The boot-in-the-groin of destiny

It was as his boot connected with my groin that I considered the poor life choices I had made leading up to this point in my short existence on this planet.

"I'm not your boss," my boss Mr Newton once told me, lying through his teeth, "All the customers are, and you should treat them as such."

That's all very well coming from the manager of a down-at-heel supermarket situated next door to a piss-scented multi-storey car park, but when you're the teenage trolley-boy asking a down-and-out if he wouldn't mind removing his worldly possessions so Prestos could get its trolley back, it was hard to look on him as management material.

"Fugg off you little squirt," he growled at me, and I made the mistake of pressing the point further, pointing out that I – as God's representative of the Presto Supermarket chain in this piss-scented multi-storey car park, my word was law, and I'd quite like our trolley back please, if you don't mind.

It was as his boot connected with my groin... that I realised I should have taken that job selling cane furniture, even if they pay was lousy. I should have kept that weekend post at Asda, where there was a corner of the warehouse where the managers never went, and I could have risen to the rank of chief cardboard collector by now.

But as the air gushed from my lungs like a whoopee cushion under an opera singer, I realised I could never leave Presto. The piss-scented car park was in my blood, and I would miss the low-grade canteen banter and getting stuck in the goods lift behind three-quarters of a ton of granulated sugar and fishing filthy trolleys out of the canal.

Also, where else would you get paid a whole two quid an hour to stand on the roof of the piss-scented car park on a Friday evening, watching the guy in the office block over the road having sex across his desk with the cleaner?

Life choices are important. I would never leave Presto. Not until the girl who I fancied on the deli counter cut her finger off, anyway.