ raising my mug of tea courageously.
What was I supposed to do? I’d never been in a fight before, let alone instigated one. How do you smash up a pub? Do you go for the top row? Piss in the pool table pockets? And, let’s be honest, in a police line-up I’d stick out like a sore thumb, firstly because of the voice and secondly because I was the only one wearing a pair of glasses over a balaclava.
My already awful day had been made worse by the thought of terrorising some poor, admittedly adulterous pub landlord. As it happened, Cracker couldn’t wait till home time and smashed up the pub alone in his lunch break. He came back with a bloodied nose, but a smile on his face – job done. All the lads were furious – ‘You should have waited for us.’ I mumbled something along the lines of, ‘Damn! I was looking forward to that …’ I trailed off at the end of the sentence, just in case he got a second wind.
T
hings couldn’t carry on like this. The meths quite literally were doing my head in. The company was diabolical and the prospects were grim, to say the least. Plus, some of the men had started to guess my sexual orientation. One man who was urinating on a pile of palettes waved his penis at me and shouted, ‘Bet you’ve never seen one as big as this before!’ He was right, but this really wasn’t the time or the place. Boy, you can tell you’re in a dead-end job when the highlight of your day is being flashed at by a work colleague. Something had to give.
Why is it that with a shit job the minutes drag, yet the years fly by, and before you know it you’re not the new boy, but one of the fixtures and fittings? I needed to push myself. My other friends had made progress. My upper school buddy Michael Underwood had started hosting
The
Ministry of Mayhem
on ITV Saturday mornings, and it awoke something in me. It showed me a life that might have been, if I’d been braver and more focused. This niggled me. Everyone seemed to be moving on, yet I was stuck. I could tell my family were embarrassed about my job because when people would ask how I was doing they would say that I’d died.
You can see how people get stuck in a rut. I couldn’t afford to leave Northampton, and where would I go if I did leave? London? I knew from experience that it’s impossible to live in London if you don’t earn a fortune, and in a weird way it would look like a step back. Then out of the blue I got a phone call from Catherine who had recently returned from her French Business School. Catherine was pissed off and, like me, instantly bored.
We met up and wanted an adventure. We decided to go travelling. We would save up and go around the world. We thought, ‘Yes, we’re skint, but you might as well be skint and tanned and on a beach with a mojito in your hand.’ That makes sense, I’m sure you’ll agree, so we started saving.
I decided to leave my gearbox-degreasing job and get a more office-based occupation that was more ‘me’. Smart slacks, a tie, photocopier – yes, it was feeling better already. I joined the temping agency Manpower, and soon I was being sent all over the county performing menial office tasks for very little reward or satisfaction. Obviously, due to my lack of (any) skills, it was mainly data entry or reception work that I would be prostituting myself for, at
£
4.40 an hour.
Data entry, for those of you who haven’t had the pleasure of doing it, is where you sit at a desk and are given a pile of statistics or names, which you have to enter into the company’s database. That’s it. No filing. No water-cooler moments chatting with your colleagues. No bonding. Just entering data. Temping in an office is no different to temping in a factory; you are ignored because you are a temp, you are persona non grata. People talk through you, and when they’re
making a cup of tea they don’t ask if you’d like one. I’ve lost track of the number of times a tin of Celebrations has bypassed me.
What didn’t help was that I was doing data entry for Mr Dog, the old name for Cesar Dog Food. Mr Dog had set up a competition. To win a caravan or whatever the prize was, the dog-owner/mug had to send in their dog’s name, breed and birthday, so Mr Dog could send the beloved pooch a card on its birthday. That’s what I did from nine to five for a month. ‘Pippa, Bearded Collie, 1989’, ‘Mr Tibbs, Chihuahua, 1993’, ‘Sue, Alsatian, 1987’. Some people had up to ten dogs, so imagine if they won the caravan. It didn’t bear thinking about. So my existence as a professional data entry-er continued: Inland Revenue, Barclaycard Fraud, British Gas. The only thing keeping me going would be the holiday brochures which I’d read in my breaks. In just a few months, Catherine and I would be off around the world for a year.
* * *
I was desperate to make as much money as possible, so I became a driver’s mate for Wicks’ Conservatories at the weekends. A driver’s mate accompanied a lorry driver on a long journey, keeping him company, map reading. More intriguing, though, was the fact that if you slept with him overnight you got an extra
£
100. Now I was like you; when I heard I had to sleep with the driver, I was horrified. I don’t mind doing a bit of map reading or taking the cellophane off his sandwiches, but I’m not giving over my body on the M25.
After I’d stopped dry heaving, the man in the agency told me that because Wicks’ delivered their conservatories the length and breadth of the country, I would have to sleep in a lay-by on the outskirts of London overnight and then carry on to Devon and Cornwall with a hopefully replenished and refreshed driver. The thought of
£
100 titillated me, and I accepted it. I could live like a king in Thailand on that and, you never know, the driver might be one of those big, burly ones, with thick arms and stubble who holds me tight in the lay-by as the other drivers rush past the window.
But no, he was a skinny thing with a hairstyle like a King Charles Cavalier Spaniel. Yes, he was minging, bald with two strands of hair that hung down either side of his sorry little grey face like cheap curtains. His breath stank: every time he spoke it was as if someone had opened the door of a portaloo.
Never mind, I thought, he could have a great sense of humour, and the miles would fly by as we laughed our way through the various counties, unable to read the map because of the tears in our eyes. No, he was deadly dull, but what’s worse is, he thought he had a sense of humour. Ten minutes into the journey, he wound down his window and shouted to a field of pigs, ‘Where’s your uniform?’ God.
Jim and I just didn’t get along. We’d got off on the wrong foot because I had turned up in jeans. Hadn’t I been told it was shirt and tie? Shirt and tie? For delivering conservatories?
‘Jeans don’t look right.’
‘Well, neither does your hair, but you don’t see me complaining.’
To top it all, he deliberately sped up and drove his lorry into a flock of low-flying seagulls, killing the back one. So I had the remains of a squashed gull in my face for the best part of the M1. If there’s one thing that I am worse at than football, it’s map-reading. I admit it, I don’t get it, the symbols, the lines, the key. What does it all mean? Plus, this was before SatNav, so it was really just me and a map, and the number of times I directed him up a B road to find that a 2-tonne truck or whatever it weighed wasn’t allowed to go over a humpbacked bridge … Every time I would make an innocent mistake he would start kicking off about his bonus; he got an extra pound added to his wages if he got there within 30 minutes. Apparently, being directed the wrong way down a one-way street by me affected his bonus.
‘I don’t want to lose my pound,’ he grunted.
‘Look, I’ll give you the sodding pound. Just let me find out what these red-coloured roads are.’
Once we had finally arrived at the houses and carried the conservatory from the back of the lorry, we were asked whether we’d want a cup of tea. As we all know, they were just being polite, but not only did Jim say ‘Yes’, he said ‘Yes’ every time. So Jim and I and the owners of the house would all be standing there in awkward silence nursing a cup of tea in their kitchen. Apart from Jim, none of us wanted to be there. How much small talk can you make about conservatories?