Seriously, I’ve had shit jobs before but this one is starting to take the frickin’ biscuit. Is it a universally accepted thing that your job is supposed to suck? Is it mandatory? I thought that once you got into an office type environment, things would get better – people would become more civil, there would be more organisation (it’s a frickin’ office, for god’s sake – it has filing cabinets!) and things would generally become easier to deal with. Boy, was I wrong. Maybe it’s just my office/company but working here is genuinely like working in a mad-house – 99% of the residents are fooking nutbars and would be ‘evaluated’ (aka lobotomised) for the things they do if they did them anywhere else (more on that at a later date). I feel that this is it; that no matter where I get a job, it will not get better.

My conclusion comes from analysing every job I've had to date and plotting a graph and....correlations, or something to that effect. It's all very scientific, I swear.

The first real job I had was in a department store café. No, it wasn’t glamorous, not even by café standards. It was grotty and greasy and smelled rank. I did it because I needed monies for xmas presents when I was 17. Now, this job wasn’t all that bad but it had that typical greasy, smelly atmosphere which I didn’t mind at first – figured I had to deal with that if I wanted to earn my cash and everyone else seemed capable of forgetting about it. Looking back now, I’m not even sure if they noticed it in the first place.

Now, this was a big cafe and it was the festive season. This meant it got very busy and very hot very quickly. No feelings or voices or dirty looks were spared when it came to the customers finding a free table, their food already bought and getting cold on plastic trays. And of course it's always been the norm to take your crap out on those serving you. So this happened, not just to me but to almost everybody under 21; being a weekend job at xmas, 90% of the workforce was under 21.

There were the various rules to contend with and I contended with them because I thought that’s what you were supposed to do. I was all “Yes sir. No sir. Three bags full, sir”.

Firstly, there was the tie-your-hair-back rule; this rule makes sense except for when you lack any considerable length to your hair, making it very difficult to tie back no matter how hard the manager is giving you the evil eye.

Then there were the uniforms. I make a grimacey face right now as I write about those things. They were horrible and grotty. Green and water-proof. Normal, policy, average are all things that may come to mind when I described them just there. Sure, until I tell you that they weren’t supposed to be water-proof – that’s how greasy they were. No matter how many times I took those things home (I had asked for an extra one in the hopes that it was semi-hygienic) and washed and washed them, they still stank and still had gross stains on them.

Damn, I thought, this working lark is kinda hard. I don’t mean physically hard; hard graft, manual labour, ‘getting stuck in’ are all things I’m capable of and relish. There is nothing like the muscle aches you get the day after some physical hard work. No, I think I mean hard in a mental kind of way - where I tortured myself with thoughts of being outside, of travelling the world, just chilling with my buddies or the copious amounts of learning I could be doing. I also torture myself with questions, wondering why people with a tiny little bit of authority had to make themselves feel better by making other peoples’ lives hell. I wonder why that mother who looks suspiciously like a junkie is telling her 4 year old daughter to ‘Shut the fuck up’ whenever the lil one asks a question. I wonder if that wee girl will grow up to be just like her mother or if she’ll be the complete opposite. I hope it’s the latter. I wonder if the middle aged woman at the till feels like a movie star as she holds up the queue to shout at the serving girls, demanding to speak to the manager because there’s no breaded fish pieces left...

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