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.