Pervert Santas, encouraging alcoholism, competitive baking and raising money for pandas. All in a days work for a temp agency employee.
"I WAS JUST RESTING MY EYES"
The only thing I had on my side when I left university, was a raging sense of self-entitlement that I should have my dream job. But I had little experience in picking up pay-cheques outside of selling shoes and thought Microsoft Excel was a type of panty-liner. The future was not bright; the future was less bright knowing there was an average of fifty hopefuls to every one graduate job vacancy in London.
I was too scared of enduring my Mum’s wrath if she found out I’d joined the dole queue, what with her thinking anything less than a fifteen hour day down the mines shouldn’t be classed as hard work. But I was also equally terrified of getting stuck in an admin job I didn’t understand, having been lured in with free gym membership and a generous pension scheme. So instead, I chickened out of both and signed up to every temping agency I could find.
I’d read articles on how temping could be the magic foot-in-the-door to a cushy job. Firstly, bullshit, secondly, seeing as they charge double your hourly wage for farming you out, recruitment agencies will place fresh meat anywhere they can. Rather than that PA job in a fast-paced design company they advertised, it was usually more along the lines of- we just need to pay someone to stand in the foyer of the fast-paced design company because of fire and safety regulations.
I had little experience in picking up pay-cheques outside of selling shoes and thought Microsoft Excel was a type of panty-liner.
But once I’d got into the swing of things, the temping gigs I got were some of the funniest, albeit painfully humiliating, jobs I’ve ever had. The downside was no-one bothered to get to know you, so it’s like the first day at a new school for every placement. But the upside was no-one bothered to get to know you, so there was plenty of scope for behaving as mentally unstable as you want, knowing it is nigh on impossible to get slung out when you’re only staying for a month. Looking back, unless I become a new member of the Jackass crew, it’ll be the only period of employment where I got away with being so incredibly badly-behaved. It was ace.
For all the financial insecurity and shitty workplaces, temping buoyed me through overdraft woes, redundancy and ultimately funded pursuing that dream career. Much like a war veteran I feel only fellow temps can understand my experience and tend to look wistfully into the distance when asked about it. But, as I am so brave, here are just a selection of the jobs that paid the bills over two years of rocky recession waters…
Telephone Charity Fundraising
The only situation where you’d pray that you could spend all day talking about cancer or child molesting, as opposed to forcing money out of people for dying pandas. No-one gives one about pandas; in fact you’d be surprised at the amount of people that are enraged to the point of dropping the C-bomb at the thought of donating £2 a month to pandas. Training was my own personal hell of team building exercises interspersed with motivational talks, but once you were settled in you could spend the whole day hanging up on people and wondering where you’d gone wrong in life.
The atmosphere was a little friendlier here, as everyone – from ex-Emmerdale actors to med students- knew they were just temporary battery chickens, direct debit scrounging battery chickens. So sometimes doing the job, gave way to daring each other to play call centre roulette and cocking calls up at the risk of being recorded. I was a pro. But one fateful day, whilst playing my favourite “Racist Accents” game, I got caught. Mustering up my best Thai bride impression, I’d answered the phone “HERRO MEESTEL SMITH, YOU RIKE GIVE MONEY?”. In a ferocious, polyester flash the supervisor came lunging out. My tele-fundraising career was suddenly over. Over for one whole week, until I got back on the conveyor belt, clocked into work as usual and they didn’t bat an eyelid.
You know that work-do where you took your top off and did the running man to Salt N Pepa? I was probably there and can recount it in glorious, sober technicolour for you.
Biscuit Icing
“You new here kid?” asked the seasoned icer as he cracked his knuckles. I nodded eagerly as I slipped my hair net on and looked out into the bakery. Someone played the harmonica as the table-tops were cleared ready for the ‘death shift’…my first 9am to 9pm day.
Less than halfway through and I was feeling the pressure. “I can’t feel my arm…I CAN’T FEEL MY ARM” I shouted as I dropped my piping bag and fell to the ground. “Leave her, she’s dead weight” my supervisor groaned, as I curled myself into the foetal position shaking, weeping and covered in the crumbs of biscuits that hadn’t made the grade.
OK, it wasn’t that bad, but I certainly never imagined the most brutal temp gig I’d land would involve icing butterflies onto biscuits. Hundreds upon hundreds of biscuits. I’d turned up expecting a homely little kitchen, with girls in floral aprons messing around with sprinkles. Instead I got a delicious smelling war zone, full of graduates on minimum wage, silently scraping by, because you can’t complain about working life, ever, if you spent the last three years pissing around in higher education.
Luckily I escaped without diabetes and if I was put in a biscuit icing combat situation, at least I know I could throw it down like a motherfucker. Nevertheless, the scent of all spice still fills me with dread.
Writing Fake Reviews
Maybe my recruitment consultant had picked up on my stunning use of vocabulary and flawless grammar in our one sentence emails? Maybe he’d been touched by my struggling writer sob story and found me the perfect opportunity? I bounded in early for my first shift in my smartest outfit (t-shirt with a cartoon bowtie print) and was taken into an fancy office that reeked of money…only to be escorted into their basement. No, really. I was sat in front of a computer and given a list of websites to visit. I awaited instructions, like, what angle am I going for here guys? The Bukowski of copy writing? Maybe I could throw in a few Haikus for you?
Long story short, I spent hours setting up fake customer accounts on review sites, writing anything from, “Your fabulous door stops saved my marriage! – Barbara from Staines” to “Your customer service team have very sensual voices, thank you – Kevin from Hull”. I did this for seven hours, five days a week in a windowless room for two months. Thing is, it all went so quickly, as throughout the ordeal I was stunned that a paying job like this even existed.
I had punched Santa Claus in the face.
Theatre Usher which actually turned out to be Ice Cream Vendor
This was high on the humiliation, anything where I have to wear something that stops me from folding my arms or slouching makes me instantly furious. The main lesson I took away from this job, was that being rich doesn’t buy you manners, because apparently rich people piss their money up the wall on five quid miniature ice creams at Rachmaninoff concerts instead. The being subservient to a nine year old literally throwing his mother’s money at me I could deal with. It was the trotting up and down an auditorium, in full view of hundreds of people, with a tray strapped round my neck which was worse. There were more than a few times where I felt like smashing the whole thing on the floor mid-concert and screaming “I AM A GRADUATE DAMMIT, I DIDN’T SIGN UP FOR THIS, WHERE’S MY £30K A YEAR SALARY?”
Alas, I didn’t have the balls to do that. However, in my last week, finish line in sight, I’d got used to the shame of it and developed a weird Cockney market stall trader level of charm in a bid for small tips. I felt like the Artful Dodger…except that there was too much CCTV around for me to rob anyone. Still, I was going to end this temp gig on a high, until one man. One man sternly clicking is fingers at me till I walked three flights of stairs to deliver his ice cream. Fine…just get the money off him and bite your tongue, I thought, you only have a few hours left. I smiled, turned on my heel and belted back down the stairs as the lights were going down again, only to hear more finger clicking. “Excuse me, this is the wrong flavour, I wanted pistachio…HELLO?“. I saw red, turned back round and in a momentary lapse of social decorum, overarm lobbed his fucking pistachio ice cream at him.
I was sent home early.
Catering
Christmas party season was a catering goldmine for extra shifts, made even more excellent by all the frustrated, office romances you got to watch come to their fumbling climax. If you drew the short straw you’d get a tame and snooty affair, where the only entertainment was seeing how many times you could say “would you like to suck me off?” in place of “would you like another glass of champagne?” But if you were lucky you got a party of people more than willing to be plied with free plonk. The quicker you got them drunk, the more likely it was that you could go home with a bin bag full of leftover canapés to live off. And man, could they drink.
You know that work-do where you took your top off and did the running man to Salt N Pepa? I was probably there and can recount it in glorious, sober technicolour for you. I’ve frog-marched pissed-up, middle-aged City workers that should know better, into black cabs and held the hair back of secretaries as they barfed, then sat on the toilet floor with them as they moaned about Derek from human resources ignoring them. Vomit aside, this was one of my favourite jobs, mainly because people are extra nice to you when you’re the purveyor of the free booze, but also the sense of relief in the air people had, knowing they wouldn’t have to talk to their co-workers for at least a fortnight over the festive period.
Santas Grotto
In contrast, this was my least favourite festive job. Freelance work had dried up and I couldn’t face Christmas only bearing gifts of poundshop bath sets and Magic Tree car fresheners. I rang my old agencies up, praying they had work left that didn’t require a costume, or if I did have to dress up as a snowman, my face would be covered. “How about taking photos for Santa’s Grotto?”…my heart sank, ugh, surely at 5 foot 9 they couldn’t force me to dress up as an elf?
I turned up to my first day feeling suicidal but I almost wet myself when I found out there was no costume whatsoever. This was a piece of piss, all I had to do was smile at highly strung parents and take a photo while Santa was promising their brats presents they’d never get. What could possibly go wrong? It’s just that outside of the grotto, sweet old Father Christmas spent his breaks loitering by the dustbins sucking on a menthol fag and being one of those, “there’s definitely an ominous reason as to why you’re a bachelor and you need to stop casually patting me on the bottom” types. Still, the money was good so I sucked up all my protestations that he was a pervert, until an incident where he innocently went to brush something off my face. Already on pervert guard, my natural reflex was to give him a quick right jab. Whenever I replay this in slow-motion, I can hear the sharp intake of breath from shocked parents, swiftly followed by the realisation of what I had done. I had punched Santa Claus in the face. Even now, whenever I get shame flashbacks of that moment, I wonder if it really happened.
I didn’t turn up the next day
On the brightside, how many of you can say you got to lob ice-creams across a theatre, drag a 40 year old stockbroker to a taxi rank or smack Santa in his boat race? I would do it all over again…but maybe on the new minimum wage scale.
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