Crinklybee

Identity Theft

Frankie has come down with a virus, so in the style of toddlers with viruses everywhere (and, come to think of it, cats and owls) is sleeping constantly during the day but then hardly at all at night.  And as if being awoken three times in the early hours by a fitful infant was not enough, the Greater Manchester Constabulary took it upon themselves to scare the holy living Bejesus out of us at 3:30 this morning in response to a call from our next door neighbours, who had in turn had the holy living bejesus scared out of them by someone (a drunk/ errant pizza delivery person/ someone from the next street who had got confused) banging hell out of their door shouting 'Let me In!'.  They are quite new next door neighbours, you see, and don't yet know that this sort of thing happens all the time round here all the time and a stoic reaction- such as turning the sound up on the late night channel five baseball highlights, and maybe even inviting the impromptu late-night visitor in to watch them with you over a cup of tea,  is really what is called for.

And then this morning I was up at the crack of dawn as I had an appointment at my soon-to-be new scary workplace to hand in some forms, before heading back into town to work in my current soon-to-be-my-former job (I keep trying to put my feet up but they persist in giving me actual work to do, which seems downright callous, I'm thinking of getting the unions involved, or I would do if it was 1978 and I was a miner, or in any event something more authentically working class than a flange sales operative working his notice).  Tonight I have spent putting the fitful toddler to bed (not very hard, admittedly as he was already asleep), tidying up the house then firing off angry emails to recalcitrant councillors about our non-existent embellished Victorian street lighting. Oh, and somewhere during this twenty-four hours of sleep-deprived manic activity I have managed to misplace a bag containing my passport, driving licence, birth certificate and all paperwork relating to my new job.  I think it may be with Mo the name-dropping genius proprietor of the Deansgate Hot Food Bar, but equally my documents could be right now in the nerve centre of some shady middle eastern terrorist group who are even as we speak in the process of stealing my identity with a view to carrying out various unthinkable acts, such as blowing up the Houses of Parliament or attempting to use my out-of-date Blockbusters card to get out the DVD of 'Sliding Doors' on a £2.99 three-day rental, the fucking cheapskates.

Now normally the inconvenience of having my identity stolen (possibly by Mo the cafe proprietor who for all we know has branched out from harmlessly if flawlessly guessing the names of his clientele into full-blown international espionage, I wouldn't put it past him) would be a cause for some concern, but in my sleep-deprived (did I mention the sleep-deprived thing?) state I quite frankly couldn't care less, and if at 3:30AM this morning I am awoken by another of south Manchester's apparently endless supply of insomniac Police Constables to be taken in for questioning related to the laundering of drug money/failure to effect the timely return of a VHS copy of Four Weddings and a Funeral to Fallowfield Blockbusters then I will most likely just cackle wildly into their very faces, before curling up and falling into a deathly slumber.

So you've been warned.  Normal service, whatever that is, will return sometime next week.  In the meantime if any of you see a Greek cafe owner acting in any way suspiciously, perhaps by trying to pass himself off as a sleepwalking thirtysomething Geordie in half-battered media spectacles while concealing a cut-price rental copy of A Life Less Ordinary (starring Ewan McGregor) inside of a pineapple fritter, then do please let me know. Any time between four and five in the morning will suit me just fine, oh yes.

The Outside

Corporation X is not managed by a cabal of dangerously psychotic Italian-American cousins, and we lowly sales clerks are not actively encouraged to post severed horses' heads to the purchasing departments of customers whose ordering patterns for four-inch aluminium flanges have tailed off dissappointingly during the quarter.  But in other respects the firm does resemble the Cosa Nostra.  The town centre sales office is home to as many bitter, timeless rivalries and passionate, mysterious loyalties as any Sicilian backstreet neighbourhood.  And, although younger workers on temporary contracts come and go, once you are offered a place on the permanent staff (the Corporate equivalent of becoming a 'made man') it is practically unheard of to leave the firm's employ of your own accord. After maybe five years of cosily permanent status, the thought of leaving the Corporation- and embarking on some alternaive life 'on the outside' starts to seem outlandish, even absurd.  You come to imagine that any inclination towards departure would be met, at best, by bursts of derisive mirth, and at worst, by an invitation to a private midnight fitting on the banks of the Manchester Ship Canal for a pair of close-fitting concrete trousers.

It was with such not-exactly-comforting thoughts in mind that I approached the desk of the 'Cappo di Tutti Cappi'- sorry, the office manager- on Wednesday morning.  After nine years as a 'Made Man' ,I had managed to suspend my disbelief about the possibility of an alternative existence for long enough not only to fill in an application form for an interesting-sounding job with a Housing Association that had been advertised in the Manchester Evening News, but to get through two gruelling interviews and, to my absolute amazement, be offered the position ahead of a half-dozen candiates I had assumed to be much better qualified.  Now I just had to break the news to my boss.  A starch-white envelope containing a hand-written letter quivered in my hand as I embarked on the opening gambit I had spent a semi-sleepless night rehearsing in my mind:

'There's no easy way to tell you this, Lorna.  I wish to give you notice of my intention to resign my post'.

My fears of an unsympathetic hearing- or of Lorna producing a gleaming handgun from her top drawer and responding to my unforgiveable betrayal with a single, cold-blooded shot to the temple- proved unfounded.  The usually inscrutable office manager looked genuinely delighted for me- saying that I had clearly been in the wrong job for several years, and this one sounded much more up my street.  The reaction of Donna, my immediate line manager, was equally supportive ('I wish I'd got out long ago myself'). 

Donna announced my news by email to the office.  Within seconds, the entire flange team had downed tools to gather around my desk in an astonished huddle- and for the last two days, half-forgotten allies from previous stints on teams around the cavernous building have drawn me to one side to hear the full juicy details of my imminent departure, and regaled me with congratulatory emails (You've escaped at last you old bastard- well done!).  More than one of them, I suspect, may be inspired to follow my example and make a break for 'the outside' themselves.

Here's the thing, though: everyone keeps telling me how brave I am being.  I don't feel brave at all.  If you want to know the truth, I feel absolutely fucking terrified of the leap into the unknown I am set to take.  Leaving The Corporation in search of a more fulfilling (if, at first, less-well-paid) career may prove to be the best move I ever made.  Or it could turn out to be a terrible, terrible mistake.  One thing is certain however- my departure has caused such a stir in this close-knit world that there is no possibility of ever going back to the life of a lowly sales clerk on the industrial flange team.  My life 'on the outside' will start at 9AM on Monday, June 18th.  Do wish me luck, everyone.

As High As You Can Get

Now if you have been reading very carefully indeed for the last three years you will know that my worst-ever job was during the summer of 1994, when I survived two weeks as a comically incompetent trainee skirt pleater in Gorton, south Manchester- only managing to escape when, owing to a bizarre sequence of events rather too complicated to relate here, my place on the shopfloor was taken by the exiled son of a Ugandan Prince living in straitened circumstances in a Victoria Park bedsit, who my flatmate had found one Sunday afternoon down the launderette.

All of which is simply a roundabout way of leading up to telling you about my second-worst-ever job, which came much earlier- in the long hot indiepop summer of 1988, when I was in between my first and second years at Wolverhampton Polytechnic.  Finding that the fortnightly dole money was stretching no further than six pints of McEwans Best Scotch and a Darling Buds single, I reluctantly signed up to become a catering assistant at Newcastle Airport, then enjoying a brief boom transporting daily small armies of Glaswegians off to package holidays in Benidorm and other Godforsaken points of the Mediterranean littoral.

We operated a punishing shift pattern- one week starting at five in the morning and slogging through past lunchtime, the next starting at lunch but not finishing until eleven at night.  The work itself consisted of clearing the tables, scrubbing the dishes, and, most memorably of all, manning the tills when the shout went up of 'Delay!', meaning that any second now three hundred ravenous Scottish people would come bounding up the stairs from the departure lounge brandishing £5.00 refreshment vouchers from their charter companies like freshly-sharpened claymore, and generally looking to our sleep-deprived eyes like a terrifying mix between a crowd scene out of Braveheart and a particularly gruesome riot at a Jesus and Mary Chain concert. 

If the long hot indiepop summer of 1988 was the first time in my hitherto genteel suburban existence I had made the prolonged acquaintance of The Sort Of People Who Went On Package Holidays (we might have lived on a council estate in the West End but we were strictly a rainy-week-at-the-seaside-caravan and disastrous-camping-adventure-ruined-by-cousin's-rampaging-dog sort of family) then it was also the first time I had come across planespotters; these lone middle-aged men with notebooks who would sidle up to your table-clearing trolley and enquire, 'Is this as high as you can get'?

Once we realised these dishevilled fellows were not making enquiries about our lack of professional and personal ambition, but simply looking for the top deck viewing platform, we would direct them towards the lifts to the upper concourse, and never see them again.  They used to bring their own flasks and sandwiches so had no use for our £1.75 cups of watered-down coffee (never mind our £4.25 plates of reheated chicken casserole that had come from a vat and didn't really have any chicken in, because the big fat Geordie chefs had nicked all the good bits for their breakfast).  I had forgotten about the whole phenonenon of planespotting, in fact, until last weekend, when I decided to take young Frankie (who has grown fascinated with air travel since we came back from the place he calls 'Americawhereabbyandjohnandoscarthebabylive') along to the airport to watch the planes taking off. 

Needless to say, we found (or at least I did, Frankie's memory doesn't go back that far) that planespotters in 2007 Manchester are in every respect indistinguishable from those in 1987 Newcastle.  There were maybe fifteen of them in all, huddled together in the corner of the sun-baked upper deck of the carpark in ill-fitting anoraks.  Their necks were festooned with an array of high-end binoculars, which they kept constantly trained on the runway action.  I say 'action' but there really wasn't any-or at least, there was very little to speak of.  Once every twenty minutes a massive colourful jetplane would take off (with spectacular supersonic special effects, causing me, Frankie, and the smattering of other daytripping-dads-with-their-lads to look up suddenly from our sandwiches and mouth 'Wow!' to each other) but the seasoned hobbyists in the prime viewing positions would studiously ignore such amateurish pyrotechnics in favour of training their expensive eyepieces on- I assumed- some rare piece of ground equipment being used to transport a load of suitcases from a parked Boeing to a Terminal Three conveyor belt. 

After the best part of an hour (and fourteen miniature home-made ham sandwiches each from our packed lunch box) me and Frankie were becoming ever-so-slightly restless at the slow midday pace on the sweltering upper deck.  I made enquiries as to the possibility of any upturn in the airborne action with a nearby chap who I took to have some kind of official responsibility , given that he was turned out in full RAF uniform complete with freshly starched shirt, regimental cap and (although I admit the sun was getting to me a bit by this stage) a blazer covered liberally with gleaming medals.  The fellow took one look at us and made a bolt for the lifts- I think he may have been somewhat shy, even for a planespotter.  We gave the bashful wannabee wing-commander ten minutes then followed his lead, ending up downstairs in the main departure lounge, where I flagrantly disregarded a stern-looking sign ordering 'No Children Beyond This Point' to wheel Frankie's pushchair into a postion from where we could both take in the last ten minutes of the Manchester derby on a big screen in the corner of a darkened and smoke-filled room. 

On the way back out to the train station, veering unsteadily between giggling Easyjetters and congoing sunburnt United fans filled with championship fervour on the strength of Ronaldo's first-half penalty and fifteen Duty-free Embassy Regal, I felt a trifle faint all of a sudden.  It may have just been the overpriced Boddingtons and the sunstroke of course- but I suspect that in there somewhere a dose of nostalgia was playing havoc with my damn nerves.  Hell, if a shout of 'Delay!' had come over the tannoy it would possibly have finished me off altogether, or at least sent me scurrying off to the tills ready to put in a graveyard shift.  That long hot indiepop airport summer of 1988- when I spent so many hours on the middle concourse of Newcastle Airport that I really did suspect it was As High As I Could  Ever Get- has a lot to answer for, for damn sure.