Mirth and Woe: Dog Meat

Mirth and Woe: Dog Meat

I worked in retail for about five minutes of my life. I think, in that time, I was responsible for at least fifty people losing their jobs.

The fools at a local supermarket gave me an evening and weekend job, and apart from stocking the shelves, asking winos to leave and watching people having sex in the office block opposite the multi-storey car park when I was supposed to be collecting trollies, they accidentally let me help out as a bag packer round the tills.

Enter some bloke who wanted dog food. All the dog food in the world, it turned out.

Why he couldn't get it from a cash and carry defeats me, but I was sent down to the stores and heaved up all the Pedigree Chum, Marrowbone Pal and own-brand roadkill I could find on one huge trolley.

Perhaps he was organising a dog show at short notice, or cooking a beef stew for a large number of people, I don't know, but the truth was that it weighed a ton, and I was sweating like a bastard in my nylon staff-issue shop coat.

All we had to do was run it through the tills. And that is, as they say, when things went a little 'tits'.

What we needed to know was the number of tins, the price per tin for each brand, feed them in and the till would come up with the final price. The tins came in pallets loaded six-by-four, which, intelligent people that you are, means there are 24 per box.

Or, by my calculations, and blinded by the fantastic chest of till operator Karen: 12. He bought hundreds, at a good 50% knock-off.

I later worked out that I lost the company some £2,000 in one transaction. The manager - who was patting me on the back for my hard work and quick thinking - got suspended while a bunch of stony-faced auditors investigated every single case of "missing" stock up to and including several hundred tins of dog food.

The Supermarket closed not long after, and the entire site was nuked from orbit, just to make sure.

Karen with the fascinating chest who I sent to the dole queue in the dog-eat-dog world of Thatcher's Britain: I'm really, really sorry. But you did have the most fascinating chest I have ever seen on any woman, ever.

There is also a certain amount of regret that I made the nine-fingered girl on the deli counter unemployed as well.

There's not much love in the world for nine-fingered girls, and I should know. I fancied her rotten as a ten-fingered girl, right up until that nasty accident with the bacon slicer, and I rather went off her as I yarched rich, brown vomit all over the shop floor.

Nine-fingered girl: I hope it grew back.

On the plus side, I helped the bloke - who must have known he was on the winning team - load the stuff into his van, and he gave me a twenty quid tip.

Whoops.

Aggravating factor: I was studying A-Level maths at the time. I failed.