[The Garden Centre: Spring 1999 (Saturdays or Sundays, but only a few)]
My mother thought I was old enough by this point to get a regular weekend Job. And I wanted money for two reasons:
to buy Citadel Miniatures, and paints and brushes with which to paint them;
to go and see bands with one of the friends I wasn’t sure if I liked. (The one I was least sure I didn’t like. We’ll call him Kent.)
With regard to number 1 on the above list, Prospective Employer, I had an orc-and-goblin Blood Bowl team, a couple of niftily customized Necromunda gangs, and a paltry collection of unpainted Skaven. I’d begun the collection in North Wales, naturally progressing from Mini Boglins to something more "grown up". The models were expensive; but even though I didn’t like the social side of the shops—with the friendly men with ponytails, and the boys even nerdier than me—I wouldn’t completely give up on Games Workshop until I was ready to call myself an adult. And that time was some years down the line yet.
As for the bands (reason number 2 on the above list) they were the tail-end of Britpop and whatever came next. But not Nu metal; never Nu metal. (Because what was wrong with the metal we already had?) My favourite band when I was 15 was Symposium; they sang songs about Tigwillow—who I was still in love with; but increasingly in that emblematic way I described, since I knew less and less about her, and by now we hardly ever wrote to one another, and I couldn't really remember what she looked like.
Sorry, yes, the Job: I was by now earning Pocket Money for the first time in my life, in return for picking up my younger brother from school and keeping him occupied in town or at the library until it was time for us both to be taken back to The Suburban Culdesac by one of our parents, both of whom had Jobs in The Cathedral City. What would this have paid? A pound a day? A pound a week? I don’t remember; but it certainly wasn’t sufficient to sustain my expensive hobby, nor the social life I was beginning to want as a 15-year-old boy, whose only “friend” (Kent) lived in The Cathedral City: a twenty-minute bus-ride away. So (following a tip-off from my mother) I went to The Garden Centre and secured a weekend Job. I want to say it was a Sunday Job, not a Saturday Job; but I’ve no documentation to confirm it either way. It was run by a ruddy-faced Bossman with grey curly hair who paid me something like two pounds an hour. There was a Tall Old Man, who breathed audibly but otherwise hardly ever spoke, and a nice Young Boy of 12 who’d already worked there for almost a year.
I disliked gardening, which my mother would sometimes make me do now that we had a garden again—because she’d always loved gardening, and always would. The Garden Centre I worked at wasn’t one of those big out-of-town ones with a café and an aquarium with neon tetra fish and a life-size plastic gorilla unaccountably for sale at an absolutely unfathomable price. But a Job was a Job, and I needed a Job; so that was that.
The Role
I was taught to use the tills first, and that was easy. I didn’t like talking to the customers, in case they asked me questions I couldn’t answer—about gardening, or anything else. But I soon learnt that talking at tills isn’t like talking elsewhere, and that the course of the conversation was usually reliable and predictable. The only problem was that either the Bossman or The Tall Old Man had to be there on the till next door, because I wasn’t old enough to be trusted near the money on my own. The thought of stealing the money hadn’t even occurred to me, because I’d never thought about stealing money—not even the coins in The Thousand-Year-Old Holy Well behind the duck pond near The Villa that my oldest brother used to pilfer; not even after he’d moved to England, thus leaving a Vacancy in that Role that my older brother was too Workshy to occupy. If The Tall Old Man was on the next till, he would stand and look straight ahead and breathe audibly and reject my attempts to converse—which were, admittedly, few and poor. If he stopped breathing audibly, which he sometimes did for a while, I’d wonder if he’d died; but he never did while I was working there. If the Bossman was on the next till—and if nobody was buying anything—he would become agitated, and tell me to go and help The Young Boy tidy the pots.
Tidying the pots was the other main task at The Garden Centre. It involved pulling out weeds and moss from in or around the pots of the plants they were selling so as to make them look newer and cleaner. This was what I mostly did over the hours that made up the few days I worked there, and this was what The Young Boy did for almost all of the hours he was there; this and taking things in and out by wheelbarrow—which, oddly, I was never taught to do—since he was too young to be put on the tills. Though he was young, and closer to my younger brother’s age than mine, he liked me and I liked him. We’d chat about the Job, and how boring it was. The Bossman would see us chatting and then he'd put me on the tills, or send him out with the barrow. It was perfectly possible for us to tidy the pots in close proximity—since the pots were always a mess, and there were hundreds of them—but the Bossman couldn’t seem to stand to see us chatting for even a moment. So I spent more time out there alone, or standing in silence at the tills next to The (audibly breathing) Tall Old Man than I did among the pots with The Young Boy, tidying and chatting.
I’d not been there a month when the Bossman took me to one side (of the empty shop) and said that there weren’t as many customers as he’d hoped, so they’d have to “let me go” at the end of the day. To date, Prospective Employer, this is the only time I’ve been made redundant from a Proper Job. And although I regret ever taking the Job now—for the unsightly blemish it would forever affix to my otherwise spotless record in this regard—at the time I was ambivalent on receiving the news of my Termination. Yes, I was worried my mother might be disappointed; but I was also somewhat relieved to be freed from the tedium of the Job: where the Drudgery was only made pleasant by company; but where if I chatted to The Young Boy I’d be promptly removed from his vicinity and put straight back on the tills, where time dripped by in slow, clock-watching tedium.
When I told The Young Boy I was leaving, he was livid. “They can’t do that!” he insisted. He told me he’d go too—or even instead—because it wasn’t fair, because I was older. But you’ve been here longer, I said. And there’s no sense in us both losing our Jobs just because only one of us is needed. He said again that it wasn’t fair, and tidied the pots in a more sullen manner. I didn’t care if the Bossman caught us chatting now because he’d already made me Redundant. But there wasn’t much besides Work to chat about when I was nearly 16 to a Young Boy who was only 12—so I went and tidied pots by myself in a corner, no less sullenly than him.
Good Job or Bad Job?
The Solidarity displayed by The Young Boy upon hearing the news of my dismissal has stayed with me over the years; as has the utter absence of Solidarity I felt in my working relationships with the Bossman and The Tall Old Man. For better or worse, these three were my first true Colleagues; and perhaps all Colleagues since could be broadly categorized into one of their three Roles: good, bad, and indifferent. There was, I suppose, some Dignity in being paid for dirty hands and clean pots. And I was pleasantly surprised to discover that my Speech Impediment didn’t entirely prevent me from functionally conversing with adult Customers at the tills. But I couldn’t argue with the stated reason for my Termination: The Garden Centre suffered from a dearth of Customers. And I wasn’t about to go beyond my brief by suggesting they might want to put in a café that served chocolate bomb cake—like they had at the garden centre my mother frequented, and had taken me to for my 15th birthday lunch last summer—or even an aquarium with neon tetra fish, or a life-size plastic gorilla unaccountably for sale at an absolutely unfathomable price (which products I’d see making inroads into garden centres in later life). Thus to conclude: as implied by the many Customerless minutes I squandered manning a dormant till, The Garden Centre job was plagued from the beginning by negligible Productivity. Thus, it was, on balance, A Bad Job: it taught me only how to use a till, and how to talk to Customers; but not that the tills, and Customers, in every Workplace will be different—so you’ll have to learn how to use them, and talk to them, over and over again.
[Next chapter to be published exclusively here on alexander velky dot com, next month!]
Comments