A New Chapter

When I started writing Raven, my initial idea was to tell tales of the grinding boredom which shop work inflicts on the human psyche.  A veteran of three years in September 2011, I was looking down the barrel of Christmas, out-of-my-tree with worry over my ever-decreasing finances and distinctly disturbed about working for the monstrous management.  And so, with those 12 months behind me, I feel more at peace having received my P45 from them, but leaving was never going to be easy, was it? My big mistake was asking for my £30 bonus payment [in cosmetics of course] for the incredible contribution I made to September’s sales figures.  Imagine my inner joy when I received a swift refusal from the under-management, thus;

“You can’t have it.”  Unphased by her response, I turned down the volume on my attitude problem.

“Okay.  Thanks for checking.  Thought I’d ask … so bye.”  As I turned to go, she called me back because she’d gone to the trouble of printing out the official documentation regarding bonuses and was determined to make me read it.  Waving it in front of me, she said, 

“You have to take it within a month of leaving, so you’re too late.  It’s an HR rule.”  That makes it alright then?  I felt it was fair and right to air my views.

“I resigned on the fifth of October and as the fifth of November hadn’t happened yet, you could do it but … y’know what?  Don’t bother.”  She was still waving the bits of paper, no doubt trying to shoo me away from the til area where the queue was getting ugly.

“You don’t qualify.”

“I do but I’m so happy to be gone that I don’t care … I can’t eat it, wear it or clean the car with it, so what’s the big deal about a bit of crappy makeup or mascara that peels off in the rain?”  I left with a strange sense that Dame Anita wouldn’t have given a flying fluff about my bonuses either, or would the woman she sold her empire to … one of the richest women in the world apparently, and owner of 1’0r34l.  Ethical - my tail feathers.

Still, I’m free and quite enjoying Job2.1 a bit more and rapidly coming to know a whole new set of characters who qualify as ‘the management’.  Currently I’m standing guard over the daycare ward of a private hospital and gathering more paper cuts than Edward Scissorhands.  ‘Nuff said.  One of my co-workers is lazier than a sloth and known to all as Stephanotis, she thinks that manipulating others to do the parts of her job she can’t be ar5ed to carry out is great fun.  On Friday, I got a hail from the nurses’ station to get a barrow load of files from downstairs.  When I got into The Bunker, she was incredibly busy, shopping on Asos.com. So I enquired,

“Have you got two broken arms perhaps?”  This is a hospital, remember.

“No?” she chirped coupled with the big, innocent, stupid look which she must use on her mother to get out of doing everything.

“Well bring them up yourself next time because this is your job ... or we’ll be chatting to matron.”  It’s fun to sharpen my claws this way.

But I don’t like sharing a computer.  Ten years of my own super-fast, virus-free work laptops have obviously marked my card and I hadn’t realised quite how territorial I’d become.  When it comes to letting others root around on your desktop … well, to a geek like me, it’s like letting a stranger rifle your knicker drawer.   It’s not as bad as my mate Dulux though … he’s a blond Raven, having hit forty and gone straight through fair feathers to a really cool icy grey.  Anyway, about a decade ago now, he went to work for Rolls Royce at Derby as an IT project manager and had been perching there for a few months when he enquired about the date his laptop would arrive, so he could do some actual work, saying “… y’know, information technology stuff, a bit of managing a project or two.  I filled out the forms … in triplicate.”  His boss slapped him on the shoulder and said “Don’t worry sunshine, it usually takes about six months but you’re doing fine.”  So fine that he’d left and got a better job before the dreaded laptop arrived.

Tip of the Blog:  My final patient last night was a pleasant surprise – gorgeous and smiley – and as we skipped upstairs to the ward, I decided to polish up my chat-up lines.

“Been here before?” I enquired.

“No.”  He quipped with a wink.  “This is my first vasectomy.

Instead of saying something smart or funny like ‘it’s a snip!’ 

All I could manage was “Good for you.” in a strangled croak.

Raven

Where was I?

More like, who am I and what am I doing neglecting you all for so long?  There's loads to tell and what a sorry tale it is but it'll have to wait for another day.  I'm working full time for the first time in five years and I just can't fathom how I used to fit in 37.5 hours and a life as well.  Not so much Superwoman ... more Raven slumped in a heap in front of the tele, beak down and talons in the air. Still, I'm keeping pace with The Killing III and a bit of yoga should sort me out for the weekend.

Gird your loins, I'll be back.

Raven

Tipping Point

The metaphor, The Tipping Point, was first coined in 1957 by sociologist Martin Grodzins from the University of Chicago in an article about social housing in the Scientific American. [Thanks to www.tippingprojects.org for that little nugget.]

There wasn’t one real tipping point which projected me out of the Retail Cathedral and into bed with Job2.2 - just a pile of stuff to try the patience of saints and sinners alike.  With a few days to myself this week, I’ve been thinking through the many tipping points that have happened in real life and if you’ve been casting a beady eye over Raven these last few months, you’ll have realised by now there’s loads of the wretched things.

My life-long favourite TP occurred in Tenerife in my trolley-dolly days …on a night-stop, where else.  I wore brown feathers in those days and looked like a chocolate button.  We were out to dinner on a balmy winter’s evening consuming vast amounts of alcohol as per the requirements of the ‘Cabin Crew Mandate’.  Our crew included a cavalier First Officer from New South Wales called Robin and, for him, the extra beers he’d had at dinner tipped him from airline pilot to idiot.  He could barely walk but the sight of a swimming pool obviously reminded him of The Great Barrier Reef back home and without disrobing he dived in, swimming straight to the bottom.  Luckily there were three of us around to watch in horror - me, Annie Firth and an elderly, Spanish pool attendant who was berating us in several languages.  Yes, we got him out and he went on to fly jumbos for Cathay Pacific but I’ll never forget the screams of the cleaner who found him next day.  Face down on the bed where we’d left him, butt naked.

Water’s been playing a large part in my life these recent, damp weeks.  It’s only a small tipping point but I’d refrain from putting your new handbag near one of those auto-wash sink contraptions in a Retail Cathedral.  I turned round to fix my lippy and hadn’t noticed my lovely bag had slipped into the sink and activated the taps … slowly filling with water and drowning the demonic Samsung Ace2.  It dried unlike my favourite slippers which would never recover from one night last week.

In Germany, apparently, it’s bad manners to flush a loo between the hours of 11.00 pm and daybreak.  No, no idea? But I’d got no such scruples about keeping the noise down when I wandered in from a bit of a party.  I completed my ablutions in the dark and accidentally tipped a loo roll into the pan thus blocking the torrent of flushing water, which resulted in wet fluffy-duck slippers and a trip to M&S.  Lucky me, I had a gift card handy and in my haste, bought a pair of sparkly boots which were too small so had to be returned to an out-of-town branch.  Don’t you love their Customer Service Representatives who move with the speed of a tectonic plate?  During my stint there in the 1990’s I got told off for being too efficient.

I was owed £4-50 and when the young woman handed me my refund, it came as a credit note attached to a grimace.

“Hang on.” I chirped. “I paid part card, part cash; so what’s with the voucher?”

“You can’t have cash.  You paid with a gift card.”  She barked, hands on hips.  “And you have to have a credit note or nothing.”  Actually, I had four beagle burgers and a bottle of water, and left with a sense of real disappointment.

I’d also returned a dress which was to wear for Job2.2, and as I don’t have that contract now, it had to be disposed of.  Besides, Alphonse looked at its leopard print fabric and obvious lack of style with complete distain and remarked “that’s vile!”  Coming from a man who can’t find the chino rack without a map, I knew it to be true and skulked off. I do have my eye on a gorgeous fake-fur coat in TKMaxx though but it might just be the tipping point that finally bursts my wardrobe.

Tip of the Blog:  What with Disney’s announcement that they’ve bought Lucasfilm and are planning three more Star Wars movies, can I send them a plea from the heart.  Get a better scriptwriter and ditch the Ewoks, please!  I’ve watched SWIII at least four times now and, politics and The Emperor aside, I still don’t know what tipped Anakin Skywalker over to the dark side of the force.  Three weeks as a medical secretary did it for me … if only light sabres were real weapons.

Raven