I’m working a lot now, more than 40 hours a week. The routine of this reminds me of my older teens, which was probably the last time I was actually out at work for such long periods of time every day.
At the age of 17, I lived in a shared house with four friends. It was meant to be three friends, but the fourth one – our landlord – never moved out. We were told he would, but it never happened. So four of us ended up sharing his attic, which was not the plan.
Mattresses on the floor. Bags around our beds. No real furniture to speak of. It was a doss house, really. Kind of fun, those friends were good ones. Kind of stressful: nobody can live like that for long and I didn’t.
We all worked together at one job, at a big pub in town. The most fun I’ve ever had whilst being paid for it. The landlord yelled at us all evening and we loved him for it. Every time he yelled, it made us grin and joke and mess around some more. He was a big bear of a man, ferociously hilarious. He took great care of us and we all trusted him implicitly. Misbehaving customers, on the other hand…! He took great care to remove them without ceremony. This was in the days when you could quite literally kick someone out of your establishment and we were glad of it. It was all part of taking care of us.
My best friend and I worked together at a second, day job: silk screen printing at a carpet factory. I think this was the most head scratchingly bizarre job I’ve ever had. Six of us (or so) were employed to silk screen print individual carpet sample boards. Hundreds of them. Why? I’ve no idea. Mine were often smudgy. I wasn’t careful enough for the work. I was constantly in trouble. My friend was employed to sit and draw pictures at an art table in front of us all. Did I dream this? I often wonder!
Earlier in the mornings I’d have been up scrubbing out giant bakery ovens in a pokey backyard somewhere. This is the worst job I’ve ever had, by far. Wet, horrible, hand-aching, back-aching work. I didn’t stick at it for long. Even getting there was pretty much impossible, it was so inaccessible by public transport at 4am.
In the evenings, when not working in the pub, I sometimes worked in the packing factory that had employed me, on and off, since I was fifteen. I actually loved that work because the people were comforting, friendly and quiet and the work was easy and relaxing.
I seemed to spend all of my spare time on buses, going from one job to another. Or sleeping, and I wasn’t doing anything like enough of that.
I was also nominally attending a college course on business management but I rarely got to that. I was far too busy being managed in other people’s businesses. And the course, when I did attend, was dire. Badly taught by tutors who didn’t care whether we learned or not. Banally obvious content that a ten year old child would have already known. A literal box ticking exercise. Needless to say, I never finished it. I learned far more by reading management text books: the story of my entire education, really.
Eight months later, I was running “my own” (sort of) pub, with up to fifty members of staff under me. But that’s a true story for another day.