God I was bored.
And not just bored, I was frustrated.
When you work somewhere, the importance of the thing you’re
working on is always exaggerated beyond all proportion. Just take all that
throwaway crap that gets stuffed through our letterboxes every day of the week
for example. Flyers, junk mail, loan offers, take-away menus, cab company cards
and occasionally, if you’re lucky, a free individual packet of washing-up
liquid you can stash under your sink in case of an emergency. Somewhere in the
world there were people whose days were dedicated to producing this stuff. Can
you imagine that? All that crappy, unimportant, nuisance litter that forces you
to stoop unnecessarily in the mornings and fills, on average, two extra bin
liners per person per year, was actually the focus of some people’s working
lives. Printers, designers, advertisers, marketeers and their minions. How the
hell were we meant to progress as a society with this all going on? Pardon me
if I’m wrong but I thought we were all meant to be living on the moon and going
to work on jet packs by the year 2000. I specifically remember all that stuff
on
Tomorrow’s World
; jet packs, robot
best friends and a couple of coloured tablets for Sunday lunch. What the hell
had happened to that lot? Were we all lied to or did the world just get
sidetracked keeping me informed about all the latest Pizza Hut deals?
What am I talking about? I don’t know. I guess I’m just
bitter and depressed because it had finally sunk in that life was really pretty
unimportant. Or at least mine was.
Yeah sure some people were out there somewhere making
startling breakthroughs with cancer research, stem cells, nuclear fusion,
artificial intelligence, space exploration and, of course, rocket science but
most of us were just cluttering up the world with crap and annoying everyone
else.
Caravans? I mean, seriously, caravans!
Caravans were things people attached to the backs of their
cars once a year so that they could drive down to the seaside and stay in a
field. They were cramped, ungainly, lightweight, rickety and cold, and they
cost about as much to hire for a week as seven days stay in a rather nice
B&B. Though of course, these were just the ones that people attached to the
backs of their cars. There were plenty of caravans in the world that never
actually went anywhere. They simply rolled out of the factory, found a nice
little patch of grass in Weston-Super-Mare and sat there and rusted for the
next thirty years.
Like I said, I wasn’t against them before I started in this
job, but seven years of having to deal with people who thought they were the
most precious things on earth, that’s what did it for me. Caravan
manufacturers, caravan retailers, caravan park owners, and most despicable of
all, Caravan Club members.
I wanted the grab each of these cretins by the scruff of the
neck every time they phoned to complain about some little mistake we’d printed
and drag them off to the nearest paediatric ward and continuously slap them
until they were prepared to admit that caravans were simply the things they
attached to the backs of their cars to go on holiday in.
I wanted to, but I couldn’t, because I was the editor of
Caravan Enthusiast
, and as the editor of
Caravan Enthusiast
, I couldn’t very
well go around beating up my readership, not if I wanted to continue to gather
food, maintain a shelter, look after my wife and buy lottery tickets every
Saturday and Wednesday. It simply wasn’t possible to do both.
In the years gone by I’d been able to take out some of these
frustrations on a few strategically timed cigarettes but I couldn’t even do
this any more.
All I had was my job.
My insignificant, boring, tedious, crappy, little job.
And my report too.
God, I wanted a fag.
Andrew came home cursing Norman
again. I don’t know why he works himself up so much. It’s actually quite
embarrassing to watch. Also, I can never work out what’s so bad about Norman.
He doesn’t sound too terrible to me and certainly doesn’t seem to justify the
names Andrew reserves for him. I’ve tried to pin Andrew down on this point but
he just gets annoyed and tells me I don’t understand. And he’s right, I don’t.
I don’t understand at all. From what I can gather Norman’s latest crime is to
ask Andrew to draw up a plan of the budget and shave off a little here and
there. That doesn’t sound too unreasonable to me. After all Norman is Andrew’s
boss. He is entitled to ask Andrew to do stuff every now and again, isn’t he?
What does Andrew expect? It’s not like he’s asked him to work late or take a
pay cut or sit on his knee and suck him off. All he’s asked him to do is
compile a few numbers and write up a report.
To be honest, I think anything you’re asked to do (within
reason) during working hours is fair enough. It would be different if Andrew
worked in a nineteenth century cotton mill and he was expected to crawl into
the machinery to extract his colleagues’ hands whenever they clogged up in the
gears, but he doesn’t.
Andrew works in publishing. How terrible can it be?
I think about Andrew and all his constant complaints then I
think about Carol at school. Carol is such a wonderful woman, just turned sixty
and still as energetic as a humming bird.
She’s really upset she has to retire at the end of the year
and almost cried when the children presented her with all the birthday cards
they’d made for her in Art. I think she’s incredible. She’s been at that school
since she was in her early twenties, almost forty years, and has taught
children of some of the children she taught years ago, which is amazing, and in
two or three instances, their grand-children.
But does she have any regrets?
Not a single one. She says she’s loved every second of her
life and, given the chance, she wouldn’t do a thing differently if she had to
live her life all over again.
I told this to Andrew and you know what he said?
“Jesus, what a saddo!”
Typical.
But what I wouldn’t give to live a life as sad as Carol’s.
Time is an amazing thing.
Just trying to get your head around it is all but
impossible. Believe me I’ve tried.
About the only way you can do it is by putting it into some
sort of context. The popular way is by condensing the whole of time into a
normal 24 hour day. Actually forget that, the whole of time is too big a deal.
Let’s just condense the lifetime of the Earth into a normal 24 hour day.
Four and a half billion years.
Right, here’s what happened.
Earth was formed out of a swirling mass of dust and space
particles and at midnight was one big molten horrible place to live. Slowly it
started cooling down but it wasn’t until about quarter past five in the morning
that you could finally take your flip-flops off and run into the sea. If you
had’ve done that, you would’ve probably found a horrible green film covering
just about every rock and pebble. This was the local tenant and an abundant
bloke he was too. He had pretty much the whole planet to himself until about
six o’clock in the evening when the seas suddenly filled up with hundreds of
little monsters that started to eat the green film. Unfortunately for these
little monsters bigger and even more horribler monsters came along to start
eating them up, so that before you knew it you couldn’t turn around without
seeing a great big set of teeth chasing you around in circles.
A few of the smaller monsters decided they’d had enough so
at ten o’clock that night they crawled out onto the land to escape the carnage.
Once there, they found their old green friend again – plant life –
enjoying a nice, safe peaceful existence and instantly started eating him
again.
By half ten, all the big monsters were now up on the land
and the whole feeding frenzy was repeating itself all over again…
Actually, you know what, this is simply too massive a time
scale too, so let’s forget about when the world formed and concentrate on
condensing life’s time scale into a 24 hour clock.
Okay, it’s midnight again and the seas are just starting to
turn green… Actually no, that’s still too big a time scale, so let’s go back
and start it when actual proper, walking about life began.
Six hundred million years ago.
Hmm, you know what, I’m not even going to worry about
dinosaurs. The dinosaurs are too huge a lump of history to deal with so let’s
just talk about man.
Scientists would have us believe that man’s been around for
a million years (that’s about two minutes to midnight on the 24 hour clock) but
to be honest if you saw one of these ‘men’ walking down the street, you’d phone
your local zoo to tell them they’d left the gates open again.
No man as recognisable as man, has only actually been around
for about a hundred thousand years.
Okay, so, it’s midnight again, we’re all dressed in animal furs
and Rachel Welsh is back at the cave getting passed around until someone
invents the telly. On this time scale, Jesus only showed up at quarter to
midnight and the war finished less than fifty seconds ago.
Incredible isn’t it, when you think about it? The war, for
me, was like another lifetime ago, but in real actual species terms it’s not
even a minute old. Now that really was amazing.
Time was amazing. Time was precious. And time was always
slipping away.
Each of us got such a tiny little fragment of it for
ourselves, a razor thin slither of light between two great immensities of
blackness and what did we do with it? What did we achieve?
Personally speaking, I’d used rather of lot of mine up
trying to work out what time it would’ve been when the dinosaurs disappeared if
the world’s history was a 24 hour clock (about half nine I think) when I
should’ve been getting on with Norman’s report. It was four o’clock in the
afternoon (the real four o’clock) and my desk was buried underneath dozens of
Post-it notes, each covered in drawings of clock faces, calculations,
cigarettes and Brontosauruses. Or should that be Bronosauri? I spent another
ten minutes looking it up on the internet and found to my surprise that it was
actually Brontosaurs, which made sense, before turning back to the question of
my report.
It was now ten past four and the thought of going through
the files had become even less appealing. I’d arrived at work this morning with
the intention of having it done by the end of the day but then I’d got
sidetracked with all this 24 hour time line business right up until
mid-afternoon before realising all I was doing was putting off going through my
files.
Miserable defeat sank through my soul as I turned my chair
to look at the jumbled bank of filing cabinets and I wondered if there was
anything else I could do before I got started.
“Godfrey?” I called across the partition to the opposite
cubicle.
[Silence bar the clicking of a mouse]
“Godfrey?”
“What?” Godfrey replied without looking up.
“Want to do me a favour?”
“No.”
“What do you mean no? You don’t even know what I’m going to
ask yet.”
“Well I don’t know specifics but I know it’s going to be
something shit otherwise you wouldn’t be asking me, you’d be doing it
yourself,” he reasoned.
This was classic Godfrey. Besides me there were three other
people who worked on
Caravan Enthusiast
.
Godfrey, my assistant, Elenor, my secretary, and Adam, my designer. Elenor and
Adam worked on a couple of other motoring titles too but Godfrey was all mine,
although if you were to see us in action you could be forgiven for not knowing
which of us was the dog and which of us was the tail.
“I’m busy,” I told him.
“Doing what?” Godfrey asked.
“Doing… doing… what does it matter what I’m doing. I am your
editor, you know.”
“You’re not
my
editor. You’re the editor of the magazine. I don’t have an editor. I am
unedited.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know,” he mumbled, before returning to his mouse
clicking.
“Godfrey, can you just do me this favour, pleeeeease?”
“Do it yourself.”
“Okay fine, if you want to be like that then this is how it
is; this is not a favour, this is a direct order. I want you to go through the
files and pull out the remittances for every contributor, photographer and
freelancer for last year,” I told him in no uncertain terms.
“Fuck that!”
“Godfrey, I’m not asking you, I’m telling you,” I repeated,
in case he’d missed that key detail.
“You can tell me all you want but I ain’t doing it. That’s a
secretary’s job. Why don’t you get Elenor to do it?” Elenor shot us both a
steely look, so I stepped out of the firing line and told Godfrey I didn’t want
Elenor to do it, I wanted him to do it.
“Why?”
“Why? Why not? Because I do. Because I’m your boss. Because
that’s my prerogative. Now get on with it.”
“What is this, fucking Russia or something? Do this! Do
that! Look sharp!
Jawohl
!” he
saluted.
“That’s German, you moron,” Elenor sneered, picking at her
split ends.
Godfrey ignored her dig, as he always did, and focussed the
full glare of his sulk on me.
“I ain’t doing it and you can’t make me. I’m in the union
and I’ll phone them up if you try to force me to do that shit,” he warned me in
no uncertain terms.
“The NUJ aren’t going to be interested in your piffling
little complaint,” I told him. “And besides you told me your membership had
lapsed because you hadn’t paid your subs.”
“I’m still a member. I’m still part of the union. I’ve still
got the card.”
“Why does everything have to be a fight with you? Why can’t
you, just for once, do as I ask?”