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.
1 comment:
Great post. I used to work at Presto when I was at school. I started off as a Shelf Stacker, but when we got a new yuppie manager I became a Merchandiser, a job that involved stacking shelves with merchandise.
During my time there we moved into a brand new supermarket. It was truly impressive how quickly the canteen walls turned from Dulux white to Nicotine Brown.
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