advance of the sales crab

Well I didn’t get that job. A letter came from them saying that I hadn’t been successful ‘on this occasion’. It didn’t specify on which occasions I would be successful.

So I remain trapped, for the time being. Barbara returned from the spiritual journey that is the Get Selling course. Naturally, I expected to find her locking herself in the office, obsessively rearranging her hair to hide the ‘W’- shaped scar on her forehead… It wasn’t like that. She was reassuring… just like they told her to be.

Speculation as to the nature of the course remains feverish, in my fevered brain at least. An e-mail came through announcing the arrival of 'Get Selling' posters, which managers must 'keep in a safe place' until staff have finished the training. Put simply, they are too disturbing to be viewed by the uninitiated.

So how is it going to be? The latest scenario conjured by my crazed imagination is this: managers have to bellow ‘Get selling’ in exactly the voice ‘Matt Damon’ uses to say his own name in Team America. As soon as they hear this, shop staff will have to adopt their ‘get selling’ positions, which will be based on individually-selected ‘totem animals’ - a tiger, say, or a jellyfish (mine will be a crab). Then they will prowl, ooze or scuttle sideways (in my case) out onto the shop floor, after the customers…

Shortly after this occurred to me, I had to lie down for a time.

rubbish

I filled in the application form for that job. I approached the blank sheet in which you have to ‘sell yourself’ with trepidation, as though it were an Arctic waste I had to traverse. It went in the usual way: I started off well, boasting about my 'people skills'; broke down in the middle and admitted I’d been lying; then wound up saying that I never really wanted their stupid job anyway. ‘You can stick it up your arse!’, I finished, resoundingly.

I posted the form off anyway. Well you never know, do you?

I might really need a job soon, since it has come to my attention that this blog is a ticking time bomb. Because one of the very few companies to sack someone for ‘gross misconduct’ after they’d mentioned their work in a blog is… Waterstone’s! And this guy hadn’t even said anything terribly damaging, though he had called his boss ‘evil’. I at least have never resorted to savaging actual personalities. Well, except for customers, but who cares about them? Nobody in retail, anyway.

And then there was my skit on the MD of Waterstones, entitled ‘Gerry Johnson Smells Of Poo And Wee’, but that is nothing less than a savage neo-Swiftian satire on capitalism itself, its literary merits so clear that it practically constitutes its own defence.

Nevertheless, just to be on the safe side, I have decided henceforth to devote this blog entirely to refuse collection issues.

Which reminds me: I visited the council offices the other day to get some orange sacks. ‘You can only have one orange sacks’, said the receptionist defensively. It seemed that she was accustomed to people coming in and angrily demanding whatever the plural of ‘one orange sacks’ is. Two orange sack? At any rate, it turns out that one (roll of) orange sacks is quite enough for the time being.

I also made off with a red box. Someone stole ours, or it migrated to someone else’s house. For weeks we have been using the old yellow box, the one you used to put paper in before the coming of orange sacks. And the bottles and jars we put in it were indeed taken by the dustmen. But it preyed on my mind. You know what dustmen are like: just because they overlook an irregularity on one occasion, doesn’t mean that they will on another. I imagined the dustmen arguing, possibly for hours, outside the house, one insisting that ‘that box is yellow, not red’, another arguing that our use of it was, at least, ‘in the spirit of recycling’. How long before these discussions erupted into violence, with accompanying damage to the surrounding property?

Now those voices are silenced and I can sleep easy.

Next week: the best way to flatten a cardboard box.

get outta here

The Get Selling training course looms. According to The Bookseller, it’s all about ‘starting a conversation’ with the customer and matching them to exactly the right book. What am I, a social worker? And what kind of conversation? ‘You sound thick. Did you know that Jordan writes books?’

As it turns out though, only managers receive the raw, in-your-face, shock that is the Get Selling training course. They then pass it on to the minions. So although it may be a kind of brainwashing, it will be diluted. An e-mail came through today reassuring managers attending the course that it is nothing to worry about, although it will require ‘a certain amount of interactivity’ and, even more ominously, ‘a change of clothes.’ I suppose the change of personality comes free.

Even the name grates. Get Selling? You can almost hear the Family Fortunes buzzer signalling that nobody chose that one. Our studio audience preferred these phrases: get lost, get bent and - the most popular choice by far - get another job.

flexibility

Maisie Loves You, said a title on a returns sheet I was processing this week. I sighed. How could I possibly work in any other kind of job? Wouldn’t I just pine away without the regular reassurance that Maisie loves me?

The application form that arrived this week asks for flexibility and a receptivity to new ideas. Aren’t there any jobs that ask for intransigence and a resistance to new ideas? Aren’t they really just asking for a willingness to lie?

Maybe I should ask Ross. He works in recruitment - that’s HR, isn’t it? I’ll have to pick the right moment though. Saturday night I got in to find him sprawled on the sofa in front of a large collection of empty beer bottles, watching a DVD. I said: ‘Oh my God’. He agreed. Later, Dave and I heard him, all alone in the room, chortling: 'He’s superglued his penis to his hand!’ We could only hope that he was referring to the plot of American Pie 2, and not to himself, in the third person.

Later, we were in the room with him, watching American Pie 3, followed by Police Academy 4, followed by Pearl Harbour. It was not quite the evening I had envisaged. Yet I only have myself to blame: I did actually choose to watch Pearl Harbour. Now I’d always imagined that Pearl Harbour actually happened, yet as I watched this airbrushed, CGI-slick concoction, I found myself doubting it. Why would the Japanese attack Hawaii? They’d only bring America into World War II and cause them to invent nuclear weapons. Didn’t they know their history? Clearly the whole thing was some kind of conspiracy. And Michael Bay’s unerring ability to shoot everything from exactly the wrong angle did not help to make it any more plausible. It all looks prettified and generic - a witless reconstruction of an old movie, not like something that might have really happened. In fact it looks like an advertisement for something: 9/11, maybe?

We ate from that new noodle place. I managed to order something that wasn’t even on the menu. It wasn’t bad, though Dave pronounced the dumplings ‘rubbery’. I’m afraid I made a racist joke.