Tales from the Grind #1

“If the Man was sticking it to me, well then I’d stick it to the Man”

Health is everywhere right now. With the Olympics on the horizon, for good or bad (and let’s face it – that sponsorship rollcall is a who’s who of rotters), every man, woman, child and dog is being encouraged to shape up or ship out. For those not opting for (or unable to afford) that cruise around the South Pacific, chances are you’ll be forced to endure a London where the infrastructure is stretched to full capacity. Sometimes the vigorous pursuit of fitness can be bad for your health.

This I discovered to my cost some years ago. While it’s now commonplace for glossy, professional, private outfits like Bupa to cater to all a person’s needs, corporate firms taking an interest in your wellbeing to squeeze every last drop out of you before you die was, in those days, only a burgeoning idea. Health wasn’t as slick or sexy; the gym and spa were for gymnasts and Spartans, and the rest of us sneered derisively from the comfort of a smoky pub, saying ‘that’ll never be us’. How wrong we were.

The charity I came to work for was forward-thinking. The upkeep of mind, soul and body was its ethos, an attainable holy trinity, and so a company famed for putting up the Village People saw fit to get people running, jumping and generally palpitating for a fixed-monthly fee. And through the doors they came, lycra-clad and some looking like Mark Knopfler in the ‘Walk of Life’ video. Like I say, not sexy.

I’ll be honest here, working as a receptionist in a Christian health club wasn’t my idea of a vocation. I’d not been in London long and previously worked a reasonably exciting job flying around Europe photocopying VAT receipts for £4 an hour. Flying back at weekends, I hoarded a veritable duty free treasure-trove of the Greek tipple Ouzo that I grew partial to over the space of the six months I worked there, and the experience of visiting different parts of the continent had been eye-opening and sodden. Young, naive and believing London was full of jobs flying to European destinations to photocopy, I threw it all in to spend the next month in my underpants drinking Ouzo and watching the World Cup.

England’s elimination in the second round to Argentina was a wake-up call. We weren’t going to win the World Cup, the rent was due and the Ouzo was running low. I’d have to get a new job.

I bought Loot and scoured it, but jobs failed to materialise. It was with some relief then that the health people eventually called, and I made the long trek from Wood Green to Ealing. They liked me. I could tell: they phoned me back that day and told me the job was mine. Whoo! £11,000 a year! I’d hit paydirt!

Astonishingly I was paid handsomely my first month. I thought I’d hit the big time. Unbeknown to me, £11,000 a year isn’t a significant amount of money. It’s a pittance, but I wasn’t into square ideas like calculating how much I’d actually get per annum after tax. It would appear nor were the people in the accounting department. Come my second month it became clear the first month’s pay had been an anomaly.

The wage reduction I could just about cope with, but the officious manager who told me to take out my earring, despite my protestations about sexual discrimination, was getting on my nerves. Then there were the Sunday 6.30am starts. Was I really being paid so little to travel all the way from North London to open up the club without a soul around? One morning I cooked up a story that I’d been “attacked by a gang who intimated I was a homosexual” (I used those very words), in order to get out of going in with a booze-induced thumper. My flatmates were impressed by my outlandish lie, but suggested my bosses might suspect something when I turn up without a mark on me. You know your job isn’t right for you when you have to punch yourself in the face.

When I thought things couldn’t get any worse, month five arrived, and opening the envelope to look at my wage-slip was like a kick to the throat. As it turned out, the anomaly had never been addressed, and so with a jolt, I discovered I’d been paid barely £300 for the entire month. That barely covered the rent. What was I to do?

Starve. Jump trains. And drink Ouzo during working hours. If the Man was sticking it to me, well then I’d stick it to the Man. I resigned in protest at the ineptitude of the accountants, but things would get worse. Way behind on the rent, I had to move out of my flat. I was homeless.

As my landlady gave me the marching orders, the words of the Village People filled my brain:

“Young man, there’s a place you can go,
I said, young man, when you’re short on your dough,
You can stay there, and I’m sure you will find many ways to have a good time…
It’s fun to stay at the YMCA”

The irony wasn’t lost on me.

By Jeremy Allen. Illustration by Alex Charnley

Do you have a tale from your ‘Daily Grind’? Email us at occupiedtimes@gmail.com with your absurd and hilarious stories from the world of working life.