Work Makes Man...

Work for me started in a shiny forecourt where a hundred men’s aspirations were crafted into a new BMW 7 Series.
I was introduced to a group of men, the kind of men that thought anything that wasn’t a man or a car was a joke. They were my father’s colleagues and they ruffled my hair and asked me stupid questions like ‘what do you want to be when you grow up?’
I didn’t know. I’d never thought about it.
‘Do you want to sell cars like your daddy?’
No.
They laughed. I was funny. Or a joke. Or maybe my father was the joke.
‘How about being a spaceman?’
I can’t remember the scene clearly but looking back I can still see my confusion because one day I would have to transform into a car salesman or a spaceman or a fireman and I had no idea how.
At primary school Mrs Lane said I could be anything I wanted to be. The world was my oyster, but I was never good with praise or criticism and I made a point to forget it
At 14 came the chance to really experience work. Friends went to America, or to newspapers, or to Nigel Mansell’s golf course. Where did I want to go? I liked psychology, law, running, writing, painting but I had no idea how you changed into any of those things so I worked a week stacking shelves at Tesco. My mum said that maybe they’d give me a job. It was a good company and my brother worked there.
My father, at this time, employed himself as a second-hand car dealer, a taxi-driver and a water-filter seller. He even gave my sister work phoning up people who were occasionally dead. My mother worked at the hospital trying to persuade the elderly against death or immobility – or if that failed she tried to make either scenario more comfortable.
I asked my mum why I needed to work. ‘You have to give something back to society’ she said. I wasn’t convinced but I worked all the same at a holiday camp where I filled empty glasses into a shopping basket and tried to dodge the ugly drunken world.
The following summer I returned to the holiday camp to whippy ice-cream for genetically engineered brats and the rest of the ugly sober world that arrived in convoys of Volvo estates packed with suntan lotion, buckets and spades and wind-breaks.
After college my gap year was spent working in Poundland for a woman called Rose, whose other name was Bitch. She screamed at the staff in front of customers but, as far as I knew, that was okay because that was how the world worked.
I dropped out of University after realising that I hadn’t transformed into an historian and was unlikely to. I hadn’t transformed into anything useful but had gradually become a button-pushing mirthless bone-carrier who only felt really happy with a pen in his hand. Still, I never was a writer. I never transformed into one of those buffoons who delights the world with their words and allows their name to be slapped about on billboards at hopeless train stations.
After the drop-out came real work, the kind of work that gave something back to society: A call-centre. Whilst working at the call-centre I would try and write stories while on the call, pretending that I was being paid for writing rubbish instead of talking it. Sometimes I’d take extra long toilet breaks just to enjoy the fact that the company was paying me to occupy a toilet seat.
I quit because it made no difference whether I worked there or I didn’t. By this time my father had traded in his car-sales for an employment with God. He had transformed into a preacherman and somewhere, on a shiny forecourt, his former colleagues still laugh. My mother worked in a crèche, my brother in a factory and my sister in a museum.
Temporary work followed. I put things in boxes, took them out, typed some letters, played minesweeper to placate the boredom, punched credit card numbers into a machine and walked out of work three hours early every day because it made no difference if I worked there or I didn’t.
I was not a psychologist, a lawyer, or even an athlete, author or artist. There had been no transformation
And there has been no transformation. I am as much of a stranger to the working world as I was when I stood in the show-room surrounded by BMWs. Of course there are differences now. The ones who ask me what I want to be no longer ruffle my hair but are sometimes younger than me, sit in stifling little rooms and ask me other stupid questions like ‘why do you want to work here?’
I have never known what I want to be, only what I am.
I understand what those car salesmen meant by their question but what I only now realise is that “nothing” was not only a legitimate reply, but also the most accurate.
I Am. Nothing.