Train To Nowhere - Thursday

‘Have you seen the latest?’ Challenges assistant manager T grumpily, before I’ve even closed the office door.

The choices are limitless in this business, where setbacks and disappointments are as regular as a new David Beckham tattoo. I walk towards the message book and scan the content as T looks at me, fingers drumming annoyingly, on his desk. There’s nothing untoward amongst the list, other than a few callbacks and a survey to chase. I’m guessing it’s an internal issue.

‘Go on then.’ I prompt  T, less than enthusiastically. I notice negotiator S has stopped what she was doing and is paying attention. Trainee F is also looking at me - he probably wasn’t doing anything useful anyway.

‘More f***ing red tape.’ Snarls T. Clicking on his computer screen and spinning it towards me. I can see a long annotated memo from head office. With the schoolboy graphics and lengthy content I’m guessing it’s from Human Resources, or that limp-wristed waster in the training department. The well-worn adage: Those that can’t sell, train - could have been written for him

‘Give me a précis.’ I tell T, realising as I say it that he almost certainly hasn’t read to the end of the missive. T looks at his shoes.

‘Anybody?’ I plead.

F screws up his face and ventures. ‘When you say pray-see, err, what exactly do you mean?’

Before I hit him - something Human Resources would certainly write extensively about - S comes to my rescue. Not for the first time.

‘It’s a new on-line training programme we all have to complete.’ She say with an apologetic shrug. S knows how I feel about these cringe-making multiple choice exercises, designed for the lowest common denominator. Ostensibly to increase knowledge bases and to inform students of the latest legislation - but in practice to cover arses and to save money.

‘I don’t like exams.’ Says F glumly. I still don’t know what his mother and various stepfathers paid all that money in private education fess for.  I guess it was just to get him out of the house. You can tell a boarding school boy at twenty paces - they have more hangups than a call centre worker.

‘What are they trying to cover?’ I enquire.

‘That fat woman’s arse, in HR.’ Says T bluntly.

‘You can’t say that, it’s sexist.’ Challenges S. 

They all look at me. I can’t even remember which box I ticked on that course.

‘Well?’ Urges S.

‘It is quite lardy.’ I say tentatively. There’s an awkward moment, then S laughs.

Dodged another bullet.

‘Who writes this shite?” Says T after S has given us a run down on what we’ll have to endure, under classroom conditions. It’s basically more due-diligence to ensure when someone falls foul of Government Money Laundering rules, or Immigration Checks, the company will have a fall guy to blame. The course looks like it’s been compiled by a primary school child with a basic PowerPoint programme and just the free included graphics to choose from.

‘They’ve paid thousand of pounds for some outside consultancy to produce this dross.’ I speculate angrily. Calling in management consultants to do the job you are already paid to do, is a booming industry. It’s the biggest con-trick since we convinced millions, in the nineties, that an endowment policy would pay off their mortgage.

If it’s not the Government abdicating responsibility for criminals and illegal immigrants then expecting us to be unpaid police and tax collectors, it’s head office freeloaders paying an outside agency to do their job. I could write a book about it…

‘When they say classroom conditions….’ Begins F tentatively.

‘They mean you can’t cheat by looking at someone else's paper, or getting the boy in the next bed to your’s in the dormitory, to do the exam in return for a dip in your tuck box.’ Says T brutally.

‘I always did all my own exams.’ Snaps back F moodily.

He’s not lying, I’ve seen his CV. It’s why he’s an estate agent - the last resort for in-bred idiots educated beyond their ability. And still no proper entry qualifications. Unless you count on-line tick-box bollocks.

I don’t.

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The God Of Small Things - Friday

‘You’ve a studio flat to look at later.’ Announces negotiator S as I re-enter the office after the joyless  run to pick up a low-calorie, taste-free, meal deal.

‘What’s that going to be like?’ Asks trainee F gormlessly.

‘The stationery cupboard.’ I tell him, dumping the wafer-thin sandwich, pseudo-crisps and tired-looking fruit combo on the desk.

I follow F’s gaze towards the aforementioned paper and pen repository. God, I sometimes long for less litigious times when it was acceptable to clout a dozy trainee around the ear, or just ask for his office keys, without verbal warnings in writing and a multi-stage disciplinary process monitored by Human  Resources' drones and legal insurance companies. I’ll have to settle for sending F on an afternoon’s leaflet dropping in the rain.

‘He means it will be compact.’ Says S to F, gently.

‘Cramped.’ Adds assistant manager T, who seems to have ducked the undersized valuation somehow.

‘Bijou, even.’ Contributes fat mortgage man M with a chubby-chopped smile. That confuses F even further, until lettings lush B adds:

‘Shite.’

I vividly remember when I first visited a studio flat, back in the late eighties when developers and speculators were busy maximising profit and minimising square-footage, in shabbily converted, once grand, Victorian family homes.

Tagging along with the kindly surveyor I was training with, we entered a top floor roof space, once designated for servants or Not Needed On Journey labelled packing cases, to find a plaster boarded space with sloping roof lines, fit only for Snow White cast members.

As I tried to hold the old-school tape measure to the widest extremity, I was thinking if this was the lounge, with a DIY style galley kitchen incongruously in one corner, how pokey was the bedroom going to be?

The first door I tried was minuscule shower room with no natural light, a wheezy extractor fan, and a toilet wedged so tight to the angled ceiling that you’d never piss standing up. The second door I tugged, expecting to find the sleeping accommodation, turned out to conceal a clumsily-lagged hot water tank.

‘So they sleep in the lounge?’ I remember asking, hesitantly. A somewhat smarter, and smarter-dressed version of F, on reflection.

‘It’s a new concept.’ Enlightened the old, Fellow of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, with a frown. ‘It won’t catch on. I’m going to down-value it.’

‘I’m not sure I’d want to buy a flat that small.’ Speculates F, once he’s finally grasped the concept of turning your sweaty sofa into a bed at the end of an evening.

‘Just as well, you couldn’t afford it on your salary.’ Says M with a hearty guffaw. ‘Particularly when you’re on commission. Not even I could fudge the employer’s reference enough to find a lender for you.’ He adds, unkindly.

‘We all have to start somewhere.’ Counters S, fiercely. 

‘Yeh? Well if I can’t bolt on endowments, or PPI sales any more, I’m not about to risk my licence fabricating income am I?’ Sneers M.

‘Can’t he self-certificate?’ Asks B from her lettings enclave.

Only for sick notes.

‘We need to trade up.’ Says the earnest young woman later. She has an obvious swelling in her belly, as her stooping boyfriend nods in agreement and tries not to bang his head on the ceiling. There’s not enough room to swing a cat in the tired-looking conversion, and yet paradoxically, they have a hissy furball in residence, one that is weaving between my legs, purring aggressively and shedding fur all over my dark blue trousers. I can feel the first sneeze bubbling up.

I can’t see they’ll even get back what they paid for the pokey little studio flat. The dodgy developer helped fund the deposit, probably on the back of an inflated sale price and a complicit broker. I don’t want to be the bearer of bad news, particularly as the poor women is expecting a baby shortly. I wouldn’t mind killing the cat though.

Not a great success.

Price upset them.

Suit needs cleaning - and turns out she wasn’t pregnant.

Fail.

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Eat To The Beat - Thursday

I spot him heading my way through a throng of lunchtime escapees. The sort of office workers who are either in the private sector, like me, and are taking five minutes to grab a sandwich to eat at their desk in between calls, or are working for the public sector and engaged in exercising their body, mind and rights by taking their full sixty minutes entitlement - no matter how may times the phone rings unanswered in their absence.

I consider dodging to the other side of the pavement, as I reach the pedestrianised area with slightly fewer empty shop units, not so many charity outlets and a healthier footfall, but I’m almost as lame as him now. Instead I paste on the increasingly hard to muster, glad to see you face. He looks genuinely pleased to meet me again – unless…

‘How’s tricks?’ Begins the hobbling banker breezily, as if greeting some sort of worn-out hooker whose overdraft facility he’s thinking of extending. The analogy has some merit, I think, as we both labour to a halt causing two jogging-bottomed, large-arsed young mothers, with more tattoos than what’s left of the Royal Navy can muster, to swerve their pushchairs past us without cracking into our ankles. The pair are engaged in some sort of harsh-vowelled rant about not getting their money on time and I wonder if they’ll be in shortly to ask B, our loose lettings lush, if she rents to DSS tenants – or if she’s coming out on the pull later? I realise, my autopilot has taken over and I’ve answered with a default platitude along the lines of: ‘Not too bad. You?’

The banker frowns and I notice, with a little churlish pleasure that he’s greyer and thinner on top than me now.

‘Seriously?’ he quizzes, shaking his head a bit like Bomber our destructive local surveyor when he down-values another home and destroys a much-needed sale with the words: ‘Price seems a bit full. Got any comparables?’

I admit, a bit sheepishly, that I haven’t thought the answer through and I’ve had better weeks, better months, better years and probably better career opportunities.

‘Thank God,’ he says brightening. ‘I thought it was just me.’

‘Thing is. I feel like a bloody dinosaur.’ Continues the shot-to-pieces in the hip and hair department moneylender, as I find myself perching on a pigeon-shit-stained bench half listening to his depressing monologue and half hearing the increasingly plaintive cries from the Big Issue seller everyone with a job, or not retired, is studiously avoiding.

‘Your business has changed a lot.’ I concede, trying to look at my watch without him spotting the movement. All the low-calorie meal deals with any non-horsemeat filling will be gone at this rate and I vaguely imagine I can hear phones ringing in my office, unless it’s that ear infection back again.

‘Tell me about it.’ Answers the man morosely, as I think ring the Samaritans pal. They volunteer for this sort of thing and don’t have to sit on a chilly bench a wino slept on a few hours earlier, feigning an interest rate I can’t sustain. The tarnished and gum-splattered pavement at my feet looks suspiciously like night-time emissions have been vented, making me wonder if I’ll have any, shoes of at the door before you come in to our house, oddballs later today. But then again, maybe they aren’t so weird?

‘The world is run by bloody bean counters.’ Rails the banker, seemingly without irony. Should I ask him about my endowment mortgage? Probably not. I’ve already seen one grown man cry today and there’s still that repossession to attend later.

‘Do you know, I’m one of the oldest in my branch now.’ Continues the man semi-rhetorically. ‘I have to report to some snot-nosed kid who talks in marketing sound-bites and questions my sales figures every Thursday.’

‘Not good.’ I concede, wondering if I can stomach another reduced-fat cheese and pickle, with those taste-free baked crisps and a bottle of flavoured water resembling piss?

‘Burger and chips?’ Asks assistant manager T, as I return.

‘Comfort food.’ I tell him - feeling a bit sick.

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