Sunday 16 January 2011

Don't Go Quietly!

I've always maintained that my place of work, (which it still is...), was full of shit. The management, (well, half of it!), the customers, the hours ... The Walls.. all full of it, but I didn't mean literally. Tonight though, it was!

I feel I must explain. And even if you don't think this deserves an explanation, it doesn't matter, you are getting one. It was about midnight. Just me and The Wall, no 3rd party tonight, and we were inundated with a customer. Yeah, it wasn't that busy, and I was looking forward to a quiet night. I say, "looking forward", I would of preferred if I was playing golf, or going to the pub but.... you know what I mean. Just as I had taken this poor drunken guy's money, short-changed him because I felt like it, I heard a muffled scream from the near corner of the store. No, no one had been kidnapped, but a girl, dressed in party clothes came over and shouted at us. I don't know what, I wasn't listening, but she mentioned that something was wrong with the toilet.

"Probably just blocked", I thought. Not a nice job, but a job none the less, so I grabbed the plunger, shaped like Daffy Duck's head and went to clean up the mess. Only, when I opened the door, it wasn't just mess. The toilet had exploded. And when I say, "exploded", I don't mean, "it had leaked slightly", I mean ... it had EXPLODED. The bottom of it was blown apart and the water, that was trapped in the confinds of the toilet area, had now flown out of the door and flooded half the store. It wasn't the nicest of sights... I won't go into detail on that part.

I knew something like this was going to happen. In the past, whenever I have a week or 10 days of holiday coming up, God would send a bad thing to happen, to challenge me and annoy me before I went for a break and seeing as God has seen that this is my last weekend, he sent the dirtiest challenge of them all. We closed the store, somehow managed to block the gaping hole of the toilet, via a few phone calls to Anglian Water, who didn't seem to think that flowing poo was a "major problem", and began the cleanup operation. There was so much water, I was tempted to ring up the authorities and notify them of a new man-made lake that should be printed on to the next Atlas. 2 and a half hours it took for both of us to clean up the lake to a sufficient standard to open up again. We had locked the doors, but of course, the occasional drunk managed to pull them open, (not difficult to achieve), and saunter into the store before being kicked out by me.

"We're closed for a reason mate!"

It wasn't pretty. It wasn't big on dignity and by the end, I smelt like a tramp who had jumped behind a cow while it was doing it's hourly crap.

And of course, I ended up being majorly behind on all of my tasks, but these days, I couldn't really give a flying shit about that... No pun intended. I had seen a lot of flying shits tonight, and I wasn't prepared to give another one for the sake of, "doing my job properly".

Still, I suppose it made the shift go a bit quicker and I had to put up with less angry, drunken custom because of it. And after I had completed my final ever instalment of Mitten vs Weekend Papers, I clambered into my car, holding my triple espresso, and laughed. So many of these cases have happened to me in the past 9 months, that I really am not surprised that this place didn't let me go without another ridiculous episode.

Just a shame it didn't smell of roses.

I can't be bothered with football this morning either. As usual after a night's work, I suppose I may be up for it when we finally get going, but I am bloody knackered. Just one more shift before I have my weekends free and am not awake at ridiculous o'clock.

No, wait, this time next week, of course I'll be awake at 4am.. Just not at work. I'll be on here, blogging about how much I need a job and how undignified I've become. Oh well.

I'll speak to you all this time tomorrow morning!

Ciao x

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